This is part one of a two-part series looking at the diversity in City of Rochester and Olmsted County staffs. Part two will be published online Friday, Feb. 21. Both parts will be in the Saturday, Feb. 22, print edition.
" id="09bbad50-c275-4cf8-8702-564da9543a23" style-type="bio" title="Editor's note" type="relcontent" width="half"}} It wasnt until 2004 that the Rochester Police Department hired its first full-time African American police officers and the Olmsted County Sheriffs Office has yet to have an African American sheriffs deputy working patrol. In 1992, the Rochester Police Department hired its first full-time Asian American officer and first full-time female officer. But Chief James Franklin said he is working to make the department one that is reflective of and responsive to the community it serves. When he started as chief, Franklin said, the department had 22 women and people of color, or about 16.5 percent of the force. With the hiring of 10 new officers who began earlier this month, Franklin said the number has moved to 19.3 percent women and people of color. ADVERTISEMENT Mayor Kim Norton, who is Franklins direct supervisor, said the two have had very candid discussions about minority hiring, community safety, outreach and engagement from the day she took office. "Hiring the best candidates is always the top priority, as it always is, but there are top quality candidates that are out there that are of color, that are women, or that are from a different cultural background," Norton said. Including white women among diversity numbers can be problematic, though. W.C. Jordan, president of the NAACPs Minnesota/Dakotas Area State Conference, notes that white women are part of the majority white population. "They are not a minority," Jordan said. Strength in diversity The value of a diverse workforce is reflected in a broader array of abilities among the Rochester Police Departments staff, which, for example, among 17 of its employees has the ability to speak 11 languages, including Spanish, American Sign Language, Somali and Hmong. "I think there is strength in diversity. It strengthens your organization," Franklin said. In policing diverse areas, knowing how to interact with different members of the community can mean the difference between solving a crime or leaving a victim feeling left without help. "If you are a cop and you cant talk to the community, you cant solve crimes, you cant prevent crimes," Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said. "You dont know what is wrong if you cant speak their language." ADVERTISEMENT Before becoming commissioner, Harrington was the Chief of Police for Metro Transit. During his tenure, Harrington guided the department through a growth spurt and a large increase in the department's diversity. Harrington said that when he joined, the departments police force was 5% people of color and women. By the time he left, he said, that number grew to 50%. "I was hiring classes of 20 to 30 people a year because transit was growing rapidly," Harrington said. "The Green Line was coming on-line, the A Line, the Red Line -- there were a bunch of new lines and I needed to have enough cops to staff those lines. It made the opportunity to increase diversity rapidly much easier because we were growing the department." That type of change isnt as easily achievable in departments where the vast majority of hiring is a result of attrition. Harrington doesnt see increasing diversity in law enforcement as a hopeless situation. "For some people, no matter how fast we do it, it won't be fast enough," Harrington said. "And for others -- and a lot of folks I know are change-averse -- the fact that we are doing the change makes them nervous, too." But shrinking candidate pools arent unique to the field of law enforcement and emergency response. Across industries, employers are having a harder time filling vacancies. Bringing in a workforce that looks more like the community it encompasses is also a struggle across industries, including the Post Bulletin. Franklin says the police department has changed questions as part of its hiring process to make evaluations more character- and integrity-based than experience-based. He said the change allowed hiring officials to take a look at people at a more in-depth level and then elevate those they felt would add that value. We want more "Diversity is not just something that is the right thing to do or a nice thing to do," Rochester Fire Department Chief Eric Kerska said. "Diverse recruitment is essential for our survival when you just look at pure numbers." When Kerska joined the fire service more than two decades ago, he said it was 100% white and 100% male. In the last decade or so, the department made some "slow but steady progress" but has since stagnated, Kerska said. ADVERTISEMENT Of the departments 110 employees, including support staff -- eight are women and two are people of color. Six of the eight women are firefighters. "We want more. That is pretty much it," Olmsted County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson said. "The struggle is attracting the people that represent different communities in the community. That is always the difficult part. It is not an easy job, whether it's the law enforcement side or the detention side." Of the very limited diversity the department has, most if not all has been in the Olmsted County Adult Detention Center. Torgerson said that to his knowledge, the sheriffs office has never had an African American patrol deputy. The department has interviewed minority candidates and has had those candidates on its hiring list, but the candidates chose to go elsewhere before they could be offered a spot. "In a couple recent cases we had spots available and they still chose to go elsewhere," Torgerson said. To work at the jail, there are fewer education requirements and many see it as a starting position while they pursue higher education with the ultimate goal of becoming a sworn officer. Not just diversity, but inclusion Diversification is not in itself a solution. Adding officers of color, women or those from different religions, isnt the only step. "Just because we add those people into existing systems does not mean that they will be successful in those systems or that the systems will change just because they are there," said Dee Sabol, executive director of the Diversity Council. "Diversification is just a state. The word diversity just means that lots of different elements are present. You also have to practice inclusion, which is an action. How do you prepare your systems and your police force or your law enforcement cultures for that change in personnel?" Research shows us that when people see themselves in authority or in positions of authority or power, they are more likely to respond in a positive way, Sabol said. "That is true when children of color see educators of color, when people who are interacting with law enforcement see law enforcement officers and administrators who are people of color. That creates a different sense of understanding," she said. But the issue of law enforcement and diversity is deeper than just seeing someone that looks like you. "Because we have such a convoluted and complex relationship between race and law enforcement that when we don't have diverse officers -- not just by race and diversity but also by ability, religion, sexual orientation and sexual identity, every facet of human difference -- if those things aren't present in law enforcement (gender in the most simplistic sense) then we have a system that both creates the perception of perpetuating inequities and actually perpetuates inequities," Sabol said. While African Americans, Latinos and American Indians make up about 11% of the state population, they make up about 51% of those in prisons or jails in Minnesota, according to data from the Prison Policy Initiative. The community has to take action as well and not just expect law enforcement and government to change, Sabol said. "As a community we need to step in those spaces too and demand that these conversations be held and facilitate them and participate in them and expect change out of them," Sabol said. "Expect action." Sabol said there is still a distressingly far distance to go in terms of just diversifying what our law enforcement looks like. And yet, she said, she remains hopeful. "I absolutely have faith in both our city law enforcement and our county law enforcement agencies," Sabol said. "I feel that they are both in transition in terms of acknowledging and addressing these issues and I'm 100% hopeful. I feel very positive that we are going to end up in a good place." Recruitment key in diversifying staff As industries nationwide struggle to find enough qualified minority and female employees, leaders in Rochesters law enforcement community as well as the state level are looking at different ways to recruit staff. In recent years, the Minnesota State Patrol has hosted events aimed at recruiting women and candidates of color. In December, the state patrol hosted a Diversity in Law Enforcement Information Session at Century College in White Bear Lake. "The State Patrol just wants to make sure we reflect the communities that we serve, and that is by having all sorts of diversity throughout the state," Sgt. Troy Christianson said. "It makes for a better agency if you are represented by people ... besides just white males. We just want to make sure people are aware of the types of careers that are throughout the state patrol." Attendees were able to learn about various positions the state patrol has, practice the physical test and get information about the Law Enforcement Training Opportunity, or LETO program, for job candidates who already have a two- or four-year degree in any subject. Those individuals get sent to classes to get post-certified to become eligible for the state patrols academy. It allows people who are looking for a career change to take steps to become a trooper. "Right now everyone is struggling for candidates in law enforcement," Christianson said. Of the 650 troopers in the Minnesota State Patrol, 60 are women, according to Christianson. Of a recent LETO class of 14 people, 13 were women or people of color, according to Department of Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington. While it wont change the complexion of the department overnight, Harrington said if efforts continue in that direction, the state patrol will eventually show a noticeable change. Local programs The Rochester Police and Fire departments have started programs aimed at getting younger people on a path to their respective careers and hopefully to their departments. In January, five young adults started as Rochester Police Cadets. The apprenticeship-like program is designed to give college-age students studying criminal justice or law enforcement paid on-the-job training and exposure to a police career. Of the five cadets, three are women and one is a young man of color. Two were participants in the Minnesota Law Enforcement Explorer program in Rochester and two were interns for the department previously. The law enforcement explorer program is a national association that is a sister organization of the Boy Scouts of America and is open to ages 14 to 21. The program runs September through May and shows young adults what a career in law-enforcement could look like, before they decide on higher education. For the 2019-2020 academic year, the Rochester Fire Department started its first high school program. The class is offered through Riverland Community College and local public schools and is a combination of online coursework and hands-on experience. At the completion of the program, students can take certification tests that would make them eligible to apply at fire departments right out of high school. "We are going to continue to take other steps to get out to the broader community," Kerska said. "Before, the fire department didn't have to go out and seek applicants. We are going to have to do things differently." Kerska said the department was making some changes to help reduce barriers to a firefighting career, which already requires individuals to fulfill three post-high school requirements. "Some departments hire people with just a high school diploma and then as first step employees, they are then trained on the job. They receive their certifications on the job," Kerska said. "That is an increased cost. We have to budget for that. We are starting to look into what that would look like -- how we could bring people in without those certifications and then train people in-house." One barrier the department is able to eliminate with fewer hurdles is doing physical fitness testing in-house rather than requiring candidates to take a national test. He said the department was also working with the Diversity Council on ways to specifically target different communities within the area and introduce them to the career of firefighting. Recruiting in places that themselves struggle to be diverse and inclusive likely means that law enforcement agencies arent going to find the variety of candidates they want. Programs to increase diversity and inclusion exist in other police departments in the state. The St. Paul Police Department partnered with AmeriCorps to launch the Law Enforcement Career Path Academy. The program is geared toward individuals from low-income families and diverse candidates, the Pioneer Press reported . It provides funding for participants to get two-year college degrees, plus a stipend while theyre doing community outreach alongside the police department and preparing to become a St. Paul police officer, according to the Pioneer Press. Diversity of thought Diversity isnt just limited to ethnicity, religion or gender. "If every police officer that you have grew up in Rochester, graduated from one of the high schools in Rochester and they all went to RCTC and then became police officers, then the way they interacted with people here would be based on their experience and their education," NAACP Minnesota/Dakotas State Conference President W.C. Jordan said. "When you bring a police officer here from California, from New York, from Texas, or from different parts of the country -- they don't have to be (racially) diverse, you can see but they bring a different set of experiences and education with them to come here." For Jordan, who travels around the state in his role as NAACP president, Rochester law enforcement isn't doing it right, yet. "I do have hope that it will happen," he said. "I think that there are things that are happening in Rochester that are going to change some of the thinking." Jordan said it will take a combination of things to achieve that, including hiring people from outside of Southeast Minnesota. He says he hopes that more people would voice their concerns about it. "We have to get away from the Minnesota Nice. You don't have to try and bring down people that are in charge here, but the numbers speak for themselves," Jordan said. "There is no way you could feel if you were someone that is Caucasian and you went to city and the Caucasian population made up 10% but you could only get 1% on the police department, would you really be satisfied with that?" "And I think that people have to ask themselves that question," he said. "The Minnesota Nice piece will be 'They're really trying' and 'They are doing all they can do and they are doing the best they can.' No, they are not. More has to be done and we have to have more people that have plans and that are including people at the table who can help them if they don't have the solutions themselves." Hiring diverse candidates not enough, promoting necessary too Hiring diverse candidates is one thing, but promoting them to positions that have power to shape policy is another. "There is a very slow turnover in the police department. Basically, you are waiting for people to retire or die to have a position in the police department," said W.C. Jordan, NAACP President of the Minnesota/Dakotas Area State Conference. "If you are not making any kind of strides to hire people of color -- it is going to be a slow drip. Then it will be discouraging." Rochester Fire Department Chief Eric Kerska said seniority has zero to do with the fire department's promotions -- they are 100% competency-based. Reflecting back on his experience with the Minnesota National Guard, Kerska said he learned through a study that building diversity within a department is a two-piece issue. "Youve got to get them in the door, which is more difficult if they don't see someone that looks like them," Kerska said. "But once you get them in the door, this is what the military learned: To keep them, to retain them, they have to see people at the senior levels that look like them." Kerska said the solution the Guard found and what he believes would work for the department is one-on-one mentorship. The Police Civil Service Commission recently accepted a new promotion eligibility list. It was the first time that Chief James Franklin had a hand in crafting the list. "We have some excellent officers and we've had some wonderful promotions," Mayor Kim Norton said. "I've been really impressed with some of the people that the chief has put in leadership, but they are a less diverse group because that's the ranks from whom we have to pull, who have been here the longest and are now qualified to apply for the higher level positions." Officers underwent a traditional law enforcement panel interview but were also interviewed by a panel of community members. One of the questions that was asked of the candidates was, "What steps have you taken to identify and/or address race and equity issues that affect the delivery of police services?" "Why is that important?" Franklin said. "It is important because specifically when we are talking about future leaders, the next generation, these race and equity issues are on the forefront of every chiefs mind across the country so we have to take a hard look on how we do business." One of the members of the community panel was Joyce Gibbs. She and her family moved to Rochester in 1963. She said she was honored to be included and felt it was important for applicants to see the diversity on the panel. She said it was important for community members to have a hand in shaping the future of the police department. "If you don't have these opportunities, you are being excluded," she said. "If I chose to exclude myself, that's one thing. But if you choose to exclude me, that's another thing. I just think that a community should be inclusive of the people who are supporting it." This is part one of a two-part series looking at the diversity in City of Rochester and Olmsted County staffs. Part two will be published online Friday, Feb. 21. Both parts will be in the Saturday, Feb. 22, print edition. Sanders (I-Vt.) was challenged on his electability and questioned on his health, the combativeness of his online supporters and the viability of his policy prescriptions. Bloomberg was hit for his political record, his alleged coarse descriptions of women, his extraordinary wealth and his contention that he is best positioned to defeat President Trump. The other candidates on the stage, who have attended each of the previous eight debate rounds, took advantage of their first opportunity to directly challenge the billionaire, who has spent more than $339 million of his own money on advertising to put his campaign in contention. Tobacco farmers' body FAIFA on Thursday said the hike in taxes on cigarettes announced in the Budget 2020-21 will only increase the smuggled cigarette trade which, in turn, will affect livelihoods of millions of tobacco growers and farm workers. The Federation of All India Farmer Associations (FAIFA) said it had also appealed to Finance Minister Nirmala Sithraman to have a "pragmatic approach" on cigarette taxation at a meeting on Wednesday evening. The hike in national calamity contingent duty (NCCD) on cigarettes proposed in the Budget is a major setback to the FCV tobacco farmers who have been fighting torrential and unseasonal rainfall this year in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, FAIFA said in a statement. "Indiscriminate increase of excise duty on cigarettes will result in reduction in legal cigarette production and this will reduce the tobacco purchases of domestic manufacturers, impacting market prices for farmers thereby putting more pressure on farmer's earnings and causing further stress," it said. Commenting on the hike in NCCD on cigarettes, FAIFA President Javare Gowda said, "This tax increase will provide a further boost to the smuggled cigarette trade and (lead to) decline in domestic demand, resulting in weak demand in the ensuing auctions." He further said the hike in NCCD was unexpected as several representations were made to the government to make it aware of the current situation of tobacco farmers and the ground-level realities of the struggles and losses that are being faced by them due to crop damage and also smuggled and illegal cigarette markets. In the Budget, Sitharaman had announced increasing NCCD on cigarettes, ranging from Rs 200-Rs 735 per thousand sticks, depending upon length of cigarette and on filter and non-filter basis. It was increased to 60 per cent from 45 per cent on smoking mixtures for pipes and cigarettes, while on other forms of smoking tobacco (other than smoking mixtures for pipes and cigarettes) and forms of chewing tobacco, it was increased to 25 per cent from 10 per cent. Gowda claimed that due to higher taxation, smuggled, illicit and contraband cigarettes along with WHO regulations, FCV production has come down to 210 million kg in 2019-20 from 325 million kg in 2013-14. It has resulted in "loss of more than Rs 5,000 crore (cumulative) to the FCV Tobacco Farming community", he added. In contrast, he said the market for illicit cigarettes is rising and has doubled from a level of 12.5 billion sticks in 2005 to 26.5 billion sticks in 2018 making India the fourth-largest and fastest-growing illegal cigarette market in the world. "Based on the current tax rates on cigarettes, it is estimated that the government loses Rs 13,000 crore in tax revenues per annum on account of illegal cigarette trade," Gowda claimed. Dakar, Senegal (PANA) - Senegalese President Macky Sall has suspended with immediate effect, "until further notice", all acquisitions of service vehicles, for the State, para-public structures and national companies, said a statement of the Council of Ministers issued on Wednesday Advertisement Despite being a self-described socialist and a scourge of the elite classes, Bernie Sanders is in fact a millionaire with a property portfolio that includes three homes, which are pictured in exclusive DailyMail.com photos. The 78-year-old Vermont senator's property portfolio was mocked by presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg during Wednesday night's debate, as he remarked: 'The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What did I miss?' You missed that I work in Washington, house one, responded Sanders. I live in Burlington, house two. And like thousands of other Vermonters, I do have a summer camp. Forgive me for that. Where is your home, which tax haven do you live in? Sanders, who has taken the lead in the recent national polls in the race, has had to defend his health, his ability to beat President Trump in November and now his estimated net worth of $2.5 million. Although Sanders wants to put hefty taxes on the wealthy, his homes, which combined are worth close to $2 million according to Zillow, are far more than the working people he champions could ever afford. He owns a main residence in Burlington, Vermont, a one bedroom pied-a-terre in Washington, D.C. that's just a half-mile walk from the Capitol Building and he most recently plopped down $575,000 in cash for a lakefront cabin complete with a guest cottage in North Hero Island, Vermont in the summer of 2016. Bernie Sanders was mocked by Mike Bloomberg during Wednesday night's debate, as the billionaire remarked: 'The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What did I miss?' Purchased in 2009 for $405,000, Sanders' main home in Vermont (pictured) has four bedrooms and is now worth around $464,000 - which is 50 percent higher than the median listing price of other homes in the area Sanders' one-bedroom apartment in Washington D.C. is his most expensive residence and is estimated to be worth around $700,000 But it is Sanders' summer retreat that is threatening to become an issue that could haunt him in his second bid to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency. He most recently plopped down $575,000 in cash for a lakefront cabin in North Hero Island, Vermont in August of 2016 Purchased in 2009 for $405,000, Sanders' main home in Vermont has four bedrooms and is now worth around $464,000 - which is 50 percent higher than the median listing price of other homes in the area. Sanders' one-bedroom apartment in the capital is his most expensive residence and is estimated to be worth around $700,000. But it is Sanders' summer retreat that is threatening to become an issue that could haunt him in his second bid to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency. Although the 99-year-old wooden camp house on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain is nondescript compared to many of its neighbors, it's the way Sanders and his second wife Jane bought the home that has ignited controversy. They scooped up the property soon after Burlington College where Jane was a former president was forced to close due to debts. Students were so upset they held a mock funeral, carrying a coffin through the streets of Vermont's largest town where Bernie first made a name for himself as a four-term mayor in the 1980s. The alternative college's money problems had begun when Jane was the driving force behind a deal to pay $10 million for a stretch of prime real estate in Burlington to give the college its first campus. Although the 99-year-old wooden camp house on an island in the middle of Lake Champlain is nondescript compared to many of its neighbors, it's the way Sanders and his second wife Jane bought the home that has ignited controversy They scooped up the property soon after Burlington College where Jane was a former president was forced to close due to debts. Students were so upset they held a mock funeral, carrying a coffin through the streets of Vermont's largest town where Bernie first made a name for himself as a four-term mayor in the 1980s Bernie and Jane Sanders bought the lake house in cash two months after the college closed its doors for good, records show. It is listed in town records as being owned by 'Islands Trust,' with an address at the couple's home in Burlington. The couple say they paid for the home with the proceeds from the sale of her late parents' home in Maine. But records discovered by the VTDigger showed she had to split the money with two brothers and received only $150,000 for that house Just a year after that 2010 deal, she was axed by the college and received a $200,000 'golden parachute,' according to The New York Times, which revived the controversy over the college in a front page story. 'There is little question that the college's 2016 demise can be traced to Ms. Sanders's decision to champion an aggressive critics say reckless plan to buy the land,' the Times reported. Federal officials investigated the college's finances, but no charges were ever filed. Bernie and Jane bought the lake house in cash two months after the college closed its doors for good, records show. It is listed in town records as being owned by 'Islands Trust,' with an address at the couple's home in Burlington. The couple say they paid for the four-bedroom home with the proceeds from the sale of her late parents' Long Lake home in Bridgton, Maine. But records discovered by VTDigger showed she had to split the money with two brothers and received only $150,000 for that house. 'My family had a lake home in Maine since 1900, but we hadn't had the time to go there in recent years especially since my parents passed away,' Jane told the Vermont website, Seven Days. 'We finally let go of it and that enabled us to buy a place in the islands something I've always hoped for,' she said. Sanders has built his political reputation attacking 'millionaires and billionaires,' but has made a small fortune from his successful 2016 book Our Revolution. His Congressional financial disclosure released in May showed he was firmly in the nation's 1 percent, earning nearly $1.06 million in 2017 the second year in a row he had topped the million mark. More than 80 percent of his earnings came from his book. Pictured: Sanders' main home in Vermont When questioned about his seven-figure earnings during a CNN town hall in April he was unapologetic, saying: 'I plead guilty to have written a book which was an international best-seller, OK? 'When you write a book that makes it to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, you make money. And I made money.' Pictured: Sanders' D.C. apartment Sanders has built his political reputation attacking 'millionaires and billionaires,' but has made a small fortune from his successful 2016 book Our Revolution. His Congressional financial disclosure released in May showed he was firmly in the nation's 1 percent, earning nearly $1.06 million in 2017 the second year in a row he had topped the million mark. More than 80 percent of his earnings came from his book. To join the top 1 percent, a person has to earn around $390,000. When questioned about his seven-figure earnings during a CNN town hall in April he was unapologetic, saying: 'I plead guilty to have written a book which was an international best-seller, OK? 'When you write a book that makes it to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, you make money. And I made money. 'I suspect that in a couple of years my salary will go back to $173,000, which is what a member of Congress gets,' he added, eliciting laughter as he seemed to be admitting he wasn't going to win the presidency which pays $400,000 a year. (Alliance News) - DS Smith PLC said Thursday the US Department of Justice has entered a consent decree to clear the completion of the packaging group's sale of its Plastics division to Liqui-Box Inc. The consent decree is now subject to a ratification by a US federal court, which is the final part of the process and should lead to the transaction being completed, it said. The GBP450 million takeover deal was first announced in March, and in May the UK Competition & Markets Authority said it would probe the proposed acquisition. In mid-July, the UK regulator had said the initial phase of its investigation found that the acquisition would create "insufficient competition", given that Liqui-Box and DS Smith are two of only four companies offering specialist Bag-in-Box packaging to food and drink suppliers in the UK. However, in September the CMA cleared the acquisition, after Liqui-Box offered undertakings to the regulator, including the divestment of its Bag-in-Box business. DS Smith said Thursday it expects to receive net proceeds of GBP400 million after taxes, transaction adjustments and exposes from the deal. Shares in DS Smith - which is based in London - were up 2.6% at 361.20 pence on Thursday. By Dayo Laniyan; dayolaniyan@alliancenews.com Copyright 2020 Alliance News Limited. All Rights Reserved. Were going to get back to living life, even if it kills us For more stories like this, check out The Chronicles weekly Travel newsletter! Sign up here. A few years ago, Michael Franti was in between songs onstage at BottleRock Napa Valley, the annual springtime music festival, when someone hollered out a question: Whats your favorite wine? For a guy who has lived in the Bay Area most of his life and rubs shoulders with some of Wine Countrys elite tastemakers, this should have been a softball question. But Franti, a 53-year-old musician who lives in Hunters Point, doesnt have much of a taste for alcohol. He had to think fast. Im thinking, (A) I dont drink wine. But (B) I didnt want to choose one cause Id piss someone off, Franti recalled recently in his living room at home. His ad-libbed reply, My favorite wine is Tequila, got the crowd laughing. It also sparked an idea for a song with that title, which Franti released in 2016 and has become a fan favorite. Franti fronts Michael Franti & Spearhead, a funky, folkie reggae-rock group that has been releasing records since 1994. His political-minded lyrics and laid-back demeanor have made him a music festival mainstay. He has lived in San Francisco for more than three decades, but you would be forgiven for thinking that he lives in Wine Country. He is closely associated with BottleRock, having played all but one of the annual events since they began in 2013. He has played benefits for wildfire victims there. His wife, Sara Agah Franti, was a headline speaker at the Womens March in Napa this year. A lot of people think we live up there, says Agah Franti, 35. Franti, born in Oakland and raised in Davis, visited Wine Country as a boy on family road trips. But it wasnt until he and Agah Franti got together that he started visiting regularly as an adult. An early foray occurred after the 2014 earthquake that rocked downtown Napa; Franti played gigs to help raise funds for the relief efforts. He and Agah Franti discovered a strong community of small business owners and vintners whose fervent commitment to their crafts and each other have made Napa a world-class wine-and-dine destination. Its not the most glamorous reason that were drawn to Napa, but its the community and the people, Agah Franti says. I always say, if there were an international airport, Id love to move up there. The two have fond memories of kayaking and picnicking on Lake Berryessa with their infant son, Taj. Franti digs the pizzas and atmosphere at CaMomi in Napa; Agah Franti goes for the green juices at the Oxbow Public Market and enjoys walking Taj along the riverfront. More than that, they enjoy the locals they meet who carry on the regions winemaking and farming traditions and whose lifestyles reflect their values as craftspeople and artists. I love when you open a bottle of wine you have to think about the history of what was happening in that place when that wine was made, Agah Franti says. Franti sees BottleRock as a galvanizing force for the younger demographic that Napa wineries are desperate to reach. Theres this renaissance of young energy there, he says. Its healthy for that community to have that youth energy. Music is a fixture of their relationship. One wall of their living room is devoted to old concert posters advertising Frantis gigs at classic San Francisco venues. A pair of guitars rests in one corner; an electric piano is tucked into another, next to a turntable and some vinyl records. The two will make a weekend out of their next trip to Wine Country when they visit in late May for this years BottleRock festival. The thing theyre most looking forward to? Franti didnt hesitate: seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform. When I proposed to Sara, she was wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers tank top, he said. We have a family mantra: Be your best, serve the greater good, and rock out wherever you are. Sara repping the shirt definitely hits the rock out part. Catch Franti live Franti is performing at BottleRock, which runs May 22 to 24 in Napa. Tickets are available at www.bottlerocknapavalley.com. He is also performing at the Vines and Vibes benefit dinner on May 21 at Meadwood Napa Valley. Proceeds go to the Do It for the Love Foundation, which helps people with severe illnesses, disabled children and wounded veterans. Tickets are available at www.doitforthelove.org. Gregory Thomas is The San Francisco Chronicles editor of lifestyle and outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas Countries around the world are taking measures to stem the spread of the new coronavirus disease, dubbed COVID-19, as the death toll continues to rise. This page has updates from Feb. 20. For updates from Feb. 21, click here. Chinese Officials Confirm Airborne Transmission of Virus in Limited Conditions The Chinese regimes top health authority has confirmed that the novel coronavirus can be spread through the air under limited circumstances, adding a new route of transmission for the disease. The coronavirus can be passed via aerosol transmissionthat is, exposure to tiny droplets in the air containing the virusif a person is exposed, over a long period of time, to high concentrations of aerosols carrying the virus in a relatively closed environment, according to updated guidelines published by Chinas National Health Commission on Feb. 19. Read more here. Dont License Vaccine: Lawmakers to US Govt Over a dozen lawmakers on Thursday asked the Trump administration not to license any COVID-19 vaccines that are developed while also requesting requirements to ensure the price of any vaccines dont reach excessive levels. The members of the House of Representatives said in a Feb. 20 letter to President Donald Trump that theyre proud the United States is a leader in developing a new vaccine and treatments for the new coronavirus, which causes a disease that has killed thousands worldwide, primarily in China. But any vaccine or treatment funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars shouldnt be exclusively licensed, the lawmakers wrote. Read more here. US Warns of Apparent Community Spread Outside China The United States warned travelers of apparent community spread of the new virus in five countries outside of China, as well as the island of Taiwan. The CDC is recommending Americans not travel to China and is also advising travelers of the apparent spread in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan. Community spread means people have been infected with the virus, including some who are not sure how or where they became infected. At this time, the extent of virus spread is not sustained or widespread enough to meet the criteria for a travel notice, the agency stated on its website. Read more here. Ukrainians Clash With Police to Block Evacuees From China Ukraines effort to quarantine more than 70 people evacuated from China over the new virus outbreak plunged into chaos Thursday as local residents opposing the move engaged in violent clashes with police. Buses carrying evacuees were finally able to reach the designated place of quarantine after hours of clashes. The masked evacuees, exhausted by the long journey, were peeking through bus windows as they drove slowly under a heavy police escort while protesters tried to block the road and even hurled stones at the buses. They shattered a window in one of the buses, but the evacuees appeared unhurt. Since the early morning, several hundred residents of the village of Novi Sanzhary in Ukraines central Poltava region had cut the road to a sanitarium intended to host the evacuees, fearing they could become infected. Demonstrators put up roadblocks, burned tires, and clashed with riot police who moved to clear access. More than 10 people were detained, and Ukraines Interior Minister Arsen Avakov personally visited the site of the protests to try to calm the crowd down. Avakov urged the protesters not to fall for provocations and be understanding of the necessity for these temporary measures. The situation is rather heated, Poltava regional police spokesman Yuri Sulayev said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky weighed in, saying the protests showed not the best side of our character. He tried to reassure people that the quarantined evacuees wouldnt pose any danger to local residents. In a statement published on his Facebook page, Zelensky said the people evacuated from China are healthy and will live in a closed medical center run by the National Guard in the village as a precaution. In the next two weeks it will probably be the most guarded facility in the country, Zelensky said. But municipal legislators in the village vowed to continue opposing the evacuation, saying that the sanitariums sewage system is linked to the one in the village and ends up in a nearby wastewater facility. We cant allow putting the health and life of local residents at risk, and demand that top officials take urgent moves to prevent people from China from being put here, they said in a statement. Amid the clashes between local residents and police, Ukraines Prime Minister Oleksiy Honcharuk said he will immediately fly to the site to personally oversee things. In the early hours of Thursday, a plane with 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign nationals took off from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. Those evacuated included people from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and other countries. The plane stopped in Kazakhstan to drop off Kazakh passengers. Later, it sought to land in Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine, but could not due to bad weather conditions. Instead, it flew to Kyiv to refuel, and eventually arrived in Kharkiv. Preliminary Results Expected Within Three Weeks Preliminary results from two clinical trials of therapeutics for the new coronavirus thats spreading around the world are expected in several weeks, World Health Organization (WHO) officials said on Thursday. The organizations R&D Blueprint, a plan that allows the rapid activation of research and development activities during epidemics, has enabled the fast-tracking of two trials, WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a press conference in Geneva at the organizations headquarters on Thursday. We expect preliminary results in three weeks, Tedros said. One of the trials is using lopinavir and ritonavir, two drugs typically used to treat HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus infection. The medications are part of a class called protease inhibitors, working by decreasing the amount of HIV in the blood, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Read more here. Weather, Protests Hamper Quarantine Efforts in Ukraine Ukraines effort to evacuate more than 70 people from China over the outbreak of the virus faced setbacks Thursday as weather conditions delayed the return of the evacuees and protests broke out near a hospital where they were to be quarantined. Several hundred residents in Ukraines Poltava region protested, seeking to stop officials from quarantining the evacuees in their village because they feared becoming infected. Demonstrators put up roadblocks and burned tires, while Ukrainian media reported that there were clashes with police. More than 10 people were detained, and Ukraines Interior Minister Arsen Avakov personally visited the site of the protests to calm the crowd down. Avakov urged the protesters not to fall for provocations and be understanding of the necessity for these temporary measures. The situation is rather heated, Poltava regional police spokesman Yuri Sulayev said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky weighed in, saying the protests showed not the best side of our character. He tried to reassure people that the quarantined evacuees wouldnt pose any danger to residents of the village of Novi Sarzhany. In a statement published on his Facebook page, Zelensky said the people evacuated from China are healthy and will live in a closed medical center run by the National Guard in the village as a precaution. In the next two weeks it will probably be the most guarded facility in the country, Zelensky said. In the early hours of Thursday, a plane with 45 Ukrainians and 27 other foreign nationals took off from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak. Authorities said those evacuated included people from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama, as well as other countries. The plane stopped off in Kazakhstan to drop off Kazakh passengers. Later, it sought to land in Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine, but could not due to bad weather conditions. Instead, it flew to Kyiv to refuel, and eventually arrived in Kharkiv. More Than 1,000 Coronavirus Cases Outside China Confirmed: WHO More than 1,000 cases of the new coronavirus have been confirmed outside of China, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Along with 1,076 cases, seven deaths have been reported, WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva on Feb. 20. That includes two deaths from Iran, which reported five cases this week. The cases span across 26 countries. The new virus has been confirmed to spread from person-to-person and a growing number of patients who have no recent travel history to China have become infected. No vaccine or treatment exists for the virus, though some patients have recovered with rest and care. Of all the cases outside of China, more than half are among passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was placed under quarantine in Yokohama, Japan in early February. Most of the passengers have since been hospitalized or, if they tested negative, released. Read more here. South Korea City Deserted After Church Super-Spreader The streets of South Koreas fourth-largest city were abandoned on Thursday, with residents holed up indoors after dozens of people caught the coronavirus in what the authorities described as a super-spreading event at a church. The deserted shopping malls and cinemas of Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people, became one of the most striking images outside China of an outbreak that international authorities are trying to prevent from spreading into a global pandemic. Deagu Mayor Kwon Young-jin told residents to stay indoors after 90 people who worshiped at the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony showed symptoms of infection and dozens of new cases were confirmed. The church had been attended by a 61-year-old woman who tested positive, known as Patient 31. Koreas Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the outbreak there as a super-spreading event. We are in an unprecedented crisis, Kwon told reporters, adding that all members of the church would be tested. Weve asked them to stay at home isolated from their families. Describing the abandoned streets, resident Kim Geun-woo, 28, said by telephone: Its like someone dropped a bomb in the middle of the city. It looks like a zombie apocalypse. South Korea Sees First Death, Another Jump in Cases South Korea has recorded its first death related to the new coronavirus on Thursday, according to the countrys Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). The death occurred at Cheongdo Daenam hospital in North Gyeongsang Province on Wednesday. The KCDC said that South Korean man, believed to be around 63 years old, had posthumously tested positive for the virus. He had been under treatment at the same hospital for 20 years, according to the Korea Herald. He suffered a pneumonia-like illness before he died. His exact cause of death continues to be under investigation, according to the KCDC. The country also saw 22 new cases, bringing its total number of COVID-19 cases to 104. The total number of reported cases on Thursday so far is 53, the largest tally in a single day for South Korea. Of the 22 new cases, 15 of them are confirmed as linked to the Cheongdo Daenam hospital, where the South Korean man died and is counted among them. Patients and staff at the hospital are being tested for the virus, according to local reports. Also among the new cases are five cases that are linked to the Shincheonji church, the KCDC said. One of the new cases was picked up in South Koreas capital, Seoul. Earlier Thursday, the mayor of Daegu urged its 2.5 million people to stay home and wear masks even indoors if possible. In a nationally televised news conference, Mayor Kwon Young-jin also expressed fears that the rising infections in the region will soon overwhelm the citys health infrastructure and called for urgent help from the central government in Seoul. National quarantine efforts that are currently focused on blocking the inflow of the virus (from China) and stemming its spread are inadequate for preventing the illness from circulating in local communities, Kwon said. Hubei Extends Work Suspension Chinas Hubei province on Thursday asked firms not to resume work before March 11 due to the coronavirus outbreak, saying only businesses involved in epidemic prevention and control or necessary public services would be exempt. Schools will also remain shut, the Hubei government said on its official Weibo account, extending a suspension that previously stretched to Feb. 21. Hubei is the epicentre of the outbreak, which has infected some 75,000 people and killed about 2,100. Iran Reports 3 Mores Cases An Iranian state-run news outlet, The Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), reported on Thursday that three Iranian citizens have tested positive for the new coronavirus disease, bringing the total number of cases in the country to five. The news outlet also reported that five hospitals have been designated to treat coronavirus cases. The latest news comes after Irans first two coronavirus cases, confirmed on Wednesday in the city of Qom, also became the countrys first two deaths. Following the deaths, the state news agency IRNA (Islamic Republic News Agency) reported that schools and universities in Qom would be closed to enable an investigation. Australia Extends Ban on Travel From China The Australian National Security Committee of Cabinet settled on the decision on Thursday to extend a ban for foreign travelers coming from China for another week, until Feb. 29. The extension means that foreign citizens, with the exception of permanent Australian residents, who have been in mainland China will be barred from entering Australia for 14 days from the time they left mainland China. Citizens and permanent residents of the country are able to enter but still need to be in self-quarantine for 14 days. The Australian government first announced the new border-control measures on Feb. 1. Singapore Confirms 3 New Cases Singapores Health Ministry in an update posted Wednesday confirmed three new cases of the new coronavirus, raising the city-states coronavirus case total to 84. The three latest cases involve Singaporean citizens with no recent travel history to China. One of the cases is a 35-year-old Singaporean woman, now in isolation. She was linked to case 66a Singaporean man who has not traveled to China recently and is linked to a cluster of infections at the Grace Assembly of God church. This cluster is the city-states largest known group of associated infections and currently affects 22 people. The other two cases are a 57-year-old Singaporean woman and a 54-year-old Singaporean man. Singapores Health Ministry also said that five cases have been discharged, among them the first confirmed case in the city-state. Australian Evacuees From Virus-Hit Ship Begin 2nd Quarantine Around 180 Australians evacuated from a virus-stricken cruise ship arrived Thursday in the city of Darwin to begin a second quarantine period. The former cruise ship passengers will spend the next two weeks in a camp facility near the northern Australian city, Australian health officials said. The new coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 illness infected more than 600 people on the Diamond Princess. The ship had been docked at the port of Yokohama since early this month in a quarantine that was widely considered a failure. The quarantine ended Wednesday and passengers who tested negative for the virus began leaving. The group of Australian evacuees was flown from Japan in the early hours of Thursday morning on a Qantas 747 chartered by the Australian government. South Korea Reports Surge in Cases, Most Linked to a Church The Centers for Disease Control in South Korea (KCDC) on Thursday reported 31 additional cases of the new coronavirus, bringing the countrys total to 82. One case was diagnosed in Seoul, while the remaining 30 cases originate from Daegu and Gyeongbuk province. Of the new cases outside of Seoul, 23 are linked to the Shincheonji Church. The same church saw a 61-year-old South Korean woman who lives in Daegu diagnosed with the virus as the countrys 31st case, according to the KCDC. Daegu is 300 kilometers (186 miles) southeast of Seoul. Just a day prior, South Korea reported a jump of 20 new cases, 11 of whom were contacts of the same 61-year-old woman. The woman tested positive for the coronavirus on Tuesday but had developed a fever as early as Feb. 10. According to AFP, she had reportedly refused to be tested as she had not recently traveled abroad. Read more here. Chinese Police Will Force Companies to Resume Operations The Chinese central government has ordered businesses to resume operations after an extended Lunar New Year holiday due to the novel coronavirus outbreak. But many are afraid of their staff spreading COVID-19, and have refused to reopen. Some local authorities have resorted to deploying police, who have been entering company premises and forcing them to operate. Others have hired chartered planes and buses to pick up migrant workers from their village hometowns and transport them to major cities for work. Read more here. New Virus Spreads More Like Flu Than SARS: Study Scientists in China who studied nose and throat swabs from 18 patients infected with the new coronavirus say it behaves much more like influenza than other closely related viruses, suggesting it may spread even more easily than previously believed. In at least in one case, the virus was present even though the patient had no symptoms, confirming concerns that asymptomatic patients could also spread the disease. Although preliminary, the findings published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine, offer new evidence that this novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 2,000 people mostly in China, is not like its closely-related coronavirus cousins like SARS and MERS. Read more here. 2 Passengers From Cruise Ship in Japan Die Two passengers from a coronavirus-hit cruise ship moored near Tokyo have died, public broadcaster NHK said on Thursday, as a second group of passengers began disembarking after two-weeks quarantined onboard. More than 620 of the passengers on the Diamond Princess liner have been infected on the ship, which has been quarantined since Feb. 3, initially with about 3,700 people on board. NHK, citing a government source, said the passengers were an elderly man and woman, both in their 80s. Read more here. Mimi Nguyen Ly, The Associated Press, and Reuters contributed to this report. For updates from Feb. 19, click here. From The Epoch Times Some students of Jamia Millia Islamia, who had suffered injuries during an alleged police crackdown on the campus on December 15, recorded their statement before the Delhi Police crime branch probing the incident on Thursday, sources said. On Wednesday, the Delhi Police had served notices on 10 university students asking them to appear before it for questioning in connection with the December 15 violence during an anti-CAA protest and the subsequent police crackdown. A team of the Delhi Police Crime Branch visited the university campus on Wednesday and handed over the notices to the students. The students who have been called for questioning included some of those detained on the night of the incident, some identified through CCTV video clips that surfaced recently, and some of those suffering injuries on that day. Some more students are likely to be called for recording their statement, sources said. Two-three new CCTV videos purportedly of the December 15 incident surfaced on social media on Thursday, in which some people can be seen throwing stones at police personnel from inside the campus. Four videos of the incident had surfaced online earlier. A team of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) probing the police crackdown in Jamia Millia Islamia has completed its probe but is yet to submit its report to the commission's chairman, an official said. On December 15, police had used batons and teargas shells to disperse a violent mob during a protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). They entered the university campus, saying that rioters had taken shelter there. However, Jamia students had denied that they were involved in the violence and had alleged police brutality. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Vermont has embarked on a flagrant effort to trample on rights that the Second Amendment says "shall not be infringed." But this time, the lawyerly legislators sworn to protect and defend the Constitution have been caught red-handed. Histrionic progressive Vermont legislators have tried to institute a blatantly unconstitutional farce by couching their evil effort in a domestic violence bill: H 610. Purportedly trying to close the so-called "Charleston loophole," this scam seeks to enact a 30-day waiting period for firearms purchases at the state level in place of the three-day federal "default proceed" process, which is current federal law. Further, if a potential gun-purchaser does not receive a background check clearance from the federal NCIS system after that 30 days, not only can't they proceed to purchase a weapon under H610, they have no right of appeal whatsoever. Imagine a legislature imposing a 30-day "waiting period" on a woman obtaining an abortion and if there is no approval, she must proceed to delivery. But the "right" to have an abortion is an "implied" right, whereas the right to bear arms could not be more explicit it is the right that guarantees all others. The United States Supreme Court has specifically ruled that this right is "deeply rooted in this nation's history and traditions" (Heller v. DC) and that this right must be equally protected against state governments under the Fourteenth Amendment (McDonald v. Chicago). It is bizarre that those who claim that Donald Trump is a tyrant seek to dispose of citizens' core ability to oppose tyranny. One would think liberal awareness of the plights of the Uighur in China or Rohingya in Myanmar would lead them to clamor for more guns to secure our nation against dreaded tyrants, but instead they conspire to eradicate self-defense utterly. The two sponsors of Vermont's H 610 (both attorneys) sit on the House Committee on the Judiciary. Vermont's Office of Legislative Council, and its attorney general, have both fully endorsed this draconian law, despite clear complaints that it grossly infringes on both the Second Amendment and the Due Process Clause, as well as Article 16 of the Vermont Constitution. All four of these attorneys are paid with taxpayer funds to defend the Constitution: they are instead dismantling them. But Vermont is (as so often) a special case. Recent emails were released that revealed something even more insulting and indefensible: H 610 is being drafted by a special-interest social worker named Sarah Robinson! In these emails, Attorney Erik Fitzpatrick of the Office of Legislative Counsel (which shamelessly calls itself "nonpartisan") writes to Sarah Robinson and Maxine Grad, Committee Chair: Attached is the revised draft of H.610, incorporating the recommended changes Sarah sent after the meeting last week. Sarah, can you please read the blue highlighted changes closely to make sure I have integrated them correctly? I did a bit of editing and rewriting for clarity and organization, but did not intend to change anything substantively. Thanks for your help and let me know what you think. Fitzpatrick's fawning consideration is for Sara Robinson, deputy director of Vermont Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence, a special-interest "nonprofit" that represents 15 consolidated nonprofit special interest groups. An hour later, Maxine Grad responded: "Thanks. Erik once Sarah ok's it, it can get sent out and posted. M" And posted it was. The purpose of the "default proceed" component of federal law is to guarantee that government does not unilaterally, and without legal cause (e.g., a felony conviction), deprive someone of acquiring a firearm including a woman in fear for her life at the hands of an enraged domestic partner or other criminal. The purpose of H 610, written by a special-interest social worker and implemented by Constitution-negating legislators and attorneys, is to interpose exactly such an unconstitutional hurdle. Vermonters have been grossly deceived by those sworn to protect them. The question is, will anything be done about it? Graphic credit: Blue Diamond Gallery. A University of Houston researcher is working to increase health literacy among Hispanics/Latinos (H/Ls) when it comes to Alzheimer's disease (AD). The largest ethnic minority in the U.S., at 18% of the population, H/Ls are 50% more likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than non-Hispanic whites. H/Ls also live longer, develop AD symptoms earlier, are diagnosed at later stages and are less likely to be treated. Given those statistics, it's startling that Hispanics/Latinos comprise less than 1% of clinical trials for Alzheimer's disease. "From a social justice perspective, in order to help reduce health disparities we need to involve these communities in the decision-making process," said Luis D. Medina, assistant professor of psychology. He will use a $2.35 million grant from the National Institute on Aging to build his "Engaging Communities of Hispanics for Aging Research Network." "There are various barriers to getting involved in research, including health literacy or what people actually know about Alzheimer's disease. In the Hispanic/Latino communities, it is often thought of as just a part of aging," said Medina, who believes the solution begins with education. The network will launch in two pilot cities, Houston and Denver. Step one is "boot camp translation" wherein community stakeholders are immersed in learning about the disease, and then the tables turn - the community members educate the trainers on how to speak to their communities. "In boot camp translation we break down the medical jargon to consumable, understandable lay language and the community tells us how to do that," said Medina. "The communities have a lot of strengths that we, as researchers, may or may not have. We are hoping to put more seats at the table so that the communities are involved in research infrastructure and help drive research projects." Steven Woods, UH professor of psychology and Jennifer Vardeman, UH associate professor of communication, are assisting on the project in collaboration with Baylor College of Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, University of Nevada, Las Vegas and the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health at the Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas. Medina plans to expand the project to Las Vegas next as he creates a template for other cities to follow. "This is about lifting all of us up and improving brain health. The more representative our research samples are, the better we can understand the disease," said Medina, who was recently invited to serve on the Alzheimer's Association International Research Grant Program Council to help craft funding opportunity requests for applications, provide expertise during grant review and make funding recommendations. The association is especially interested in Medina's input on issues related to the recruitment of underrepresented populations. ### The following letter was sent to the Ancient Order of Hibernians: The St. Patricks Parade has always been a part of my own familys traditions as well as the traditions of other Staten Island families. It is a day when everyone is Irish. We celebrate Staten Islands Irish culture and come together as a community. It is a day when everyone is included. The community is included in the planning, the fundraising and the implementation of a magnificent parade. From school children to local businesses to local law enforcement, it is a true reflection of the inclusive community that we live in. However, its not a truly inclusive day, nor is it a true reflection of Irish culture, or even that of our community, when we leave groups out of the parade, like the Pride Center of Staten Island and the Gay Officers Action League NY. If your organization is keen to uphold Irish culture then perhaps you should turn to Ireland itself for guidance. Ireland currently has a Prime Minster who is openly gay and in 2015 a referendum for gay marriage was approved overwhelmingly. The Republic of Ireland has transformed from a country holding very conservative views towards the LGTBQ community to holding overwhelmingly more liberal ones in a very short period of time. The Ancient order of Hibernians was founded on the principles of supporting those who were discriminated against. The AOH has proudly stood up against bigotry since the early 1800s. To actively discriminate against the LGTBQ community is going against all that you stand for and have built over the years. Ireland didnt lose any of its culture when it became more inclusive. It became richer and stronger. You have the opportunity this year to demonstrate leadership within this community by allowing ALL members of the Staten Island Irish community to march in the parade. Pride for your heritage should not be denied because of who you love. (Lindsay Hyland is a Livingston resident.) SEOUL/BEIJING : The streets of South Korea's fourth-largest city were abandoned on Thursday, with residents holed up indoors after dozens of people caught the coronavirus in what the authorities described as a "super-spreading event" at a church. The deserted shopping malls and cinemas of Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people, became one of the most striking images outside China of an outbreak that international authorities are trying to prevent from spreading into a global pandemic. New research suggesting the virus was more contagious than previously thought added to the alarm. And in China, where the virus has killed more than 2,100 people, officials changed their methodology for reporting infections, creating new doubt about data they have been citing as evidence of success in fighting its spread. Deagu Mayor Kwon Young-jin told residents to stay indoors after 90 people who worshipped at the Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony showed symptoms of infection and dozens of new cases were confirmed. The church had been attended by a 61-year-old woman who tested positive, known as "Patient 31". Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the outbreak there as a "super-spreading event". "We are in an unprecedented crisis," Kwon told reporters, adding that all members of the church would be tested. "We've asked them to stay at home isolated from their families." Describing the abandoned streets, resident Kim Geun-woo, 28, told Reuters by telephone: "It's like someone dropped a bomb in the middle of the city. It looks like a zombie apocalypse." South Korea now has 104 confirmed cases of the flu-like virus, and reported its first death. In China, officials have been pointing to evidence that new cases were declining as proof they are succeeding in keeping the virus largely contained to Hubei Province and its capital Wuhan, where the virus initially emerged. But revisions to their methodology have raised doubts about the data. Under the latest methodology, which excludes chest X-rays, China reported fewer than 400 new cases over the past day, less than a quarter of the number it had been finding in recent days under the previous method. Only last week, another change in Chinese methodology created an overnight spike of nearly 15,000 new cases, reversing a trend of falling numbers that Chinese officials had previously touted as evidence their disease-fighting strategy was working. Scientists in China who studied nose and throat swabs from 18 patients infected with the virus said it behaves much more like influenza than other closely related viruses, suggesting it may spread even more easily than previously believed. In at least in one case, the virus was present even though the patient had no symptoms, suggesting symptom-free patients could spread the disease, they wrote in preliminary findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine. "If confirmed, this is very important," said Dr Gregory Poland, a vaccine researcher with the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who was not involved with the study. China has imposed severe controls in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, to halt the spread of the virus, and has taken urgent steps to keep the overall economy from crashing. On Thursday, its central bank cut a borrowing rate, while the authorities extended an order for businesses in Wuhan to shut down until March 11. Schools in the city, which had been due to re-open on Friday, will also stay shut. Two cruise ship passengers die Japan reported the deaths of two elderly passengers from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship anchored off Yokohama. They appear to be the first people to have died from the disease from aboard the ship, the biggest cluster of infection outside mainland China with more than 620 cases. Japan has begun allowing passengers who test negative to disembark from the ship. Hundreds departed on Wednesday and hundreds more were set to leave on Thursday. The ship was carrying about 3,700 people when quarantined on Feb. 3, about half of them from Japan. Japanese passengers were permitted to go home once cleared to leave; other countries are flying passengers home and keeping them isolated on arrival. Japan, which is due to host the summer Olympics in July, had faced criticism over its strategy of quarantining people on board the ship. Its National Institute of Infections Diseases published data which it said supported its strategy, showing that the onset of symptoms from confirmed cases had peaked on Feb. 7 and tailed off to zero by Feb. 15. The NIID report was "very reassuring," said Kentaro Iwata, an infectious disease specialist from Kobe University Hospital who had been one of the harshest critics of the quarantine. 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!! Topics Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 19:03:09|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close A staff member distributes protective materials to workers before their departure for south China's Guangdong Province in Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture, southwest China's Yunnan Province, Feb. 19, 2020. The customized train carried some 600 returning workers from Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Yunnan to Guangdong Province to resume their work on Wednesday. (Photo by Wang Hong/Xinhua) Especially, from 2020 onwards, Vietnamese students will have the opportunity to receive the British Ambassador scholarships worth VND800 million ($34,780) for students studying at BUV who will receive a degree from Staffordshire University. Founded in 2018, the BUV scholarship fund aims to give students the opportunity to study UK undergraduate and graduate programmes in an international-standard educational environment right in Vietnam. In 2020, BUV officially raised the value of the scholarship fund to VND40 billion ($1.74 million) with hundreds of scholarships. 2020 is also the first year BUV has awarded the UK Ambassador Scholarship, a full scholarship worth VND800 million ($34,780). The UK Ambassador Scholarship covers the full cost of a bachelor's degree at BUV, which is awarded by Staffordshire University, preparatory courses, and travel expenses for interviews for remote students. Admissions criteria include academic achievements, social experience, extracurricular activities, as well as personal development goals and plans. Gareth Ward, British Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to Vietnam (left), awarded the scholarship to Prof. Dr Raymond Gordon, Rector of BUV when the university celebrated its first decade in Vietnam BUV was honoured to receive the scholarship from Gareth Ward on the occasion of its 10th anniversary. Gareth Ward shared: During its 10-year development journey, British University Vietnam has been widely regarded as a symbol of successful educational co-operation between the UK and Vietnam. BUV's ability to deliver UK education and an international-standard learning environment to Vietnam makes it an ideal educational institution to award the British Ambassador Scholarship. I look forward to seeing this year's scholarship winners. BUV is the first and only international university in Vietnam to offer a bachelor's degree directly from the University of London and the prestigious Staffordshire University. BUV's mission is to provide British-standard qualifications and an international-standard learning environment for Vietnamese students and to raise a generation of young people who will change the world through their passion to learn and explore. Founded in 2009, BUV now offers 11 Bachelors and one Masters programmes. All BUV students get a job or continue their studies within three months after graduation. With more than 300 partners in many fields and an internship programme for students right from the first year, BUV helps students gain professional knowledge and practical work skills to meet the needs of employers and stand ready to develop their career right after graduation. Students will study at BUV's new campus in the Ecopark urban area that represents an investment of $25 million for the first phase, meeting the demand of 2,000 students. The BUV campus' modern facilities and 4IR's iconic design were recognised to make for one of the best educational environments in Asia. Upon completion of all three phases, BUV's Ecopark campus will have a total investment of $70 million and will meet the training demand of 7,000 students. Prof. Raymond Gordon, rector of BUV, emphasised that, BUV is very proud to receive the support of the British Ambassador and to receiving a scholarship with such great value. This is a testament to the quality of BUV's education, with the outstanding academic campus which accurately reproduces the British learning environment in Vietnam. The full scholarships will give opportunities for young Vietnamese students to access quality British education and modern facilities, thereby creating a future that promises success for every student, family, and the country. Seoul: South Korea has reported its first death of a person infected with coronavirus as well as 22 new cases, bringing the total to 104. The death and a rise in new infections in South Korea fanned fears on Thursday of the global spread of the pathogen as research suggested it was more contagious than thought and two elderly passengers from a cruise ship quarantined in Japan died. China reported a sharp drop in new cases but the data was partly attributable to a change in how it diagnoses the virus and the figures could not quell growing alarm about its spread. Everything from the Australian dollar to the Indian rupee came under fire on foreign exchange markets as concern about the coronavirus drove investors to look for safety in the US currency. CLEVELAND, Ohio A Warrensville Heights man was sentenced to life in prison Wednesday after a Cuyahoga County judge found him guilty of the November 2018 shooting death of a 39-year-old man. Demarcus Sanders, 23, was convicted last week by Judge Hollie Gallagher of two counts of aggravated murder, murder, aggravated robbery and felonious assault. Sanders waived his right to a jury trial, according to County Prosecutor Michael OMalley. According to prosecutors, Sanders got into an argument outside his residence on Warrensville Center Road near Sunset Drive with Kevin Lewis, 39, of Warrensville Heights, on Nov. 4, 2018. Sanders went inside his home and emerged with a .20-gauge shotgun. Lewis ran but Sanders chased him, firing and missing with one shot. Sanders continued to chase Lewis for more than 800 feet before shooting and hitting Lewis in the back, according to court records. Lewis fell on the concrete in a parking lot near the intersection of Warrensville Center Road and East Ridgewood Avenue. Sanders then stood over Lewis and fired a final shot into Lewis head, records show. Sanders took money from Lewis pockets then returned to his residence, according to prosecutors. He refused to surrender to police, who called in SWAT. Police eventually fired tear gas into the home during a standoff that lasted several hours. Sanders was found hiding under blankets in a bathroom, and the shotgun was found underneath a bed in the residence, prosecutors say. Sanders is eligible for parole after 26 years. To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page. More crime-related content on cleveland.com: Dismembered burning body found in Cleveland is missing head, hands and feet, sources say Cleveland police want data from countys crime-sharing program, but dont want to share information with other cities Man robbed at gunpoint walking home from work in Clevelands Tremont neighborhood Cuyahoga County jail guard pleads guilty to assaulting inmate whose teeth were knocked out, gets probation Musician Taylor Swift is known for dropping Easter eggs when it comes to her songs, albums, music videos, and more. Lately, fans are excited about one thing above all else: A music video for her latest single, The Man. And even though Swifties have already received a lot, theres still a chance that a music video is coming. Heres when (and why) we think theyre right. Taylor Swifts latest single is The Man The Man, which is the fifth track on Swifts seventh album, Lover, has been one of her most-talked-about songs since even before its release. She first posted some of its lyrics Id be a fearless leader. Id be an alpha type, in a black-and-white photo from her September Vogue cover shoot. The title, along with the rest of the tracklist, came a week before the album dropped. Swift has gone on to perform the song multiple times: At her NPR Tiny Desk concert, at a live show in Paris, and as the start of the medley during her American Music Awards performance, to name a few. She released a lyric video for the song Prior to Lovers release, Swift dropped three official singles: Me!, You Need to Calm Down, and Lover. (The Archer was billed as a promotional single.) And for months after, Swifties eagerly awaited a post-album single, but instead got a few other treats (like Christmas Tree Farm). However, news began to circulate in early 2020 that a fourth official single was on its way. The Man entered the charts on Jan. 27, 2020, just one day after Swift chose not to attend the Grammy Awards, where it had been rumored she would be performing the song. Then, on Feb. 7, a lyric video dropped. Swift dropped a live video as well A lyric video, in the case of most of Swifts singles, is typically followed by a music video. So many were surprised when, on Feb. 18, 2020, Swift released not a choreographed music video, but a recording of her acoustic performance of the song in Paris back in Sept. 2019. The Man is a very important song to Swifties. In a Tumblr post that Swift liked, a fan explained how it can become a source of strength and empowerment for a lot of women in their daily lives. Many others agree, and would like to see a music video. Heres when we think The Man music video could arrive Taylor Swift attends the NME Awards 2020 on February 12, 2020 in London, England. | Dave J Hogan/Getty Images When it comes to Easter eggs, Swift utilizes aesthetics, along with numbers and words. As you can see from all of the photos and videos above, The Man has lent itself to a black-and-white color palette, which shes been using into these first two months of 2020 (including at Sundance). If that means anything, perhaps its that Swift is saying theres more to come. And if there is, and were really getting a The Man music video, we have an idea when it will be. Swift is obsessed with the number 13, and uses it whenever possible. Feb. 25, 2020 = 2+2+5+2+2=13, so thats a likely date. The other option would be Saturday, Feb. 29 (2+2+9=13, leaving off the year), but the first seems more in line with Swifts past decisions. Heres to hoping! Salma Hayek has not lost her stunning good looks even though she has been in the movie business for 30 years. And the 53-year-old Like A Boss actress proved that she is still every inch a pinup once again as she posed in a plunging black swimsuit while on a blue boat near a rocky cliff. The mother-of-one was also seen leaning down to expose her cleavage in a selfie shared with her 14M Instagram followers. Looking good! Salma Hayek has not lost her stunning good looks and the 53-year-old proved that she is still every inch a pinup once again as she posed in a plunging black swimsuit in this Instagram photo shared on Thursday Closer look: The mother-of-one was also seen leaning down to expose her cleavage in a selfie shared with her 14M Instagram followers Hayek did not leave much of a caption but her followers sure spoke up. Diavilleg64 said simply 'Amazing ' while haroldmagalhaesss called her 'Medusa.' Lairbear33 commented on Salma's age: 'You cant be in your 50s.' Dm1953r added, 'Beautiful lady at a beautiful spot.' Salma also did not reveal where she was spending her day, though it looked like it might be in the Mediterranean, where she often vacations. Capri? Salma did not reveal where she was spending her day, though it looked like it might be in the Mediterranean, where she often vacations After a swim: The siren's hair was still wet when she took this image with her Alexander McQueen sunglasses on These posts come just after Hayek responded to a fan accusing her of having 'too much Botox' in a seaside selfie she shared on Tuesday. The funnywoman kindly clapped back in the comments: 'I don't have Botox but thank you for the advice because I was thinking maybe it's time.' At 53, the half-Mexican, half-Lebanese American has impressively managed to maintain her flawless complexion and slim 5ft2in hourglass figure. 'I don't believe in Botox, especially when [people] do it so young. They destroy themselves,' Salma once said - according to Inquisitr. 'Not needed Salma!' Hayek responded to a fan accusing her of having 'too much Botox' in a selfie The Like a Boss funnywoman kindly clapped back in the comments: 'I don't have Botox but thank you for the advice because I was thinking maybe it's time' 2020 versus 2001: At 53, the half-Mexican, half-Lebanese American has impressively managed to maintain her flawless complexion and slim 5ft2in hourglass figure 'I don't really take big risks when it comes to beauty. I think a big risk is plastic surgery. I'm very conservative in my beauty routine. I don't know if I would never get plastic surgery. I'm not planning on it right now.' Valentine's Day marked her 11th wedding anniversary with her husband - Kering CEO Francois-Henri Pinault - and the wealthy couple are proud parents of 12-year-old daughter Valentina Paloma. Hayek (born Jimenez) will next portray a character called Dolores in Sally Potter's alternative lives drama The Roads Not Taken, which hits US theaters March 13 and UK theaters On May 1. CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The burning body firefighters discovered Wednesday in a secluded field near train tracks in the citys Collinwood neighborhood was missing its head, hands and feet, according to three law-enforcement sources. Cleveland police Sgt. Jennifer Ciaccia would not say what body parts were missing. The dismembered body was burned to such a degree that investigators cannot identify its gender, Ciaccia said. Cleveland police have not said if they have any suspects or any leads in the case. Investigators and the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiners Office have not determined how the person died. Firefighters made the discovery about 4 a.m. in a grassy area off Larchmont and Clermont Roads, south of St. Clair Avenue, where a small brick path in between homes leads to the tracks. Someone placed shrubs on top of the body and set it on fire, officials said. A resident in the neighborhood reported the fire and firefighters alerted police. Cleveland police combed the area around the burn site for more than five hours early Wednesday in a search for clues. An Ohio Fire Marshal investigator led an accelerant-sniffing dog to the small patch of burned-out grass where firefighters discovered the body. Cleveland police homicide Lt. Ali Pillow told reporters at the scene that police in the past have recovered several burned-out cars in the same area. Remnants of a torched car sat about 20 feet away from the body. Police also searched the area for a stolen phone after the victim of an armed robbery from earlier in the night reported his Find My iPhone app put his phone near the site where firefighters discovered the body. Police never recovered the phone. To comment on this story, please visit our crime and courts comments page. Read more from cleveland.com: Cleveland police want data from countys crime-sharing program, but dont want to share information with other cities Man robbed at gunpoint walking home from work in Clevelands Tremont neighborhood Cuyahoga County jail guard pleads guilty to assaulting inmate whose teeth were knocked out, gets probation Burma Shan Armed Group May Sign Myanmars Nationwide Ceasefire Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP) leaders held a meeting for two weeks at their headquarters in Wang Hai, northern Shan State in February 2020. / SSPP Information Department / Facebook A northern Shan rebel armed group, the Shan State Progressive Party (SSPP), says they may sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) this year if necessary to work with the Myanmar government towards political reform. SSPP leaders held a meeting from Feb. 4-18 at their headquarters in Wang Hai, northern Shan State, to discuss the possibility of signing the NCA and finding compromises with the Myanmar government. If we need to sign [the NCA] for our group, we will do it. But first we want to discuss it with our members of our alliance, said SSPP Colonel Sai Su. The NCA was first signed in October 2015. Col. Sai Su also said that if the government and the Myanmar military, or Tatmadaw, are wise, they will choose to compromise with the ethnic armed group coalition known as the Federal Political Negotiation and Consultative Committee (FPNCC) and all of its members will sign the NCA. The FPNCC includes the SSPP, the United Wa State Army (UWSA), Mong Las National Democratic Alliance Army (NDAA), the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), the Taang National Liberation Army (TNLA), Kokangs Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) and the Arakan Army (AA). According to the SSPP, the FPNCC does not have a common stand on signing the NCA and the groups need more time to discuss it. Col. Sai Su said that if the SSPP signs the NCA, they will explain the decision to ethnic Shan people. The SSPP was a member of the now-defunct United Nationalities Federal Council (UNFC), which worked to draft the NCA, but resigned from the group in 2017. The SSPP then joined the FPNCC, which continues to negotiate with the Myanmar government regarding the NCA. Col. Sai Su said the SSPP has learned about problems with the NCA from ethnic armed groups who signed the agreement. The Shan colonel said the Myanmar army has taken advantage of the NCA to occupy territory that belongs to ethnic armed groups. As fighting has broken out in territories of NCA signatories, the Tatmadaw and ethnic armed groups have blamed one another. The Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee (JCM), the body established to monitor NCA signatories implementation of the ceasefire, has little power to control the Myanmar army or stop the fighting. There should be an organization which has the power to influence the Myanmar army and the ethnic armed groups that is a member of the Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee, so the organization could point out when the Myanmar army or ethnic armed groups have violated the agreement, said Col Sai Su. The SSPP pushed for the NCA to include terms that would establish such a body. As part of the FPNCC, the group pushed for China to be included in the JMC, but the Myanmar army and the government rejected the idea. According to the SSPP, Myanmar also needs to reform the military-drafted 2008 Constitution. The SSPP has suggested that if the National League for Democracy government, the Union Solidarity and Development Party and the military can compromise and amend the constitution, the country will be closer to real political reform. They could make a compromise if they truly wish to have real political reform in the country, said Col. Sai Su. We do not have to tell them what our ethnic groups need, as they understand already that we need equal rights. Once they compromise among themselves, then they can deal with our ethnic groups and look at how to build a federal system. You may also like these stories: India-Myanmar Cross-Border Bus Service to Operate Soon KNU to Myanmar Military: Stop Road Building Until Dispute is Settled Fighting Closes Schools Ahead of Key Exams in Myanmars Chin State Advertisement Some architects clearly like a challenge. A new coffee table book has revealed the world's 'edgiest' homes - eye-catching houses located in some of the most treacherous places. Studded into cliff faces, steep mountain slopes and other unlikely plot locations, these head-scratching architectural wonders defy logic - and gravity. The book - Edgy Architecture: Architecture in the Most Impossible Places, by Agata Toromanoff and published by Lannoo - contains beautiful photographs of the sleek abodes and explanations of how and why they were built. From China's Qiyun Tree House, which features a set of box-like structures perched precariously on top of each other, to the aptly named House On The Cliff in Alicante - which looks like something out of a James Bond movie - these buildings, designed by some of the world's most renowned architects, are guaranteed to amaze. Scroll down to behold house designing at its most extreme. The Nariga House is located in a mountainous region in northern Mexico and studded into a steep mountainside. It gives the occupants 360-degree views of the stunning surrounding area The stunning Nariga House peeps out above the lush vegetation and has been designed by P+O Arquitectura to respect the local wildlife and leave the ecosystem untouched - the reason why the architects decided to raise it so high from the mountain floor The stunning 11-metre-high Qiyunshan Tree House in China is a higgledy-piggledy mishmash of boxes. Designed by Bengo Studio, it incorporates a number of 'observational spots' that provide views of the nearby mountains The Qiyunshan Tree House has been made with natural materials - mostly wood and glass - to blend in with the surrounding forest Villa Escarpa in Portugal's Algarve region juts out and somehow balances over a steep escarpment covered in pretty flowers The designer of Villa Escarpa only had a small plot to work with and wanted to maximise the space - he couldn't go across or behind, so he went outwards. The property offers stunning ocean views The YA House, designed by Kubota Architect Atelier and located in the Hyogo Prefecture of Japan, is a sleek, elegant affair boasting sharp lines that spike out from a slope in a mountainous area The YA House was designed with light in mind, with the designers keen to illuminate the property naturally. A mixture of concrete and glass has been used, with the concrete elements seemingly floating in the air Northeastern Spain's Sunflower House features a cube-like design by Cadaval & Sola-Morales and is meant to reflect and mesh with its rocky, cliff-side location. Each 'cube' has been positioned to maximise the views Each of the Sunflower House's cubes houses a traditional living space. There's a bathroom, bedroom, kitchen and living room The stunning Two-In-One House in Norway houses two families and incorporates a basement apartment. Designed by Oslo-based Reiulf Ramstad Arkitekte, the building is supposed to give the illusion of uniformity, although it is split up inside Sitting on top of a steep slope, the Two-In-One House is covered in vertical cedar wood panels, along with other materials that can withstand Norway's snowy conditions Perched on a slope on the outskirts of Barcelona, X House, pictured, was designed by architects Eduardo Cadaval and Clara Sola-Morales. It was designed to offer views of the mountains and the sea Villa Anzere, pictured, is a property embedded into the side of a Swiss hill. The design is based on a traditional Swiss chalet and the terrace on each level has views of over 4,000 peaks, including the Matterhorn Konieczny's Ark, pictured, is situated on a slope in the middle of mountain fields in Poland. It was designed by architect Robert Konieczny and it has been described as looking like 'a bunker' and 'a piece of rock rolling down the hill' This property, called Villa in Kaiko, is a holiday home overlooking the ocean in Atami, Japan. The book describes it as a 'highly expressive structure with a zig-zag facade' This house, called Casa Del Acantilado (Cliff House), is located in Granada, Spain, and was inspired by the architect, Gaudi. The book describes it as 'one of the most extraordinary houses ever built' Located on a cliff on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, this house is perched on the bedrock of the cliff. It is described as 'visually stunning' in the book The aptly named HillSide House in California is a three-level residence that looks as though it's a modest size from a street-level view. It actually stretches down a steep hill and boasts balconies, terraces and balustrades aplenty The HillSide House has been by designed by Zack de Vito, with energy efficiency and sustainability at its heart. The house utilises a hi-tech solar power system and a window arrangement implemented to reduce the need for indoor lighting The House On The Hill in Alicante was designed by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos and embedded into a deep slope, overlooking the Mediterranean The House on the Cliff is suspended over the contour of the hill, the book explains, with the protruding part resembling binoculars. "Books, TV, and movies paint a phony, delusional picture of lawyers, judges, and the judicial process. My book reveals the ugly truth." In Earl Careys IBM and the Corruption of Justice in America, the dreadful, shocking truth of America's corrupt federal courts is exposed. The author spent four years representing himself in civil lawsuits against IBM and the United States government. By representing himself, he was able to penetrate the barrier and mystique which shields the operation of the corrupt judicial system from non-lawyers. In plain, simple English the author takes the reader on a terrifying insider's tour of the operation of the federal courts, the Department of Justice and Congress. There is no tricky legal finesse. The crimes are smoking gun obvious. On an even more sinister level, the author discovered his cases were not unique. Federal judges routinely commit and cover-up criminal offenses with the full knowledge and blessing of both Department of Justice and Congress. The cast of characters includes 42 federal judges, multiple members of Congress, US attorneys, and the FBI. The author suggests that those who read the brief preface and introduction, will read the rest of the book as if it were a thrilling novel. Unfortunately, all is true. When asked why he wrote the book, the author replied: "There are two traditional options to fight injustice in America. Conduct mass demonstrations like Martin Luther King, or conduct mass riots like Ferguson and Baltimore. I could do neither. So I wrote the book to expose this judicial corruption. Books, TV, and movies paint a phony, delusional picture of lawyers, judges, and the judicial process. My book reveals the ugly truth." Many lawyers write books. Why don't they expose this corruption in the books they write? Author Earl Carey explains: "Omerta is the Italian word for the mafia code of silence. Lawyers adhere to their own code of silence. No lawyer will expose this judicial corruption. The corrupt judicial system is the gravy-train which enables lawyers to rake in the big bucks. The lawyers' motto says it best, you win some, you lose some, but you get paid for all of them." When asked to comment on the wider implications of his book, Carey stated: First, American political leaders take great delight in criticizing injustice in countries such as Russia, North Korea, and Iran. They harp on American values. Yet all the while, they knowingly permit federal judges to operate like black-robed mafia dons. The hypocrisy is appalling. Second is the tremendous power large corporations have to manipulate government to their own advantage endangers our society. This book presents a perfect example. IBM, the original tech giant, was able to fix a case in federal court and have forty-two federal judges from across the nation fall in line as if they were lemmings. Third, the corrupt judicial system spreads its poison throughout our government and society. Contempt for the rule of law and justice will provide a never-ending string of scandals to dominate the headlines." IBM and the Corruption of Justice in America: The Carey-Gate Story, is available in eBook format at all major online eBook retailers. About Earl Carey Earl Carey has a bachelors degree in engineering and a masters degree in business administration. He has worked in engineering for General Motors and Ford, and in various marketing positions for IBM. When he wrote IBM and the Corruption of Justice in America in 1992, no publisher would touch it. The self-published first edition had limited distribution. Now for the first time, this remarkable book is available to people around the world at all major online ebook retailers. Washington: Roger Stone, the longtime adviser and confidante of US President Donald Trump, has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for witness tampering and lying to Congress. The judge who handed down the 40-month sentence, Amy Berman Jackson, blasted the notorious dirty trickster for his behaviour, describing it as "a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the very foundation of our democracy". US Attorney-General William Barr controversially intervened last week to overrule a recommendation by prosecutors in his department of a seven to nine-year prison term for Stone. Four prosecutors withdrew from the case and one quit the Justice Department altogether following Barr's intervention, which followed tweets by Trump blasting the recommendation. Brisbane mother Hannah Clarke was driving her three young children to school when her estranged husband doused his family in petrol and lit them on fire. The three children Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey, aged between three and six died in the burning car on Raven Street at Camp Hill on Wednesday morning. Slain mother Hannah Clarke with her three children. Ms Clarke, 31, died in hospital on Wednesday evening, succumbing to her injuries. Rowan Baxter also died at the scene, reportedly from self-inflicted stab wounds. PHILADELPHIA The American Red Cross is facing a national blood crisis its worst blood shortage in more than a decade. Dangerously low blood supply levels are posing a concerning risk to patient care and forcing doctors to make difficult decisions about who receives blood transfusions and who will need to wait until more products become [] Alabama voters will decide March 3 whether to move from an elected state school board to one appointed by the Governor. A yes vote on Amendment One sends the elected state school board home. A no vote keeps the board in place. Supporters of the amendment say one reason to change is because most states in the top 10 on the Nations Report Card, where Alabama ranked dead last in math and near last in reading, have appointed state school boards. So AL.com looked at those top 10 states on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a test given to a sample of students in the 4th grade and 8th grade in each state every other year in reading and math. We looked to see if there were any differences among elected and appointed boards. And there are. First, some caution: NAEP experts say there is no way to connect any one policy decision (like who governs the schools) to success on the NAEP. Experts also caution against ranking the states. We are doing it here because Alabamas low ranking on the NAEP is one of the main talking points that supporters of Amendment One use to argue for an appointed state school board. Looking at only the top 10 states for each grade and subject area, states with appointed boards have an edge over elected boards, particularly where math is concerned, and not simply because there are more appointed boards than elected ones. But getting a top ranking on the NAEP isnt something that happens just because you have an appointed board. And before you ask, yes, there is a weak correlation with how much money is spent to educate students and where states rank on the NAEP, but there are exceptions. For example, see Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, all of whom are ranked higher and spend less per student on education than Alabama. And while NAEP rankings are lower in states with higher levels of student poverty, there are exceptions. For example, again, see Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, all of whom are ranked higher and have higher levels of student poverty than Alabama. The series of maps below show NAEP rankings, shown by the number, and the method of choosing a state school board shown by color. Green shades indicate an appointed board, blue shades indicate an elected board. Gray indicates the state has no governing school board. Yellow and orange indicate the state has a combination of appointed and elected state school board members. The Department of Defense schools (ranked in the top 5 in all areas) and the District of Columbia (ranked in the bottom 10 in all areas) are not included on the map. Heres 4th grade math. Click here for an interactive version. The map shows the type of state school governance by color and the state's ranking on the 2019 NAEP 4th grade math results. Heres 8th grade math. Click here for an interactive version. The map shows the type of state school governance by color and the state's ranking on the 2019 NAEP 8th grade math results. Heres 4th grade reading. Click here for an interactive version. The map shows the type of state school governance by color and the state's ranking on the 2019 NAEP 4th grade reading results. And heres 8th grade reading. Click here for an interactive version. The map shows the type of state school governance by color and the state's ranking on the 2019 NAEP 8th grade reading results. Heres a link to a list of states, complete with rankings in each area on the 2019 NAEP test. As always, the list is best seen on a large screen. Its one thing to look at the map, and its another to do the data wrangling to see if one type of board outshines the other. The wrangling helps determine whether elected and appointed state school boards are represented in the top 10 and bottom 10 in the same proportion they exist across the country. This is an overly simple way to look at it, but it is a place to start. Focusing only on states, neither Department of Defense nor the District of Columbia schools were included in this analysis. For example, given that 36 out of 50, or 72% of the total, state school boards are appointed, all things being equal, youd expect to see 7 in the top 10 and 7 in the bottom 10. And because one in 10 state school boards are elected, youd expect to see 1 in the top 10 and 1 in the bottom 10. Focusing only on states, neither Department of Defense nor the District of Columbia schools were included in this analysis. So what does the data show? Looks like appointed state school boards have the edge over elected ones. If you isolate the top 10 states in each grade and subject combination, eight of the top 10 have appointed state school boards in both grades in math and in 4th grade reading. However, only 6 of the top 10 states in 8th grade reading have appointed state school boards (fewer than would be expected) while two of the top 10 have elected ones (more than youd expect to find). What about the other end of the rankings? Appointed boards again come out looking better. In both grades and subject levels, there are fewer appointed state school boards than youd expect to find in the bottom 10. Two of the bottom 10 states in both grades in reading and in 4th grade math have elected boards (20% of the total in the bottom 10), which is more than youd expect to find. Related: Alabama school board member threatens lawsuit if Amendment One passes Also worth a look are the four states that have no governing state board of education. Two of those states, Minnesota and Wisconsin, have top 10 rankings in 8th grade math and Minnesota is in the top 10 in 4th grade math. Wisconsin also appears in the top 10 for 8th grade math. Thats more than youd expect to find at the top, given there are only four in the entire country. What happens if you look at, say, the top 20? In that case, elected state school boards do well in both grades in reading and in 8th grade math. Appointed boards shine in 4th grade reading. And states with no state school board do well in math at both levels. Of course, NAEP scoresand any student outcome measuresare affected by much more than how the state school board is selected. So, depending on whether youre looking at the top 10 or the top 20, appointed state school boards either shine or not, respectively. Any form of governance is only as good as the people doing the governing. Asking voters to approve Amendment One is a way to replace all of the state board members at the same time. While Gov. Ivey has said this effort isn't about any particular board member, it isn't lost on this observer that the past few years have been particularly full of turmoil for this particular elected state school board. One thing is for certain: Alabama voters will have the final say. And whether Amendment One is voted up or down, there will still be a lot of work to dobeyond the choice of state school board membersto improve Alabamas NAEP rankings and student outcomes. Related: How to find and read your schools report card AL.com used information from the National Association of State Boards of Education and the Education Commission of the States for information on which model of governance is used in each state. It has been two weeks since the United States announced the killing of the chief of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). This severe blow has hit al-Qaeda hard, adding to the list of its losses over the last 10 years. The most recent loss is the death of Qassim al-Rimi, who was targeted in Wadi Abedah in Yemen's Marib province. On Feb. 6, the White House confirmed the death of Rimi in an airstrike, saying that this mans death degrades al-Qaeda and brings us close to eliminating the threats these groups pose. Apparently, it is a big victory but it is not a cure-all for potential al-Qaeda threats. Multiple American drone strikes have been conducted to kill al-Qaeda leaders, but this has not sufficed to wipe out the entire existence of al-Qaeda in Yemen. The killing strategy has been effective in uprooting the heads, but the roots of the problem persist. Rimi was a founding member of AQAP and his influence grew in 2015 when he was declared as the new head of the group after the killing of his predecessor. Since then, Rimi has been the mastermind of al-Qaeda operations in war-ravaged Yemen. Al-Qaedas malign activities have just added to the ordeal Yemen has been witnessing over the last five years. The United States has conducted several counterterrorism operations in Yemen even prior to the breakout of the civil war in 2015. The first high-profile al-Qaeda leader to be killed on Yemens soil was US-born Anwar al-Awlaki, who is originally from Yemens Shabwa province. He became a prominent cleric and a spokesman for AQAP. A US drone strike targeted him in September 2011. In 2013, the Yemeni government announced that Said Ali al-Shihri, a Saudi-born national, died from wounds he previously sustained in a US counterterrorism operation in Yemen. Shihri had a long terrorism career. He was wounded in an airstrike in Afghanistan in 2001 and was brought to the American prison at Guantanamo Bay. After a five-year incarceration, the United States released him into a Saudi program that was established to persuade jihadis to renounce violence and be part of society. But he fled to Yemen and AQAP announced on the internet in early 2009 that Shihri was the groups new deputy commander. In June of 2015, AQAP announced that its leader, Nasir al-Wuhayshi, was killed in a US drone strike in Yemens Hadramout province. He had a weighty influence in the group and he was a former personal assistant to Osama bin Laden. Upon declaring the news of his death, al-Qaeda was swift to reveal his successor, Rimi, who has lately met the same destiny: being killed by a US drone attack in Yemen. In February 2016, a drone strike hit a car, killing six al-Qaeda members including the head of Ansar al-Sharia, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, in Yemens Abyan province. Moreover, US President Donald Trump declared in October 2019 the death of Ibrahim al-Asiri in a drone strike in Yemen two years prior in a counterterrorism operation. Asiri, originally from Saudi Arabia, was a highly skilled bomb maker. The successive losses of al-Qaeda have weakened the group and nowadays it appears in its weakest stage, according to observers. Nabil al-Bokairi, a Yemeni researcher and writer, told Al-Monitor, Al-Qaeda in Yemen has been living its dying moment for a long time given the fact that many leading figures have been eliminated. Rimis death will contribute to weakening al-Qaeda further. It is the eclipse of al-Qaeda. Bokairi added, The media have exaggerated the present size of al-Qaeda in Yemen and have depicted Yemen as the safe haven of al-Qaeda. However, time has proven that al-Qaeda is much weaker. We still remember how al-Qaeda handed over Mukalla [city] to the so-called Arab coalition forces in Yemen in 2016. In April 2016, al-Qaeda operatives withdrew from Mukalla in Hadramout province after mediation efforts led by religious clerics. While the drone strikes have caused tremendous losses to al-Qaeda, this killing approach is not a viable approach to get rid of the group for good, according to observers. The drone strikes will not eliminate al-Qaeda. Recently, US drone strikes have killed some leaders of al-Qaeda. This is not enough. The United States and the international community should find other ways to confront al-Qaeda, Adel Dashela, a Yemeni researcher and writer, told Al-Monitor. He noted, The international community has to support the Yemeni people through resolving the internal conflict, helping to implement a democratic transition and the outcomes of the National Dialogue Conference [NDC], ending the [Houthi] military coup and stopping the regional proxy conflict in Yemen. Then they can eliminate al-Qaeda in Yemen. The political parties engaged in a national dialogue in March 2013 and concluded in January 2014. It was called the NDC in which a plethora of political parties, civil society organizations and the youth took part. Though they agreed on a road map to a better Yemen, dreams shattered when the Houthis took over Sanaa in September 2014, setting a precedent for a new political and military scene that ended up in a devastating civil war. According to Dashela, the current conflict in Yemen has led to the rise of al-Qaeda in some areas of Yemens south and east and this has enabled it to exploit the ongoing conflict and spread its radical ideology among the tribesmen and in tribal areas. In addition, Yemen's internationally recognized government is weak, and it cant fight the [Houthi] sectarian militias, the [separatist] militias and al-Qaeda. Dashela argued that all partners fighting terrorism have to address the core of the problem. They must find jobs for the youth, solve unemployment problems and poverty, and implement a real national reconciliation [in Yemen]. The irreparable eclipse of al-Qaeda requires a fix of Yemens problems, in particular political, military and economic issues. In the absence of strong governance, outlaws, including al-Qaeda, will find a fertile ground to rise and survive and drone strikes alone will not make Yemen a radicalism-free country. Mike Bloomberg boasted about sending his tall and busty and blonde teenage daughter on dates he arranged during a business trip in China, according to a newly-resurfaced report on the billionaire presidential hopeful from 1999. The quotes were published in a Wired magazine profile on Mr Bloomberg - despite his demands for them to remain off the record after he made the comments to a table of Boston College graduates. My daughter is tall and busty and blonde, Mr Bloomberg told the graduates, Wired reported. We went to China together. And what's a 16-year-old going to do on a business trip?" According to the story, Mr Bloomberg popped another carefully buttered piece of bread in his mouth before adding: So I got her dates in every city in China." He then reportedly barked at the author of the profile, David Bennahum, saying: Thats off the record! However, going off the record is typically an agreement made between a journalist and interview subject before information is provided or quotes are shared. Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Show all 18 1 /18 Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Jessica Canicosa, a precinct captain for Bernie Sanders, waits to greet caucus voters at Liberty High School in Henderson, Nevada REUTERS Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Hotel workers at the Bellagio in Las Vegas get to grips with voting papers during the Nevada caucuses AFP via Getty Images Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A caricature of Bernie Sanders is projected on to a tree during a rally in Las Vegas EPA Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A woman waits to have a photo taken with Elizabeth Warren during a town hall meeting in Las Vegas REUTERS Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures The threat of coronavirus and other germ-borne illnesses was on some voters' minds at the Democratic caucuses in Henderson, Nevada Getty Images Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Former vice-president Joe Biden takes a selfie with a voter in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucuses REUTERS Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Amy Klobuchar changes her shoes backstage after giving a speech in Exeter, New Hampshire AFP/Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A warmly-wrapped-up dog attends an Elizabeth Warren event at Amherst Elementary School in Nashua, New Hampshire AFP/Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Bernie Sanders, who romped to victory in New Hampshire against Hillary Clinton in 2016, talks to the media in Manchester Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Joe Biden was hoping to improve on his poor showing in Iowa in the New Hampshire primary Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Elizabeth Warren, renowned for giving time to supporters for selfies, works the crowd at the University of New Hampshire in Durham Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Joe Biden takes a selfie with a supporter and his child outside a campaign event in Somersworth, New Hampshire on 5 February Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders quarrel after a confrontation in a TV debate in which Sanders claimed that Warren was not telling the truth about a conversation in which she claimed he had said a woman could not win the presidency on 14 January AP Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Supporter Pat Provencher listens to Pete Buttigieg in Laconia, New Hampshire on 4 February Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Pete Buttigieg speaks at a campaign event in Concord, New Hampshire while awaiting the results of the Iowa caucus Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Elizabeth Warren is presented with a balloon effigy of herself at a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire on 5 February Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A Trump supporter rides past a rally for Amy Klobuchar in Des Moines, Iowa on 14 January AP Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A man holds up a sign criticising billionaires in the presidential race in front of Michael Bloomberg in Compton, Califronia. The former New York mayor skipped the first caucus in Iowa and instead campaigned in California on 3 February Reuters The quotes were shared in a tweet by Twitter user @Andipalmur on Wednesday night, who told The Independent "some anonymous hero" posted a screenshot of the quotes on the chat app Discord, shortly before Mr Bloomberg made his debut on the Democratic primary debate stage in Las Vegas, Nevada. Normal guy Mike Bloomberg likes to get his busty daughter laid on business trips, they wrote, adding: Off the record. The Twitter user then linked to the Wired article and credited Mr Bennahum, writing: Props to the author for ignoring a billionaires request to be off the record. Mr Bloomberg made the reported comments while attending an alumni dinner at the Hilton hotel in New York, where he was the keynote speaker. The Democratic candidates past comments have seemingly come back to haunt his presidential campaign, as others on the debate stage took him to task for other alleged remarks he made about women. Elizabeth Warren attacked Mr Bloomberg early on in the night, saying: Id like to talk about who were running against: a billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians.' And no, Im not talking about Donald Trump. Im talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk, she added. Look, Ill support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this: Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another. Former Vice President Joe Biden also called on Mr Bloomberg during the debate to release multiple women who accused him of sexual harassment from nondisclosure agreements, though he refused. The former New York City mayor responded: None of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didnt like a joke I told. Mr Bloomberg has two daughters, Georgina, 37, and Emma, 40. His campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. This is the globe-trotting travel blogger linked with her husband to an alleged massive fraud against the Irish Football Association. Newtownards-based Sumbul Jahangir appeared in court on Friday alongside her accountant husband Muhammad Naeem. Jahangir (36) describes herself on social media as a "world traveller, film-maker, blogger, dreamer and adrenaline junkie". Her husband Naeem (39) faces the majority of the charges over the alleged double invoicing scam against the IFA in Belfast. Expand Close Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir He is charged with eight offences, including fraud by abuse of position between January 2018 and last August. Ms Jahangir faces a single charge of possessing criminal property during the same period. The pair, both Pakistani nationals, appeared before Belfast Magistrates' Court last Friday and were released on continuing bail to appear again on March 26 while the Public Prosecution Service prepares a full file. Outside court Naeem told our reporter he could not comment on the case and Jahangir ignored questions about her travel blogs. Expand Close Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir Ms Jahangir is a prolific travel blogger who boasts of posting travel content twice a week to her Facebook account Travel Is The Answer. According to her Facebook page, the self-confessed travel junkie has visited numerous countries since February 2019 including Turkey, Switzerland, Scotland, Holland, England and holiday destinations here in Northern Ireland. The jet-setter also boasts of staying in cave rooms in Cappadocia, Turkey, skydiving in England and climbing the Schilthorn in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. Expand Close Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir Ms Jahangir uploaded a series of pictures of a trip to the Lake District on January 24. On social media she says: "My name is Sumbul and I am inflicted [sic] with the travel bug. "I am passionate about exploring and learning about this beautiful, stunning and awesome world. "Nature just takes my breath away. In my opinion there is beauty everywhere in this world. You just need the eye to see it. I am going to share all my travels with the rest of the world through this channel because I strongly believe everyone should get a chance to see the immense beauty and positivity this world has to offer. "Its high time to stop focusing on the negative and appreciate the tons of positivity we easily take for granted every day. Expand Close Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir leaves court / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir leaves court "Besides, travelling is the best way to grow and broaden your perspective. So stay tuned and come along to explore with me! New Videos Every Week!!!" The couple are based at Drumhirk Avenue, Newtownards. Partner Muhammad Naeem is accused of abusing his position by duplicating invoices and making fraudulent payments, with the intention of causing loss to the IFA, "on numerous occasions". He is further accused of making payments into bank accounts held in his name during the alleged scam and concealing, converting, transferring and removing criminal property from Northern Ireland. Expand Close Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir Jahangir - who has described herself in Companies House records as a consultant, company director and photographer - is charged with one count of possessing criminal property. According to Companies House, Naeem is the director of seven dissolved businesses which were registered in Northern Ireland and England. Naeem resigned last February from an accountancy services firm called Solvers Business Services Ltd, which was registered to an address in University Avenue in south Belfast. On the listings, he describes himself as either a consultant, accountant or business consultant. But his wife is a director of three firms registered to offices in the university area of south Belfast, concerned with business security and office cleaning. One of the firms, Solvers Services Ltd, was only founded in November last year. Expand Close Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Travel blogger Sumbul Jahangir The husband and wife are joint directors of two Belfast firms just launched in September last year - Solvers Cleaning Services and Solvers Security Services. Sumbul Jahangir had previously had two companies registered in Milton Keynes and one in London and at one point described herself as a photographer. There is no suggestion that any of the companies with which the pair are involved have anything to do with the alleged fraud. NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Betches, a digital media brand for gen z and millennial women, has named independent marketing and communications agency The Sway Effect as its new public relations agency of record. The selection follows an agency review initiated by the Betches founders late last year. The Sway Effect will partner with Betches to develop a communications strategy to support the next phase in the company's evolution. The scope of work will include brand strategy and narrative development as well as a strategic media relations campaign focused on amplifying Betches verticals and forging new partnerships and alliances. "The Sway Effect brings together a proven network of experts that has the skills, experience and know-how that our team needs at this important time in the evolution of our brand," said Aleen Kuperman, Betches CEO and Co-Founder. "Our company has always been focused on providing a place where all women feel empowered and can express their true self. Partnering with another female driven brand, like The Sway Effect, was the right fit for us as Jennifer Risi and her team are bold thinkers that share our values and views on how to change the world." "We are thrilled to partner with Betches. We look forward to an outstanding collaboration with the founders and to bringing the power of our network together to forge new relationships and an expanded circle of influence to the table," said Jennifer Risi, Founder and President of The Sway Effect. "We could not be more excited to work with such an inspirational group of female entrepreneurs." For more information on The Sway Effect, visit theswayeffect.com or find us on LinkedIn and Instagram. Contact: Glo Lindenmuth Phone: (908) 616-8936 Email: [email protected] SOURCE The Sway Effect Related Links www.theswayeffect.com Lt. General Charles "Chuck" Pitman passed away this past Thursday at age 84. His career spanned over 40 years, including three combat tours in Vietnam. He also was involved in Operation Eagle Claw, the attempted rescue of the American hostages in Tehran in 1980. He commanded an Air Wing and was the Deputy Chief of Staff for Marine Corps Aviation. He earned the Silver Star, four Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. But for all his achievements in uniform, Pitman is better known for ignoring military protocol and breaking a bunch of regulations so he could save lives. That was the thought process of then, Lieutenant Colonel Pitman. On Jan. 7, 1973, Pitman was the commander of the Marine Air Reserve Training in Louisiana. Pitman had turned on the television to see a horrible scene unfolding. A gunman had taken position on top of a hotel and was shooting and killing police officers. The sniper had a full view of all on comers, and any attempt to enter the hotel was met with murderous gunfire. Pitman didn't even think twice about asking permission to help. He grabbed another pilot and two crew members and jumped in a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter and headed toward New Orleans. The incident Pitman was flying into actually started several days earlier on New Year's Eve. Mark Essex was a Navy vet who had been kicked out due to behavior issues. He had ended up in New Orleans, where he fell in with radical groups. One of those groups was the Black Panthers. Essex had grown angrier over time with what he perceived to be injustices he faced in the Navy and now as a civilian. After learning of a civil rights protest in which two students from Southern University were killed by police, Essex lost it. He went to New Orleans police headquarters, where he shot and killed an African American cadet; shooting him from behind. He then fled and tried to break into a warehouse. When police arrived, unaware that he was linked to the shooting at HQ, Essex ambushed them, mortally wounding one. By the time backup arrived, he had vanished into the night. On Jan. 7, Essex reappeared, and entered a Howard Johnson hotel in downtown New Orleans. As he made his way to the roof, he murdered a newlywed couple and the hotel's manager and assistant manager. He then set fires in several rooms and made his way to the roof. Essex had set an ambush. The shooting and fires would draw first responders to the scene. Then he would carry out his horrible plan to kill more cops. As the police and firefighters arrived, they attempted to enter the hotel. Essex killed three police officers and wounded several more. He was able to pin down anyone that attempted to move toward the hotel and was completely concealed from return fire by concrete barriers on the roof. By this time, the TV cameras had shown up. Broadcasting over the airwaves, they told viewers of the horrible situation unfolding in downtown New Orleans. One of the viewers was Lt. Colonel Pitman. Pitman flew the CH-46 toward the hotel without any idea what he was actually going to do. He just knew he had to do something. When he arrived on site, Pitman located an empty parking lot next to the hotel. He landed, headed to the command center, and quickly became apprised of the situation. The cops on the scene sought his advice, and his years of service in Vietnam kicked in. Essex had the high ground, so Pittman would go higher. He put several New Orleans police officers on the helicopter and took off. He started flying passes over the roof of the hotel, slowing down and turning so that the police could get a good shot. They could not. Essex would take shots at the aircraft from afar but would take cover the minute they closed in. Pitman noticed this and kept making passes to lure Essex into thinking this was his routine. Finally, after one pass, he turned immediately around and caught Essex in the open. The police in the helicopter unloaded on the sniper. When all was said and done, Essex was found with over 200 rounds in his body. Pitman was lauded as a hero by the police and citizens of New Orleans and just about everybody...except the United States Marine Corps. It turns out that Pitman (kind of sort of) violated a few rules and regulations when he took the helicopter. He wasn't allowed to use military personnel or aircraft for anything other than a rescue mission (like evacuating flood victims). You would think that the Marine Corps would look at the badassery that Pitman just pulled off and call it a public relations coup. But, they didn't (of course) and started the process of a court-martial. It was only due to the intervention of Democratic Congressman and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Edward Herbert that the issue was dropped. Pitman would continue his amazing career, retiring in 1990 as a Lt. General. Lt. General Pitman, rest easy, and Semper Fidelis. MORE POSTS FROM WE ARE THE MIGHTY: 10 things you don't know about the Battle of Iwo Jima The hidden truth: military families face financial insecurity One of Pearl Harbors last survivors dies at age 97 We Are The Mighty (WATM) celebrates service with stories that inspire. WATM is made in Hollywood by veterans. It's military life presented like never before. Check it out at We Are the Mighty. MOUNTAIN VIEW (dpa-AFX) - Oracle Corp. (ORCL) said that a wide array of individuals and organizations from across technology, arts and culture, government, advocacy, and academia urged the Supreme Court of the United States to reject Google's attempt to weaken copyright protection in the United States. The group filed amicus briefs this week supporting Oracle in the Supreme Court. The group is speaking out to defend copyright protection and to reject Google's attempts to excuse its theft of more than 11,000 lines of Oracle's original code, Oracle said. Oracle General Counsel Dorian Daley said,' Google is attempting to rewrite the fundamental copyright protections that fuel innovation in this country. The amicus briefs make clear that to avoid significant consequences well beyond the software industry, Google's self-serving arguments and attempts to rewrite long-settled law must be rejected.' The U.S. Department of Justice in a filing on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to rule in favor of Oracle in the case that Google once referred to as the 'copyright case of the decade.' The DOJ argued that Google flouted copyright law when the tech giant copied 11,500 lines of Oracle's code more than 10 years ago. In 2010, Oracle - which acquired Sun Microsystems, the previous owner of Java - filed a copyright infringement case against Google for using Java APIs in its Android operating system. Application programming interfaces (APIs) are the building blocks of software interoperability. Oracle claimed that 'Google had replicated the structure, sequence, and organization of the overall code' for 37 packages in its Java API, which performs fundamental computing operations such as mathematical computations, file and string manipulation, and database connectivity. Google had negotiated with Sun Microsystems in 2005 for a license to use Java for mobile devices, but both parties were unable to reach a deal. So, the search giant had decided to develop its own implementations of the methods contained in the 37 Java API packages, which accounts for 97 percent of the lines of code in those packages. The remaining 3 percent at the heart of Oracle's copyright claim refers to the method declarations,which Google retained in its implementation so that applications written in Java can call those methods and run on Android, thus achieving interoperability. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.de There is a strong push within the Takoradi Constituency of the ruling National Patriotic Party (NPP) to unseat the Western Regional Minister, Kobina Okyere-Darko Mensah, after his twelve-year reign as Takoradi Member of Parliament. The desire by party folks to unseat the Minister follows the arrival and filing of nomination by a 37-year-old lecturer at the Takoradi Technical University, Frederick Kakraba Sam, who is a lawyer and the immediate past NPP Youth Organizer in the Takoradi Constituency. Speaking to Citi News, a cross-section of the party supporters, most of them delegates in the upcoming NPP primaries who accompanied Frederick Kakraba Sam, to file his nomination forms called for a new face for the Takoradi seat since the incumbent MP according to them has done little for the three-term he has been on the seat. A member of the NPP in the Takoradi Constituency, Dede Baiden, said the time is ripe for the incumbent, Kwabena Okyere Darko Mensah to go. It's been 12 years since Kobby took the Takoradi seat and what has he done? It is time he leaves for somebody else to come. Just like late Gladys Asmah did, she came for three terms and left for Kobby to come, he said. I support Kakraba because he is humble and has come to support the youth of Takoradi. Takoradi is really not seeing any progress and there should be awakening so everyone is supporting Kakraba. An NPP activist in the Takoradi Constituency known as 'Chilling,' was not different in his calls for incumbent Takoradi MP to give way for Kakraba. We need a change this year in Takoradi. When we voted for Kobby he didnt do anything. In fact, he has not done anything for us. He doesn't even pick our calls and so right now we don't want him again. We have somebody who can help us in the person of Kakraba, he said. Frederick Kakraba Sam whose filing of nomination was preceded with a mammoth float with his supporters to the party office, beside his lecturing career is also a successful transport operator who has created a lot of job opportunities for the youth in the Takoradi Constituency. Speaking to Citi News after filing his nomination forms, the first-timer parliamentary aspirant, Frederick Kakraba Sam, said his years of hard work to the party, academic and professional experiences have prepared him enough to lead the party to win the Takoradi seat and finally represent the constituency in Parliament. In addition to his parliamentary duties, Kakraba Sam said if given the nod, he will push for serious development of Takoradi and make sure the youth benefit from the Oil and Gas resource. This is the UP tradition and we believe in democracy since the party every four years allows people to pick forms to contest. So I have done personal introspection, consulted widely and upon all these, I realized that I stand a better chance of representing the people in Takoradi Parliament. I am a young man who has acquired all the necessary academic feat and currently pursuing my LPC in the UK and believes strongly that with all these, and as a legislator, I would be able to advocate for the interest of Takoradi people in Parliament. Many of the youth are clamouring for jobs everywhere I pass, so my main aim to help Takoradi constituency is to use my connections, both local and international to bring people to invest in Takoradi to give the youth jobs which would be a panacea to their worries. Even now, when you look around there are some Petroleum Support service providers who can give jobs to Takoradi residents, but how many are employed? As the leader of the Takoradi constituency, I will do my best to talk to these companies to give jobs to the people of Takoradi to avert the youth of Takoradi from one day rebelling against the industry, he said. Thirty-Seven-year-old Frederick Kakraba Sam who would be contesting the incumbent MP in addition to two other aspirants has MSc Logistics and Supply Chain Management from the University of Hull, United Kingdom, a Bachelor of Law from the University of Hull, UK and was also a one time Secretary for Hull Chapter NPP. ---citinewsroom McCullar didn't ask for a specific sentence but told Chief U.S. District Judge John Gerrard he was profoundly sorry. "This was nothing short of destruction," he said. "Words fail me completely in how to express my sorrow and regret of the wrong I did to the victim." McCullar said he has a strong desire to fix what is broken with time and treatment. In the end, Gerrard sentenced him to nearly 42 years 30 years for the victim he took photos and videos of, and 11 years and eight months for the videos and images of other children he downloaded online calling it one of the "most egregious crimes that this court sees." This wasn't watching videos, which he said was in itself horrendous. This involved the sexual touching and assault of someone under 2 years old, the judge said. "If courts cannot protect the most vulnerable in this society, little children, there is no other institution left to do so," Gerrard said. And the child wasn't the only victim, he said. Her family was left with this devastation, too. The judge said he also considered McCullar's good work history and lack of a prior criminal record. Sharjeel Imam, the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student arrested last month for his cut-off Assam remark was brought to Guwahati on Thursday by the Assam Police. Imam had been arrested by the Delhi Police in Jehanabad in Bihar and was handed over to a team of the Assam Police in New Delhi on Wednesday by the Patiala House court and taken to Assam by train. The team with Imam reached Guwahati on Thursday. He was immediately produced in a court. We had requested the court for four days police remand and the same has been granted, Nabaneet Mahanta, additional deputy commissioner of police (crime), Guwahati said. The Assam Police had registered a case against Imam after a video of him stating that Assam should be cut-off from the rest of India, during an anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protest, went viral. The police will interrogate Imam during the next few days and might take him to different locations in the state. Earlier in the day, Imams brother Muzzammil had alleged that Sharjeel was brought to Assam in a secretive manner and that his family was worried about his safety. My brother Sharjeel Imam has been taken to Assam in a secretive manner without informing his counsel and family. We are all concerned about his safety and well being. He has nothing to hide and has been actively cooperating in the investigation, Muzzammil wrote on Twitter. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Guardia Civil officers have rescued six workers, who were at risk of suffocation, from a hidden cigarette factory near Monda. The men, all Ukrainian nationals, were found enclosed in an underground bunker, which was equipped to produce 3,500 cigarettes an hour. Earlier in the day the factorys masterminds had already been arrested elsewhere. Run by an organisation formed predominantly by British nationals, the bunker is the first illegal tobacco production line to be located underground in Europe. Detectives had established that the cigarettes were being produced on an estate near the small town of Monda, on the edge of the Sierra de las Nieves. The arrested suspects failed to tell detectives that the workers in the bunker would be running out of oxygen All that was visible when members of the UCO (the Guardia Civils elite division) arrived at the site, however, were stables. Nothing could be seen or heard, although four metres below their feet, six men were banging on the walls of the bunker shouting for help. The underground space they lived and worked in was running out of oxygen. The ventilation system, as the officers later established, was run on a generator that needed filling with diesel every day. On the day of the raid, however, with the gangs ringleaders under arrest, nobody had refuelled. The walls of the bunker were soundproofed to prevent the noise of the machinery from being heard above ground. Officers said later that they had been surprised by the indifference of the leaders of the organisation who, after being arrested, knew that the generator was likely to have run out of fuel. Despite being aware that their six workers could die of suffocation in the bunker, they still gave no indication of its location. According to the detectives, if they had not found the entrance when they did, the lack of oxygen in the underground enclosure would have killed the workers, as the air supply had been cut off. The entrance to the bunker was eventually located after officers had been searching the land for 16 hours. An old shipping container, apparently used as a tool shed, had to be moved using heavy machinery. The workers had been living in insalubrious conditions, the UCO officers explained after the rescue. With bunk beds and a kitchen underground, their contact with the outside world had been nonexistent. A month underground According to the Guardia Civil, once the workers had gone down the narrow step ladder into the bunker, they spent a month underground, where they worked 24 hour shifts. The organisation brought over workers as tourists from Eastern European countries and they returned after their month in the factory. The six Ukrainians found during the operation were totally closed off and abandoned to their fate, following the arrest that same morning of their bosses, said officers. The operation, codenamed Hannibal, has resulted in 20 arrests after 13 searches of private properties. Some 153,000 packets of cigarettes ready for sale were confiscated in the operation, along with 17,600 kilos of granulated tobacco, 20 kilos of hashish and 144 of marijuana. Among the Britons arrested is one of the organisations ringleaders, identified by the Guardia Civil as 30-year-old D. D., who was on the run from the British authorities after failing to return to prison after temporary release. Another of the suspects arrested is Lithuanian national A. R., who is wanted by the authorities in his home country for crimes related to smuggling. The investigation is being coordinated by a Coin court. Twelve of the 20 suspects have been remanded in custody. Patients with highly complex or rare cancers will benefit from the specialized expertise, leading-edge technology and clinical research available at NCI-designated cancer centers, such as Sylvester. Those treatments include bone marrow transplants, CAR T-cell immunotherapy, precision medicine approaches, cancer prevention, proton therapy coming later this year, and other new methods to preventing and treating cancer. "Our affiliation allows patients to continue to receive world-class, personalized and comprehensive cancer care at Jupiter Medical Center, while making it easier for our patients to access the experts, specialized technology and scientific breakthroughs being made at Sylvester," said Dr. Amit Rastogi, president and chief executive officer of Jupiter Medical Center. "The relative proximity of Jupiter Medical Center and Sylvester will help support collaboration and cooperation between the medical teams at both institutions." "We have a highly-qualified team of more than 300 cancer-focused physicians and researchers working together to deliver world class expertise in cancer prevention, innovative treatments and survivorship to patients," said Dr. Stephen D. Nimer, director of the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center. "This affiliation allows Sylvester to work with a hospital that shares our mission to make advanced cancer care available to a broader community. We are very happy to have an opportunity to work with Jupiter Medical Center to provide pioneering treatments to more patients from Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast." Dedicated nurse navigators will facilitate communication and coordination of care between the medical teams at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center and Jupiter Medical Center. The agreement also provides opportunities for cancer experts from both medical centers to collaborate on patient evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment, sharing best practices to determine the best treatment plans for all types of cancer. Jupiter Medical Center is home to the new Anderson Family Cancer Institute, a 55,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art cancer center opening in March 2020. Accredited by the American College of Radiology, the Commission on Cancer and the National Accreditation Program for Breast Centers, Jupiter Medical Center offers full spectrum of cancer care, including advanced diagnostics, personalized treatments provided by a multidisciplinary team of clinicians, support services for family and caregivers and survivorship programs. Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center is one of only 71 NCI-designed centers nationwide. This designation recognizes cancer centers that meet rigorous standards for multi-disciplinary care and state-of-the-art research focused on developing new approaches to treating and curing cancer. About Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, part of UHealth - University of Miami Health System and the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, is the only cancer center in South Florida designated by the National Cancer Institute. NCI designation recognizes that Sylvester has met the most rigorous standards for cancer research, beginning in our laboratories, extending to patient care, and meeting specific needs in our community. Sylvester is known as South Florida's leader in patient-focused cancer research and care, offering the only Phase 1 Clinical Trials program the first step in evaluating how patients respond to the latest investigational treatments. NCI designation further expands Sylvester's ability to provide access to novel therapies through more clinical trials and collaboration with other designated centers. Equipped with a highly qualified team of more than 300 cancer-focused physicians and researchers working together, Sylvester discovers, develops, and delivers more precision cancer care. To serve current and future patients, Sylvester has a network of conveniently located outpatient treatment facilities throughout South Florida. About Jupiter Medical Center Ranked #1 for quality, patient safety and patient satisfaction, Jupiter Medical Center is the leading destination for world-class health care in Palm Beach County and the greater Treasure Coast. In 2019, the Leapfrog Group named Jupiter Medical Center a "Top Hospital," a distinction earned by only 6 percent of hospitals nationwide. Jupiter Medical Center is also the only hospital in Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie and Indian River counties to receive a 4-star quality and safety rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). Outstanding physicians, state-of-the-art facilities, innovative techniques and a commitment to serving the community enable Jupiter Medical Center to meet a broad range of patient needs. The region's only independent, not-for-profit hospital, Jupiter Medical Center offers specialty concentrations in orthopedics and spine care; cancer care and oncology; cardiac and vascular care; neuroscience and stroke care; women's and children's services; urgent care; and other key areas. For more information on Jupiter Medical Center, please call (561) 263-2200 or visit jupitermed.com. SOURCE Jupiter Medical Center Related Links http://www.jupitermed.com/ Human Rights Defender of Armenia Arman Tatoyan and the personnel of the Office of the Human Rights Defender have left for Artsakh on a working visit, as reported the Public Relations Department of the Office of the Human Rights Defender of Armenia. During the visit, the Ombudsman and the personnel are expected to hold official consultations and meet with President Bako Sahakyan, Human Rights Defender Artak Beglaryan and the command of the Defense Army. The Ombudsman and personnel will also pay visits to and work thoroughly at military units, hold personal talks with the soldiers and officers, as well as with their colleagues of the specialized subdivision of the Office of the Human Rights Defender of Armenia and the Office of the Human Rights Defender of Artsakh. The Human Rights Defender congratulates everyone on the occasion of Artsakh Renaissance Day, the press release reads. British Ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons has laid flowers at the monument to the Heavenly Hundred Heroes in Kyiv, according to the Facebook page of the UK Embassy in Ukraine. "Today, Ukraine remembers the courage and sacrifice of men and women who died six years ago during protests on the Maidan. They have been fighting for a free, independent and successful future for their country. The United Kingdom will continue to assist Ukraine in its efforts to deliver on that vision," the report reads. The embassy added that Simmons was impressed by the number of people coming to pay tribute to the victims. op Home Minister Amit Shah on Thursday said that the vision of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is to make the Northeast free from problems by 2024. "Northeast would become 'Samasya Mukt' (free of all problems) by 2024. There would be no dispute, only a golden future for a developed Northeast. Arunachal, which is the Land of Rising Sun, would become the harbinger of growth for the entire region," he said. "The Modi government developed an emotional connect between Northeast and the rest of India," said Shah, adding that Article 371 would not be removed from Northeast ever. "Under the Modi regime, Northeast saw a sharp rise of over 250 per cent in developmental budget allocations by the Finance Commission and 24 per cent in the Union Budget allocation," said Union Minister for Home Affairs Shah while presiding over the 34th Statehood Day celebrations of Arunachal Pradesh here. The Home Minister inaugurated a bouquet of projects and schemes for the State including the launch of Arunachal Pradesh Industrial and Investment Policy 2020, laying of the foundation stone for the Police Headquarters at Itanagar, construction of new apartments for MLAs and residential complexes for senior government officers in Chimpu, worth over Rs 140 crore. Expressing confidence that the launch of Arunachal Pradesh industrial and investment policy 2020 will boost economic growth in the State, Shah said that with this fast-paced growth Arunachal will play an important role in achieving Prime Minister Modi's vision of India becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2024. Talking about the PM's vision of connecting Northeast, especially Arunachal, with the country, Shah said the Government of India is committed to safeguarding the fundamental rights, culture, heritage and traditions of all the 27 tribes and over 120 sub-tribes of Arunachal Pradesh. Taking about other developments, he said that bamboo would be a harbinger of growth in Northeast. In the last three years, over Rs 32,000 crore have been allocated and 1,200-km of Highways, out of the sanctioned 3,800-km, have been completed; and 900 km railway track has been converted to broad gauge. The Home Minister said the Prime Minister is focussed on finding lasting solutions to the problems of the Northeast including interstate issues inter tribe issues, border disputes, extremism, and insurgency. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 18:07:35|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Those who spread conspiracy theories about the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) are doing so either out of "bad intentions" or "absurd ignorance," a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Thursday. Certain Western individuals and media outlets have suggested that the COVID-19 virus may have to do with China's biological warfare program and it is a bioweapon leaked from a lab. "We hope that the international community, while working together to combat the virus, will continue to work together against conspiracy theories and other 'political viruses,'" Spokesperson Geng Shuang told an online news briefing. Geng said the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has said repeatedly there is no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was engineered in a laboratory or caused by the manufacture of biological weapons. Many of the world's leading medical experts also believe that such allegations as "laboratory leakage" or "biological weapons development" have no scientific basis. According to Geng, The Lancet, an authoritative international medical journal, has published a joint statement signed by 27 of the world's leading scientists in the field of public health, in support of the Chinese research, health and medical workers fighting the COVID-19 outbreak. The statement said scientists from multiple countries have analyzed genomes of the causative agent, and they conclude that this coronavirus has originated in wildlife, as have many other emerging pathogens. These scientists believe that conspiracy theories can do nothing but create fear, rumors, and prejudice that jeopardize the global collaboration in the fight against this virus. They also call for respect for the professional advice of the WHO, Geng said. Geng said the Chinese people are fighting an all-out war against the COVID-19 not only for its own sake, but also for global public health. "I want to emphasize that, in the face of an epidemic, what we need is science, reason, and cooperation. We must seek the triumph of science over ignorance, dispel rumors with truth, and replace prejudice with cooperation," said the spokesperson. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 03:07:00|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close People are seen in front of buildings in the City of London, London, Britain, on Feb. 1, 2020. (Photo by Stephen Chung/Xinhua) Stefaan De Rynck, senior advisor of chief EU negotiator for Brexit Michel Barnier, said Britain is too geographically close to the EU for a Canada-style trade deal without guarantees that Britain will not undercut European standards. LONDON, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- The future relationship between Britain and the European Union (EU) is a "different ball game" to the one the EU has with Canada due to Britain's proximity to the bloc, a key EU aide said here Wednesday. Addressing a conference at the London School of Economics (LSE), Stefaan De Rynck, senior advisor of chief EU negotiator for Brexit Michel Barnier, said Britain is too geographically close to the EU for a Canada-style trade deal without guarantees that Britain will not undercut European standards. Following the end of Britain's EU membership on Jan. 31, both sides have until the end of this year to strike a future trade deal. Britain will continue to follow EU rules during the transition period ending Dec. 31. De Rynck's comments came after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, called for a "Canada free trade agreement-type relationship" and urged the EU to drop its demand for post-Brexit regulatory alignment. "We bring to the negotiations not some clever tactical positioning but the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country," Frost said Monday in a speech in Brussels. A protester with his face painted in the colors of an EU flag prepares to attend the "Together for the Final Say" event at the Parliament Square in London, Britain, on Oct. 19, 2019. (Photo by Stephen Chung/Xinhua) In response, De Rynck said: "Some in the UK now seem to want to become Canadians. But Dover is much closer to Calais than Ottawa is...Proximity matters, distance matters. What also matters is the interconnectedness between our economies." He said trade deals struck by the EU are expected to include "level playing field" commitments, adding that it is not a specific demand on Britain. "Canada and Japan are also partners on upholding standards. Every trade deal concluded has level playing field commitments," De Rynck added. Barnier said Tuesday that Frost's remarks in Brussels breached Johnson's previous commitments to the EU, saying such an offer for a Canada-style trade deal "was not on the table". Wednesday's conference at the LSE was called to look at the financial consequences of Britain's Brexit negotiations with the EU. Formal trade talks between the two sides are scheduled to start in March. A new Bond film means new Bond girls - but this time, theyve been updated from the tired tropes of old. No Time to Die, the 25th Bond film and Daniel Craigs last in the title role, stars Lashana Lynch as Nomi, a new 00 agent, and Ana de Armas as Paloma, a CIA agent who assists Bond on his mission. De Armas recently told Vanity Fair that her character was created for the film by director Cary Joji Fukunaga specifically for the actress at the last minute, and written entirely by Fleabag creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge. You could also tell that Phoebe was in there," she said. "There was that humor and spikiness so specific to her. My character feels like a real woman. So who is Ana de Armas? Here are eight things you didnt know about the Bond star 1. Shes Cuban-Spanish Ana de Armas was born in Santa Cruz del Norte, Cuba, near the capital of Havana. Her grandparents are Spanish on her maternal side, and the actress obtained Spanish citizenship through them and moved to Madrid at the age of 18. 007 James Bond 25: No Time To Die Character Posters 1 /8 007 James Bond 25: No Time To Die Character Posters 2. She learned English in four months De Armas learned English in four months - Because my life depended on it, she told Vanity Fair. After moving from Spain to Hollywood at 25, de Armas said she was so determined to get auditions, there were moments she didnt fully understand the dialogue she was saying. The first time I read for a part, I had no clue what I beg your pardon was, she told Vanity Fair. I thought it was really angry, like I beg your pardon! Like I am going to take your pardon. And every person in the room was like, She has no clue what shes saying right now. But the thing is, I knew exactly what was happening in the scene. 3. She has wanted to act since she was young De Armas has wanted to act since she was a teenager and attended the National Theatre School of Cuba for four years. She told the Hollywood Foreign Press: I knew I wanted to be an actress but you always need [someone] to discover you. In about my second year of school, Spanish director Manuel Gutierrez Aragon cast me and that was my first movie. 4. Shes a Golden Globe nominee De Armas received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical or Comedy for Knives Out. The 2019 murder mystery/comedy, directed by Rian Johnson (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), stars de Armas as Marta, a nurse caught up in a complicated murder plot. Ana de Armas and Daniel Craig in Knives Out (Claire Folger) De Armas won praise from critics for her performance, with the LA Times calling her terrific and AP saying she seizes the film. 5. She started acting in Spain before moving to Hollywood De Armas found success in Spain after moving there at the age of 18. After a role in the Spanish film Una rosa de Francia in 2006, she won a role on the television series El Internado (The Boarding School), which she was on from 2007-2010. De Armas told Build Series in 2016 that while she was still living in Madrid, she auditioned for the Spanish-language film Hands of Stone, which convinced her to make the move to Hollywood in 2014. 6. Her breakout role was in Blade Runner 2049 You may recognise de Armas from Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to Ridley Scotts 1982 sci-fi classic. De Armas played Joi, the holographic artificial intelligence girlfriend of Ryan Goslings character K. The role marked a breakthrough for de Armas, with the Hollywood Reporter branding the actress Hollywoods Next Big Thing in 2017. 7. She is playing Marilyn Monroe in an upcoming film De Armass next major role after No Time to Die will be in Netflixs Blonde, a biopic about the life of Marilyn Monroe. Director Andrew Dominik (The Assassination of Jesse James) reportedly handpicked de Armas to play the role. She told Vanity Fair: I only had to audition for Marilyn once and Andrew said Its you, but I had to audition for everyone else. I knew I could do it. Playing Marilyn was groundbreaking. A Cuban playing Marilyn Monroe. 8. She was once married De Armas married Spanish actor Marc Clotet in 2011 and divorced him in 2013. N othing beats seeing a new performer explode onto the comedy scene. Catherine Cohen did just that last summer when she caused a sensation at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with her musical stand-up debut, The Twist..? Shes Gorgeous. This attention-seeking American was the definitive word-of-mouth hit, going from unknown to Edinburgh Comedy Award best newcomer winner. Now the buzz has come south. Cohen announced two gigs at Bush Hall in March and without a whiff of advance publicity until this exclusive interview, a third date has already been added. So what makes Cohen so special? She is not the first entertainer to mix mirth with melody, but few have been this candid about millennial life and sex. Her self-deprecating calling-card line is: Boys never wanted to kiss me, so now I do comedy. Her style is scatty and compelling and her gigs a wild ride. The infectious songs are written with accompanist Henry Koperski, while the patter between them is often a stream of consciousness. Welcome to the oversharing world of Catherine Cohen. Everything is true, she claims. Well, maybe not quite everything. One hilarious revenge number is about murdering a man and burying his body in the woods. Thats my imagination, but it is inspired by events. The lyrics elaborate on the reason for the killing: because you touched my lower back at a party four years ago. Cohen, 28, cites Cher as an inspiration, which explains the sequins and sparkling costumes. She has a powerhouse singing voice, but in conversation she is more of a freestyle cocktail of Carrie Bradshaw and Lena Dunham. She recently started writing an advice column for W magazine and has a weekly sex and dating podcast, Seek Treatment. Thats when I get into trouble. Its usually me frantically calling the producers the next morning and being like, Wait, can you cut that thing I said about that guy from the bar, because he knows my cousin and she listens to the podcast? But I never want to hurt anyone or make anyone feel stupid, its mostly joking about myself. Edinburgh Comedy Award winners over the years - in pictures 1 /14 Edinburgh Comedy Award winners over the years - in pictures Previous Edinburgh Comedy Award winners you should know 2018: Rose Matafeo Horndog Horndog was the third solo show for New Zealand born comic Rose Matafeo, who wowed audiences last year with her sheer energy and pace of delivery. Welcoming people with a game of ping pong, she regaled stories of her teen crushes, millennial love life and pop culture knowledge. Matafeo told the Standard that she wanted to write a show about the excitement of being really into something when youre young this sure came across; the excitement was infectious. She is the first person of colour to win in the 38 years since the awards began. Matafeo is due to appear in the next series of Daves Taskmaster and has also just finished filming her first starring role in a film, Baby Done, directed by Taika Waititi. 2017: Hannah Gadsby Nanette Two very different shows shared the main prize in 2017. BBC 5Live host John Robins also took home the coveted award with his hour, The Darkness of Robins, but it was Hannah Gadsbys Nanette that sent shockwaves the world over. It was supposed to be her departure from comedy, but the award led to world tours and a highly praised Netflix special. Much stand-up is highly personal, but Nanette seemed to spark something new, criticising the world of comedy and discussing the very nature of art, as well as talking about her own experiences with homophobic and sexual violence. Off the back of its success, Gadsby is doing another show after all, named Douglas after her dog. Getty Images 2014: John Kearns Shtick John Kearns, a former House of Commons tour guide, is the first and only act to win the newcomer award (for Sight Gags for Perverts in 2013) and the main award the year later. His trademark look the wig and the teeth gets him laughs before he opens his mouth, but its not a character, as hes told many an interviewer before. The costume just lowers his inhibitions enough that he can communicate what he needs. His shows since namely Dont Worry, Theyre Here in 2017 and 2018 have shown his unique voice and poignancy. Rah Petherbridge 2013: Bridget Christie A Bic for Her The title of this show came from a real biro aimed at women, a pink pen designed to fit the ever-so-dainty female hand. It was the perfect jumping off point for Bridget Christie already a well established stand-up by this point to poke fun at all the pervading levels of misogyny (her point proven by some of the reviews that followed). While in previous shows, she had introduced feminism in a subtler way, dressed as an ant, this show saw her throw off any disguise and go full-tilt with routines about supposed feminist icons and human rights. Christie has been all over the telly since, and wrote a book off the back of this show: A Book for Her. Rich Hardcastle 2008: David ODoherty Lets Comedy David ODoherty was first nominated for the best newcomer award in 2000 for his debut, and won the main prize eight years later. Since that win, hes been returning each year with the same energy, whimsy and miniature keyboard skills. Even when the material is bleak and it does go there you have to laugh (which was the title of his 2018 show). When hes not selling out live venues, hes a regular face on the TV panel shows and lends his endlessly youthful humour to writing childrens books. 2002: Daniel Kitson Something Daniel Kitson is beloved by many. Hes often called a cult genius of comedy and is a favourite among others within the industry. But youll not have seen him on panel shows or Live at the Apollo, though lots would like to. He has managed to choose the level of fame he aspired to and stick to it, playing medium-sized venues to dedicated fans, and dipping in and out of theatre-making as well. His Edinburgh win in 2002, for his show Something, followed a nomination the previous year for Love, Innocence and the Word Cock, and hes been a hard worker since, performing stand-up and story shows around the world. 2001: Garth Marenghis Netherhead, with Richard Ayoade, Matthew Holness and Alice Lowe This Stephen King-esque spoof show starred Matthew Holness as a horror writer and master of the macabre Garth Marenghi (an anagram of argh nightmare). The show was co-written with Richard Ayoade and also starred Alice Lowe. After winning the Comedy Award in 2001, the show went on to become Garth Marenghis Darkplace on Channel 4. Of its stars, Ayoade is undoubtedly the most high-profile with The IT Crowd catapulting him to fame. Lowe has since written, directed and starred in Prevenge, a film about a pregnant woman who believes her unborn baby is willing her to kill people she was actually pregnant when filming. Holness stepped away from comedy for his recent film,, Possum, inspired by Jimmy Saville. 1995: Jenny Eclair Prozac and Tantrums Dedication pays off. Jenny Eclair was on her 13th trip to the Fringe when she won the award and turned the air blue with Prozac and Tantrums, becoming the first ever solo woman to do so. She co-created Grumpy Old Women, a conversational programme where women talked about irritations of modern life, which then spawned a popular live show. Eclair trained as an actor, and has appeared on the West End, most notably in The Vagina Monologues. She also has a number of novels under her belt too, as well as a one-woman play, Andy Warhol Syndrome. 1992: Steve Coogan In Character with John Thomson Alan Partridge may well be one of the most recognisable British comedy characters. The Norwich broadcaster was born created by Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci the year before this Edinburgh show, which catapulted him towards his famous Knowing Me, Knowing You on Radio 4 that same year. Alan Partridge was just one of many characters in his show with longtime collaborator John Thomson. Of course, Partridge lives on, but Coogan has taken on some other varied acting roles, including The Trip with Rob Brydon and Stan & Ollie with John C. Reilly. PA Archive/PA Images 1981: Cambridge Footlights (Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery, Emma Thompson, Penny Dwyer and Paul Shearer) The very first award went to the now famed Cambridge University theatrical club. Its alumni include the likes of Monty Python, Miriam Margolyes, Sue Perkins and Olivia Colman, but its the 1981 line-up that stands out: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Tony Slattery, Emma Thompson, Penny Dwyer and Paul Shearer. Between them, they can count some of the most popular films and TV series in their list of achievements, from Blackadder to Harry Potter. Fry and Laurie remains one of the last centurys most iconic double acts, while Thompson is writing and starring in films left, right and centre. Slattery returned to the Fringe this year with a new show about his life, packed with all his signature improv know-how. BBC She grew up in Houston and studied English and Theatre at Princeton. Her graduation speech is on YouTube and is more of a stand-up routine than a collegiate thank-you. Off duty, she is only a partially dialled-down version of her flamboyant performing incarnation. She credits her parents for her sense of humour. Theyre business people, but smart and funny. My dad is Jewish. My mom is Catholic. I went to Baptist school and Episcopal school. In some ways I liked the community, but I also found it to be damaging when it came to how they talked about women and their bodies and yeah, its kind of f****d up. So when she started performing Cohen went in the other direction, being positive, full-on and frank. Her break came when she and Koperski landed a residency at Alan Cummings intimate hangout, Club Cumming. Their standing-room only Cabernet Cabaret nights allowed Cohen to hone her improvisational style: Alan is the most generous man. They just trusted me with that basically. I feel like I became a pro at dealing with whatever the crowd was throwing at me by having that slot. Edinburgh 2019, however, was the ultimate rite of passage, doing a nightly show for nearly a month. I did 28 and I almost lost my mind, it was insane. It was the most challenging and most rewarding thing Ive ever done. I was floating through the festival. Some days I wouldnt stress about it and some days I was like I cannot do this today, but you learn how to get through it. By the end I was like, I can do anything. Onstage she is a social-media account made flesh, constantly unpacking her emotional baggage and wisecracking about modern masculinity: Sometimes the only way to know if a man is straight is if he Instagrams a building. She finds it easy to be open. I cant keep anything to myself. Its therapeutic to talk onstage. To be able to connect with an audience, its like, yeah, its a drug. Anyone who buys a ticket will certainly see the true Catherine Cohen. I can only write something if Im really feeling it. One time, I was trying to write a song about a breakup, but I hadnt gone through a breakup recently and I was like, this doesnt feel genuine. You know what I mean? Offstage she finds it easy to wind down, maybe because the transition from public to private is minimal. Being an exhibitionist is her natural state. Once I was dating this guy and I just finished a show and I was lying on my couch eating a bagel off my chest and he was like, Wow, when you relax you really relax. She is not the first woman to be outspoken, but she does it with a modern mix of absolute self-confidence and lacerating candour. Yeah, totally. I always joke that my friends mom one time was like, Catherine, shes so confident, in a way that implied maybe I shouldnt be. And I always think thats so funny. I think I was raised by very loving parents and they gave me the strength to love myself even though the world can make you feel like shit. Currently Cohen feels on top of that world. She is soon to appear in movie The Lovebirds, starring The Big Sicks Kumail Nanjiani, and has an eye on a film career. But the shine of winning Best Newcomer in Edinburgh has still not worn off. It truly felt so amazing. Every night I just worked my ass off and to have that at the end, it was like, f*** yeah, I did it. Whether she will return to the Fringe this year is another matter. To do it two years in a row you must have a death wish. But life is awesome right now. I just might. By Easton Sanders Feb. 19, 2020 | 02:35 PM | MARSHALL COUNTY Superintendent Trent Lovett spoke with West Kentucky Star about the future upgrades. He said all of their schools have a buzzer system at the door and security cameras, but four of them do not have secure vestibules yet. At their Monday meeting, the school board had planned on voting to approve the plans for the secure vestibules, but the architect working with the county didn't have the plans completed, so officials tabled the vote until their March meeting. Lovett says that although four of the schools do not currently have secure vestibules, there are no security concerns. He said, "They're all secure. You can't just go walk into any of our schools without pushing a buzzer, and they all have a camera and they can see who's trying to come in." After the eventual vote on the plans, Lovett says construction will begin this summer, as originally intended. Marshall County officials are working to increase the security at several of their schools. CEO Umais Abubaker says Cool Clouds had 'ceased all distribution' of Puff Bar Exploiting a loophole in the Food and Drug Administration's recent ban on flavored vaping products, a rash of shadowy companies have popped up marketing disposable e-cigarettes with exotic, fruity flavors. These disposable e-cigarettes are sold under brands like Puff Bar, Stig and Fogg in flavors such as pink lemonade, blueberry ice and tropical mango and the flavored vaping ban does not apply to them because they cannot be refilled, and are thrown away after the cartridge is empty. Appearing to skirt FDA regulations, such brands and cheaply available knock-offs manufactured in China often operate with unclear ownership and have no ties to formal trade associations. Among the most popular of these trendy disposable vapes is Puff Bar, a brand distributed by the shadowy company Cool Clouds Distribution Inc, which is headquartered in a shuttered storefront in Los Angeles' Skid Row. 'What's sketchy about this?' Cool Clouds COO Shahid Shaikh recently asked a Bloomberg reporter after clambering out of the seemingly vacant storefront under the half-open shutter. Puff Bars have exploded in popularity, exploiting a loophole in the FDA ban on flavored vapes. Because they are disposable, Puff Bars are exempt from the ban Puff Bars are distributed by Cool Clouds Distribution Inc, a shadowy company headquartered in this shuttered storefront in Los Angeles' Skid Row The explosion of brightly colored, fruity flavored disposable vapes follows the FDA's February 6 ban on refillable nicotine e-cigarettes with any flavor except for tobacco and menthol. The crackdown was intended to cut down on the epidemic of teenagers becoming hooked on nicotine vapes such as Juul. But it seems teens have been quick to switch to disposable vapes such as Puff Bar. 'They are very accessible and seem to be the new buzzy product,' said Dr. Karen Wilson, a tobacco researcher and pediatrician at Mount Sinais medical school in New York. The FDA confirmed that the flavor restriction don't apply to 'self-contained, disposable products,' but only to rechargeable ones that use pods or cartridges prefilled with a nicotine solution. The agency's rationale: Reusable vaping devices are far and away the most popular with underage users, preferred by more than 60% of high schoolers who vape, according to survey data collected last year. The explosion of brightly colored, fruity flavored disposable vapes follows the FDA's February 6 ban on refillable nicotine e-cigarettes with fruity flavors Teens have been flocking to Puff Bars in recent months, calling them 'the new Juul' The FDA's top tobacco regulator said it can still go after any vaping product that appeals to teenagers. 'If we see a product that is targeted to kids, we will take action,' Mitch Zeller, who heads the agency's tobacco center, said in a statement. Researchers who study e-cigarette trash around high schools say they have noticed a shift in what teens are vaping. Jeremiah Mock, of the University of California, San Francisco, has been finding discarded Puff Bars in local school parking lots over the last three months. Vape shop owners also say the market is changing. Mike Chang, owner of Master Piece Smoke Shop in New York City, says most of his customers who buy disposables switched from Juul after the company pulled its mint, mango and dessert flavors last fall. The company took that voluntary step under pressure from multiple federal investigations and lawsuits from state and local authorities. Menthol Juul cartridges are seen next to disposable flavored Puff Bars Puff Bar seemed to emerge from nowhere. Now, amid rising scrutiny, the CEO of Puff Bar distributor Cool Clouds says the company is halting sales to seek FDA approval. Days after a Bloomberg reporter visited the company's Skid Row headquarters, CEO Umais Abubaker, who goes by Max Baker, told the publication that Cool Clouds had 'ceased all distribution' of Puff Bar products in the U.S. The FDA began regulating vape products in 2016, and all new products introduced after that date have to file lengthy applications indicating how their products might help adult smokers, and whether they might attract kids. It appears that Puff Bar never went through the FDA approval process for new vape products. 'Cool Clouds looks forward to reintroducing the Puffbar in the United States after taking necessary measures,' Abubaker said. A senior German security official said a video posted online last week is being investigated, as it is thought to show the suspect. In it, a man addresses the camera in what he says is a message to Americans. Your country is under control of invisible secret societies, he says, warning about mind control and the mainstream media. He calls on U.S. citizens to fight now. Philly Jesus kicked out of cathedral, handcuffed and cited for trespassing Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A former heroin addict who dresses like Jesus Christ and preaches in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was kicked out of a Roman Catholic cathedral and cited for trespassing. Michael Grant, commonly known as Philly Jesus, was removed from an installation service for Archbishop Nelson Perez at the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul on Tuesday. Law enforcement removed Grant from the ceremony and he was eventually given a $25 citation for trespassing at the service and released from custody shortly after being detained. I said, Im a priest. He said, Youre not a Roman Catholic priest. Im a universal priest, Grant told NBC's affiliate in Philadelphia. I just kept standing my ground I brought up my religious rights, he added, explaining that police dragged me out like head first through the double doors. Grant said he considered the citation to be bogus and was planning to take legal action due to his belief that he was unjustly targeted. Its a disgrace how I was treated. I was extremely embarrassed. It was a horrible feeling, he continued. They were just hating on me. But Jesus said, Haters gonna hate. He said that in John chapter 15, verse 18. Jesus said, If the world hates you, remember it hated Me first. According to an entry on his website, at one time Grant was a satanic rocker who went by the stage name Opal Weaver. While undergoing rehab, he became a Christian. "JESUS came into my Life and brought me to my knees in tears of JOY ... and broke every chain of addiction in my life. ... He broke the chain of sin in my life ... ripping its veil completely," stated Philly Jesus. "The people of Philadelphia have coined me with the name Philly Jesus ... so I decided to run with it ... I have decided that I will be doing this Philly Jesus street ministry for the rest of my days on Earth to HONOR and GLORiFY ONE MAN." Grant has been known to go about Philadelphia with long hair, a beard, and wearing a robe, evangelizing and even occasionally baptizing people at the LOVE Park fountain. In September 2016, Grant was found guilty of trespassing at an Apple Store when he came in to charge his phone due to him bringing a large cross inside with him that was blocking an aisle. Following the 2016 verdict, Grant took to Facebook to forgive the prosecution, maintain his innocence, and express his intention to appeal the decision. "Mixed verdict for me Not guilty of disorderly conduct but was found guilty of defiant trespass .. but I forgive them for trespassing against me ... for they know not what they do ... I will appeal ... ALL iS WELL ... GOD iS GOOD NO MATTER WHAT..I'AM iNNOCENT IN JESUS CHRiST MiGHTY NAME," wrote Philly Jesus at the time. Philly Jesus was cited for trespassing during the installation of Archbishop Nelson Perez.https://t.co/Jy8HRKlsJCpic.twitter.com/8xPeMY7G4f The Philadelphia Inquirer (@PhillyInquirer) February 18, 2020 Sy Sperling, founder of Hair Club for Men who single-handedly launched a multi-billion dollar industry for balding men passed away Wednesday after battling a lengthy, undisclosed illness in Boca Raton, Florida. He was 78. Born in 1942, the New York businessman and philanthropist, known for his famous slogan, 'I'm not only the Hair Club president, but I'm also a client,' founded the hair company in 1976. He retired in 2000 after he sold Hair Club to a private equity firm for $45million. He spent summers in Vancouver and winters in Hillsboro Beach, Florida with his wife Susan. Hair Club for Men founder Sy Sperling passed away Wednesday in Boca Raton, Florida, at the age of 78 after battling a lengthy and undisclosed illness Sperling is survived by his wife, Susan (pictured), daughter Shari Sperling, son Andrew Sperling and sister, Rosalie Slute At 26 years old, Sperling was newly single and losing his hair. He felt self conscious about his receding hairline and thought it would ruin his chances of finding a woman. The New York businessman and philanthropist retired in 2000 after he sold Hair Club to a private equity firm for $45million After trying comb overs and toupees, he went as far as weaving human hair into his own only to find that it all came out when he took a shower. Sperling needed to find a more permanent solution that would stay in place during intimate moments. 'If you're dating and going to be having special moments, how do you explain, ''I got to take my hair off now?''' he asked. He finally learned the weaving technique from his stylist and quit his job in swimming pool sales to open his own salon in New York City in 1968 using $10,000 in capital from credit cards. He did find love with his new wife and they perfected the weaving technique using a nylon mesh fitted to the scalp. The first commercial for Hair Club for Men debuted on national television in 1982 and featured testimonials from customers. A second commercial was filmed featuring Sperling, where he said the famous line: 'I'm not just the president, I'm also a client.' It aired late at night, when commercial time was the cheapest, and swept the nation. Soon, the company got 10,000 calls a month and by 1991 there were 40 franchise locations. By 1993, the commercial was airing 400 times a day. It cost Sperling $12million annually in advertising but raked in up to $100million a year in sales. Sperling founded Hair Club for Men in 1976 and was known for his award-winning slogan, 'I'm not only the Hair Club president, but I'm also a client' At 26, Sperling was balding and single but he did find love and perfected the weaving technique using a nylon mesh fitted to the scalp and eventually started Hair Club for Men In 2000, he sold the company for $45million to a group of private investors who then sold it to Regis hair company for $210million in 2005. The Hair Club still offers similar solutions to Sperling's initial product, but has added topical treatments like Rogaine and transplantation surgery. Aside from the hair business, Sperling made countless public appearances ranging from lecturing about business and entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business, to appearances and interviews on national radio stations, newspapers, magazines and talk shows including The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. He also co-hosted Saturday Night Live and Wrestlemania. Sperling hosted his own radio show on WSBR in Boca Raton, Florida, called How To Succeed in Business and was a 1992 INC. Magazine Entrepreneur of the Year Award winner. Aside from the hair business, Sperling made countless public appearances ranging from lecturing about business and appearing at Wrestlemania X in 1994 Sperling co-hosted Saturday Night Live in 1994. He's pictured center with Lorne Michaels to his left and Kelsey Grammer to his right Sperling was most proud of his charitable contribution in the form of Hair Club for Kids, in which Hair Club for Men provided hair free of charge to children under 18 who lost their hair from chemotherapy. It was this program that changed the lives of thousands of children nationwide. He was also the honorary chairman for City Relief, an organization that provides Meals on Wheels for the homeless and sponsored other philanthropic causes. Sperling was a lover of animals, a devout vegan and was at the forefront of animal rights for decades. He is survived by his wife, Susan, daughter Shari Sperling, son Andrew Sperling and sister, Rosalie Slute. The space is important because its geared toward giving people opportunities to advance their education or career. The building was set up for public use. We want to maintain that. ... This is a space that shows that we care about the people who are living in the community," Gutierrez said. The City of Winnipeg's spring flood preparation wish list includes $200,000 worth of sandbags, and thousands more in emergency equipment that would be deployed in the case of a major event. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The City of Winnipeg's spring flood preparation wish list includes $200,000 worth of sandbags, and thousands more in emergency equipment that would be deployed in the case of a major event. The new batch of empty sandbags tops the city's recent funding request to the province, as its current stock nears the end of its working life. The Winnipeg public works department also hopes to purchase an emergency response trailer outfitted with hand tools, temporary dikes, a generator, and gas pumps, at a cost of $115,000. The department also plans to spend $150,000 on consultant and training fees, as it brings its flood-management system procedures up to the latest standards. City officials sent a request for provincial support valued at $640,000 to the recently-minted 2020 flood preparation program Thursday. The Manitoba government announced the one-time cash injection for municipalities last week, with the intent to bring programs online to mitigate financial losses and property damage caused by potential flooding this spring. To receive funding, municipalities must make the purchases before March 31. The City of Winnipeg is eligible for up to $500,000 in funding, while other municipalities can request up to $150,000. The province will be measuring asks against flood risk, efficacy of the programs, regional benefits and future resiliency. 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. Also on the city's list are portable cameras to monitor ice conditions and potential ice jams on waterways, ice measurement tools, lighting, generators, emergency operation centre equipment, water rescue equipment and a collection of floatation jackets (worth $34,000). The U.S. National Weather Service's latest spring flood outlook says there is a high risk of major flooding in North Dakota and Minnesota along the Red River in Fargo/Moorhead, Halstad, Grand Forks/East Grand Forks, Oslo, Drayton and Pembina. It also notes the risk for significant snowmelt flooding is substantial and above long-term historical averages. The Grand Forks, N.D., weather office is predicting significantly high flows at all main stem points to the Red River influenced by excess soil moisture and a high winter snowpack. Manitoba is expected to release its first spring flood outlook during the last week of February. A basins condition report issued by the province at the beginning of February noted precipitation levels in parts of the Red River and Souris River basin were 200 per cent above normal since Nov. 1, while much of Manitoba and Saskatchewan received below-normal precipitation. Soil moisture also ranges from well above normal in central and southern Manitoba, and in the U.S. portion of the Red River watershed levels are near-record highs. MIAMI Emma Afra had taken the short ferry ride from her home on the wealthy Fisher Island enclave countless times. But sources familiar with the investigation told the Miami Herald on Wednesday that they believe Afra forgot to put her Mercedes in park and hit the gas pedal by mistake when the vehicle started rolling. That working theory is based on what witnesses told Miami-Dade police: that the car accelerated suddenly through a lightweight barrier aboard the Pelican ferryboat and into Government Cut, just after the ferry departed from the island on Tuesday evening. The apparent freak accident claimed Afra, 63, and her passenger, 75-year-old Viviane Brahms, of Harrison, N.Y. Hours later, police divers found the car upside down 52 feet below the surface. It was a heart-wrenching scene: The two friends were discovered in an embrace in the back seat of the car, according to multiple sources. Afra's older sister, Mary Davis, was devastated by the tragedy. Her sister was a well-known South Florida philanthropist who worked to stop child abuse and human trafficking. "I can't handle this. It's so sad," Davis told the Miami Herald on Wednesday. "She's been a wonderful sister and great daughter to our mother." The bizarre incident is now casting scrutiny on safety measures aboard the Fisher Island ferry system, which for decades has moved dozens of cars and passengers safely back and forth between Miami Beach's MacArthur Causeway and an island that is home to a few hundred wealthy residents. The investigation is being spearheaded by the U.S. Coast Guard and Miami-Dade Police's homicide bureau. Around the world, between 2015 and 2019, at least 6,000 passengers have died or gone missing on ferry boats, according to a rough tally from the Worldwide Ferry Association. That includes a woman and her child who died when their car reversed off a ferry in the waters off Mombasa, Kenya. But most deaths happen overseas, where boating standards are less rigorous. The United States' passenger-vessel industry is generally considered safe, especially on ferries that regularly traverse the nation's waterways. "In the past 20 years, ferry fatalities are very few in the United States," said Roberta Weisbrod, the executive director of the New York-based Worldwide Ferry Association. "It's very rare in developed countries." Most U.S. ferry accidents involved collisions a Staten Island ferry infamously struck a dock in New York, killing 11 people in 2003. The Fisher Island ferry was involved in a fatal crash in 1997. A woman named Anne-Lynne Samole died when her family's boat collided with the Fisher Island ferryboat known as the Eagle. The ferry operator's insurance company later paid out $4.15 million in a settlement. The Fisher Island ferry system is one of the few in Florida and has operated, 24 hours a day, for decades largely with few incidents. The system, run by the Fisher Island Community Association, features three boats including the Pelican. From the mainland, they depart from a dock on the MacArthur Causeway near the Coast Guard station to the island that touts itself as "consistently ranked as one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the U.S." The Pelican is a 113-foot passenger vessel built in 1981. It had an active Coast Guard certification and was last inspected on Jan. 23, according to the Coast Guard. Inspection records show few problems with the vessel in October 2018, the Coast Guard noted that the boat owner had replaced a cracked propeller and bilge piping, and removed "dead-end" wire from the engine room. Seven months earlier, in March 2018, the Coast Guard inspected and cleared the vessel after it was involved in a collision. "Inspectors attended vessel and observed no significant damage to vessel's hull," the records show. The ferry ride is less than two miles, and usually lasts between eight and 12 minutes. Passengers ease their cars into one of four numbered lanes aboard the Pelican, entering the back of the boat to exit on the opposite side at docking. A sign reminds drivers, who wait in the car, to engage the parking brake as they wait inside their vehicles. The crew places blocks, known as chocks, under the tires to keep the vehicles from rolling. Although the chocks are not required by law, the Pelican's crew is believed to have been using them that day to secure the vehicles, including the Mercedes, said Coast Guard spokesman Jonathan Lally. Investigators believe the car may have just accelerated over the chocks. But the vessel was not equipped with any video recording system that would have captured the accident, sources said. Afra's 2019 Mercedes S560 was the lead car in the first lane its front just feet from a thin netting strung across the edge. Aerial footage of the boat after the incident shows the empty space where the Mercedes was, with the netting crumpled. Weisbroad, of the ferry association, said photos of the Pelican's barrier shows it was nothing more than a visual barrier to mark the edge of the vessel. "As opposed to something really effective, something that would hold back a roll," she said. As a contrast, she pointed to the tiny Balboa Island ferry in Newport, Calif., which has a heavy metal gate on each end to protect or slow cars from going over the edge. John Hickey, a Miami maritime lawyer who has ridden the Fisher Island ferry several times, said the safety measures are inadequate. "Other ferries that I've seen have large steel barriers which also form the ramp," said Hickey, who handles lawsuits involving maritime accidents. "The netting on the Fisher Island ferry is pretty insufficient. It's pretty flimsy. It's not going to hold anything back." Hickey said the crew members should have been knocking on windows, reminding motorists to put their cars in park and engage the parking brakes. "It's not a huge time commitment," Hickey said. "It's part of their job." The Fisher Island Community Association declined to answer specific questions about the incident and safety measures. "It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of the tragic loss of life of Emma Afra and Vivian Brahms who perished on Tuesday, Feb. 18, when the car they were riding on the ferry ended up in the water for reasons still to be determined," Roberto Sosa, president and CEO of the association, said on Wednesday. "The entire Fisher Island community mourns their loss and our hearts and prayers go out to their families and loved ones at this very difficult time. We continue to cooperate fully with the U.S. Coast Guard and other government agencies." The two dead women appeared to be longtime friends. Afra graduated from the University of Miami in May 1985 with an English degree. One of her passions was Kristi House, a nonprofit that advocates to end child abuse and child sex trafficking and also provides services to victims and their families. She became involved with the nonprofit in 2002 as a volunteer, helping to plan the nonprofits annual "Touch a Heart" gala dinner its primary fundraiser for more than a decade. In November 2012, she took on one of three co-chair roles for the fundraiser, which helped raise $500,000 for child victims of sexual abuse that year, according to the organization. "She was very charming, lighthearted, sweet, very lively," said Lauren Harrison, a former Kristi House board member and event chair. She co-chaired the fundraiser in 2012 with Afra. Harrison says Afra had a knack for securing high-end auction items for the fundraiser. Those items would help bring in thousands of donations every year to Kristi House. Afra and her husband Siavash "Sia" Afra, who died several years ago, always attended the gala sometimes bringing guests along and donated more than $50,000 to the nonprofit since 2002, said a Kristi House spokeswoman. "It's just awful; it's just tragic," Harrison said. "I have a heavy heart today. She will certainly be missed and all of the time and energy she put into Kristi House is remembered and appreciated." In December 2019, both women were photographed together by WorldRedEye.com at Glenn Ligon's art lecture in the Miami Design District. They were also photographed in September 2017 at a private opening and cocktail reception for a Minimalism and Beyond gallery at the Mnuchin Gallery in New York City by BFA. The New York Post reported that Brahms lived in an "exclusive Sterling Ridge neighborhood of Harrison." "It's a terrible tragedy," a woman who answered the door of the Brahms home told the New York Post. "I really can't say anything else right now." -- Tribune News Service A message in a bottle asking the finder to send a photograph has washed ashore after more than 80 years at sea. Nigel Hill was walking his dog Reggie on a beach in the Bel Royal area of Jersey when he stumbled upon the bottle and was surprised to find a message written on cardboard inside. The note, dated 5 September 1938, asks the finder to communicate with a man named John Stapleford in Hertfordshire and to send a photograph. It was handwritten on the back of an old cake box from Cawley Bros Ltd and placed in a Smiths bottle. The companies were both once based in Jersey, which has led people to believe the message originates from the island. Message in a bottle 'returns' to Jersey beach 82 years later Show all 4 1 /4 Message in a bottle 'returns' to Jersey beach 82 years later Message in a bottle 'returns' to Jersey beach 82 years later jersey bottle1 Nigel Hill with the message in a bottle he found while walking his dog on St Aubin's beach on the Channel Island of Jersey on 18 February, 2020. The note, dated 5 September 1938, asks the finder to communicate with a man named John Stapleford in Hertfordshire. Jersey Evening Post/SWNS Message in a bottle 'returns' to Jersey beach 82 years later jersey bottle3 Jersey Evening Post/SWNS Message in a bottle 'returns' to Jersey beach 82 years later jersey bottle4 Jersey Evening Post/SWNS Message in a bottle 'returns' to Jersey beach 82 years later jersey bottle2 Jersey Evening Post/SWNS Mr Hill, 55, said: I was just walking along and saw it and thought it looked interesting. Then I saw the note inside. Unfortunately, I had to break it to get the note out. The message read: Will the finder of this bottle please communicate with: John Stapleford, 18 Fitzjohn Avenue, Barnet, Herts, England. With a photograph. Mr Hill shared his find on Facebook and was soon able to track down the current resident living at the address. He said: I thought at first this might be a hoax but its definitely not. As is the way with Jersey, I had lots of people contact me to help and I have been able to track down the lady who currently lives in the property. She says she does not recall a John Stapleford and she has lived there for 30 years. But she has looked into the deeds of her home and found that a John Stapleford did buy the place in 1921. It would be really nice if I could give the bottle and the note back to members of his family. It could be an heirloom for them. Birth and death records show Mr Stapleton was born on 4 August 1889 and had worked as a civil servant as well as chief accountant with HM Customs and Excise. It is believed he had a wife called Nellie and that he died on 2 December 1980, aged 91. His address then was St George House, 11 London Road, Norfolk. Additional reporting by SWNS Iranian Government Spokesman Ali Rabiei said the government has established a Coronavirus Combat and Prevention Headquarters to counter the deadly virus, which has been recently spotted in the country, reports Mehr. By the order of the president, the Coronavirus Combat and Prevention Headquarter has been established in the Health Ministry, Rabiei said in a tweet on Thursday. The government will carefully implement every necessary measure to address the issue, he added. Rabiei also called for "more comprehensive action" and "cooperation from all citizens" to combat coronavirus in the country. The announcement comes after two patients were reported dead on Wednesday due to coronavirus infection in the central city of Qom. WASHINGTON -- Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) has complained to the Kazakh government that its refusal to accredit two of its journalists is the latest in a series of efforts over the last year to interfere with its operations inside the country. In a February 19 letter addressed to Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tleuberdi, RFE/RL President Jamie Fly called the decision to deny credentials arbitrary, and said it is just the most recent example of lawless behavior directed by your government toward our journalists, who work with RFE/RLs Kazakh Service, known locally as Radio Azattyq. One of the journalists, Sanat Urnaliyev, is an internationally recognized reporter who has worked with the Service since 2014. Among a litany of actions that have breached domestic law and Kazakhstans international commitments, Fly pointed to a decision by the ministry last June to deny credentials to seven reporters with its Current Time network and Kyrgyz and Tajik Services one day before national polls to elect a successor to former President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who resigned in March last year. At the time, RFE/RL said the refusals directly interfered with RFE/RLs mission to inform people in Kazakhstan about an event of profound public interest. Fly told the minister that cases of harassment against Kazakh Service journalists in 2019 were sufficiently serious and numerous as to prompt RFE/RL to send a complaint in July to the office of newly elected President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev, the countrys prosecutor-general, and several other cabinet members. The letter documented physical assaults by provocateurs, and arbitrary detentions and interrogations by authorities. It also accused Kazakh police of a willful and repeated failure to act, even when journalists under assault appealed to officers nearby to stop the attackers many wearing masks or wielding umbrellas. The letter has gone unanswered. The Kazakh governments refusal to credential RFE/RL journalists comes as authorities in nearby Tajikistan use accreditation in an effort to control the companys operations there. Seven correspondents and staff with the Tajik Service have sought to renew their accreditations unsuccessfully for months, and in one case, two years; another 11 have been issued partial accreditations for 3- and 6-month periods, despite a requirement under local law that renewals be applied for on an annual basis. Fly concluded the February 19 letter by urging the foreign minister to credential RFE/RLs journalists promptly and uphold Kazakhstans international commitments, so that our journalists can report for the people of Kazakhstan unimpeded, in safety, and without fear. RFE/RLs Kazakh Service reports reliable news and information in both the Kazakh and Russian languages that state-controlled media is often unable or unwilling to provide, while serving as a platform for the free exchange of ideas. In 2019, the services azattyq.org website logged 27.8 million visits and 42.6 million page views. More than 764,000 people subscribe to its YouTube feed, and 413,000 follow its Instagram page. About RFE/RL RFE/RL relies on its networks of local reporters to provide accurate news and information to more than 37 million people in 26 languages and 22 countries where media freedom is restricted, or where a professional press has not fully developed. Its videos were viewed over 3.6 billion times on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram/IGTV in FY2019. RFE/RL is an editorially independent media company funded by a grant from the U.S. Congress through the U.S. Agency for Global Media. ---- FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Joanna Levison in Prague (levisonj@rferl.org, +420.221.122.080) Martins Zvaners in Washington (zvanersm@rferl.org, +1.202.457.6948) Pakistan's Attorney General Anwar Mansoor Khan on Thursday resigned after an uproar by the legal fraternity at his controversial remarks against judges of the Supreme Court. Khan reportedly used contemptuous words on Tuesday against some members of the full bench of the apex court which is hearing the case about proceeding to remove Justice Qazi Faez Essa, another judge of the top court. The court ordered to expunge Khan's remarks from the record. However, lawyers demanded his resignation. The government on Thursday submitted a response to the apex court regarding Khan's remarks, saying that the statements by Khan were unauthorised and without the knowledge of the federal government. Khan submitted his resignation to President Arif Alvi, saying he should be relieved of responsibilities immediately. "I note with profound regret that the Pakistan Bar Council, of which I am the Chairman, has demanded through its press release dated 19th of February 2020 that I resign forthwith from the Office of the Attorney General of Pakistan," he wrote in the resignation letter. "Accordingly, I hereby resign from the position of the Attorney General for Pakistan and request to accept it with immediate effect," he wrote. Pakistan Bar Council vice-chairman Abid Saqi asked Khan to submit an unconditional written apology along with his resignation for his "unbecoming conduct" and announced to file contempt of court petition against the attorney general and the law minister. Khan was appointed as attorney general on August 31, 2018. He also served in the army. He joined the Pakistan army in 1971 and fought against India in the 1971 war and was made a prisoner. He was set free along with other prisoners but resigned in 1973 on return. Later, he joined the legal profession and was appointed judge of the Sindh High Court in October 2000, but resigned from the position on October 3, 2001 to practice law. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) American constitutional government will die unless great spiritual awakening occurs, scholar says Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Without a religious awakening, the American system of government will not last much longer, according to a renowned political scientist who is not a Christian. In an interview with Canadian podcaster and pro-life activist Jonathan Van Maren, Charles Murray, a political scientist and author of Coming Apart an analysis of the widening economic and social disparities in the United States in the last half-century said he believed that U.S. constitutional government is "dead as a doornail." Absent large-scale spiritual renewal, the U.S. might only exist for a few more decades, he said. Murray holds the F. A. Hayek Emeritus Chair in Cultural Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank in Washington, D.C. The political scientist believes that even those who call themselves conservative now believe things that the American Founders would find scandalous. At present, what is happening in the U.S. is undergoing a preview of what a "post-America" may be, he said. You cannot have a free society, a society that allows lots of individual autonomy without some outside force that leads people to control the self, Murray explained. The U.S. today is just another powerful, rich nation and the "American way of life" is now meaningless, he said. What was at the very core of the American founding the character of the American people was what in the eyes the founders made the experiment possible. Murray went to on to say that it would be great if what used to be called a "religious great awakening" would happen again and inspire substantial changes in behavior in the population, particularly if a new upper class joins in the revival of Judeo-Christian traditions. Yet the scholar is not holding out hope that such a thing will happen in the U.S. or in Europe, which is on course to die out culturally. However, he said, neither can ongoing secularization endure. I cannot believe that the secularization of society is going to continue indefinitely. We have never had an advanced culture, in the history of the world, that is nearly as secular as contemporary Europe. And I would say that is the test case, he said. He added that Americans ought to return to small towns and live "the traditional American way of life" and be active in their communities. In addition to Coming Apart, Murray is perhaps best known for his scholarship in a 1994 book he co-authored titled, The Bell Curve. His newest book, which was just released, is Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class. In 2017, Murray garnered national headlines after he was shouted down and prohibited from speaking by an angry mob of students at Middlebury College, an elite liberal arts college in Vermont. The professor who had invited him, Allison Stanger, was physically assaulted and ended up in a neck brace following the attack. The protests were in part because leftist students considered The Bell Curve to be "white supremacist" because of the way he discusses racial differences in intelligence and the implications of those differences. As was widely reported at the time, the students who protested his speech chanted: "Racist, sexist, anti-gay, Charles Murray, go away" and "Your message is hatred, we cannot tolerate it." The state has leveled fines against two Gary pizza establishments for failing to report their delivery drivers had been slain in robberies on the job last year. (Newser) The bodies of two longtime friends were found embracing in the back seat of a car that sank Tuesday after plunging off a Miami Beach ferryboat in what's being described as a freak accident. Emma Afra, 63, had driven her Mercedes-Benz to the front of the first of four car lanes on the 113-foot Pelican ferryboat for the 2-mile journey to Miami Beach from Fisher Island, where she lived, reports the Miami Herald. Just as the ferry was departing around 5pm, and for reasons still under investigation, the car drove out of the lane and through a thin barrier marking the spot where cars would exit onto land. A devastating scene was discovered hours later. Afra and her passenger, Viviane Brahms, 75, of Harrison, NY, were found embracing in the back seat of the car, which came to rest upside down some 50 feet below the surface of the channel known as Government Cut. story continues below The ferry was reportedly not equipped with a video recording system. But authorities believe Afra, a well-known philanthropist, may have forgotten to put her vehicle in "park" and mistakenly hit the gas pedal. She's thought to have driven over chocks used by the crew to keep cars from rolling, according to investigators. Footage of the scene showed a vacant parking spot at the front of the boat behind what the Washington Post describes as a "blue tarp" barrier that had been torn down. The Herald notes a sign aboard the Pelican "reminds drivers to engage the parking brake." Roberto Sosa, president of the Fisher Island Community Association, mourned "the tragic loss of life" in a Wednesday statement. "It's a jarring tragedy," Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber adds, per CBS Miami. "I think the whole community is very shocked." (Read more ferry accident stories.) Niger continues to face simultaneous emergencies that are stretching the capacities of humanitarian partners to respond adequately. The situation is exacerbated by instability in the region, including in neighboring countries, resulting in an influx of thousands of refugees, returnees, internally displaced persons and migrants, all needing access to basic social services and protection for survival. "In a context of constrained resources and limited social services, the communities that host displaced populations are showing extraordinary resilience and sharing the little they have. This truly is a great example that Nigeriens are showing to world," said Dr. Felicite Tchibindat, UNICEF Representative in Niger, following a visit in the conflict-affected region of Diffa, alongside national and international partners. "As more attention is now paid to the resurgence of armed violence in the central Sahel, it is equally important to pay the same attention to its impact on children and their families," she continued. Insecurity has exacerbated the chronic challenges already facing children in Niger. Attacks against civilians in the Lake Chad region prevented 263,000 people in Diffa from returning to their homes. Growing insecurity along the borders with Burkina Faso and Mali has increased needs in Tillaberi and Tahoua regions, where nearly 78,000 people have been displaced. Deteriorating security on the border with Nigeria has also resulted in the movement of tens of thousands of people who have sought refuge in border villages of the Maradi region, in central Niger. "Insecurity is spreading at a rapid pace in the central Sahel region. Women and children are bearing the brunt of the violence. In already fragile host communities, the burden of forced displacement increases the vulnerability of children and communities and significantly affects their health, protection, nutrition and education," said Dr. Tchibindat. The sharp increase in insecurity, violence and military operations has also hampered humanitarian actors' access to populations affected by conflict. "Reaching those in need is increasingly challenging. UNICEF calls on all stakeholders to respect humanitarian spaces allowing safe and sustainable access to deliver humanitarian assistance to affected populations, including women and children, wherever they are, Tchibindat said. UNICEF is appealing for solidarity to help the Government of Niger and its partners meet the urgent needs of the affected populations and provide vital assistance to improve their living conditions in the affected areas. In Niger, UNICEF is working on several priority fronts to respond to the immediate needs of people affected by emergencies and conflicts. UNICEF works with national actors and humanitarian partners to respond to acute emergencies such as new population movements, and to increase national capacities to mitigate risks and respond to cyclical and chronic emergencies, including flooding, malnutrition, disease outbreaks and epidemics. In Niger, UNICEF and its partners will need US $ 59.4 million to deliver vital humanitarian aid to children in 2020./. 1. Yes. The downtown area needs a good draw. Some quality taverns would be a plus. 2. Yes. Too many storefronts are vacant. Bars could help to bring in needed revenue. 3. No. Putting a number of bars downtown is just asking for trouble. Dont change things. 4.No. Several churches have located downtown. Putting bars close by would be a bad fit. 5. Unsure. It would depend on how the law is written and what standards are enacted. Vote View Results The Bachelor's Peter Weber is continuing to fuel rumors of a romance with show producer Julie LaPlaca. The dapper pilot, 28, and behind-the-scenes pro definitely seemed to be enjoying each other's company while seen at The Stonehaus winery in Westlake Village, California on Wednesday afternoon in new video obtained by Page Six. Appearing to signal things were quite serious, Peter and Julie were joined by his mom, Barbara Weber. Final rose? Bachelor Peter Weber seemed to fuel rumors that he is dating show producer Julie LaPlaca as the pair were seen enjoying a day at the winery with his mom Barbara on Wednesday Everyone seemed to be getting along during the outing. Peter, Julie and mom looked at ease as they chatted and laughed while sipping wine at a picnic table. There was even a bit of dancing. This isn't the first time the producer has spent time with the Weber family. Julie joined Peter and his family for an Italian feast ahead of celebrating the new year in Times Square together. Barbara also seemed quite invested in her son's love life in a trailer for this season where she was seen crying and telling her son: 'Dont let her go bring her home to us.' Chemistry: The supposed pair are seen in a December Instagram above Inner circle: This isn't the first time the producer has spent time with the Weber family. Julie joined Peter and his family for an Italian feast ahead of celebrating the new year together Start of the saga: Julie and Peter are seen together on the opening night of the reality show above Rumors that Peter found a different type of on-set love emerged earlier this month, first prompted by the pair's New Year's Eve together. Fans speculated that Weber got hot and heavy with LaPalca after she posted a New Year's Eve photo with him standing in the background. Former Bachelorette contestant Hannah Brown then commented that she 'approved' of the content, leading Bachelor Nation to believe she had given the sign of approval on LaPalca's new relationship. Later, some since-expired Instagram story posts from the evening were unearthed. Celebrate: Former Bachelorette contestant Hannah Brown commented that she 'approved' of the content, leading Bachelor Nation to believe she had given the sign of approval on LaPalca's new relationship; Weber seen standing in the background in a brown coat Sneaky: Later, some since-expired Instagram story posts from the evening were unearthed Friends! Julie and Hannah Brown became friends after she served as a producer on The Bachelorette Host Chris Harrison kept coy about any potential romance when approached by TMZ outside of LAX airport on Tuesday, telling the site: 'Far be from me to get in the middle of a good rumor.' Harrison only had wonderful things to say about Julie, going on to say: '[She] is an amazingly talented producer. Shes a smart, talented woman, and a great producer.' He further egged on rumors by sharing an Instagram of the duo taken at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Peru during filming. 'Knowin nothin in life but to be legit New album cover came out great!' he joked in the caption. While Harrison was happy to tease his fans, ABC executives weren't quite ready to squash any questionable commentary, either. Rumor mill: Host Chris Harrison kept coy about any potential romance when approached by TMZ outside of LAX airport on Tuesday, telling the site: 'Far be from me to get in the middle of a good rumor' Squad: Chris further egged on the romance rumors by sharing an Instagram of the duo taken at Jorge Chavez International Airport in Peru during filming 'Well, I hate to get in the way of a good rumor, so Im not going to confirm or deny about whether he ends up with a producer,' the network's Senior Vice President of Alternative Series Rob Mills told ET. 'I dont know how wed ever top that though! 'But, it is crazy. What weve seen about the finale over the years is that the 'finale' is really on that night when the show goes live. 'Theres a lot of craziness, its a roller coaster, but I would say even now the roller coaster hasnt ended, and it wont end until after After the Final Rose.' Julie's IMDb shows that she began working on Bachelor in Paradise as a segment producer in 2014 before joining The Bachelorette in 2017. She's served as a producer on The Bachelor for more than 30 episodes, beginning in 2016 on Ben Higgins season. German police last night said eight people had been killed in shootings in the city of Hanau, near Frankfurt. A short police statement gave no information on the victims but said special forces were searching for the gunmen who fled the scene in a car. The reason for the shootings was not clear. Regional broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk reported that one attack took place in a hookah lounge in the centre of the city. It said witnesses reported hearing eight or nine shots and seeing at least one person lying on the ground. The perpetrators then apparently drove in a dark-coloured car to another part of the city, where shots were fired in another hookah lounge, the broadcaster said. SPRINGFIELD - City firefighters paid their annual tribute to the memory of Leonard Corbin, the first black firefighter, with a wreath service Thursday by his monument outside the Mason Square Fire Station. In a service attended by Mayor Domenic Sarno, Fire Commissioner Bernard J. Calvi, and several of Corbins family, speakers celebrated the life of Corbin as a civil rights pioneer in Springfield history. I knew Lenny well. He was a great and humble gentleman and firefighter, said Sarno. "He was a trailblazer the Jackie Robinson of our SFD. May God rest his soul and may his brave legacy of professionalism live on forever. When Corbin was hired as a firefighter in Springfield in 1969, he was only the second black firefighter statewide. He served 32 years until his retirement in 2001. Lenny Corbin was a true professional and exemplary firefighter, said Calvi. "I thought it was important to honor Lenny Corbin, who was the citys first African-American firefighter and opened the door for so many others to follow after him, said Commissioner Calvi. By the monument to Corbin outside the firehouse, officials placed a wreath and then sounded a traditional salute to his memory - four bells to signal an engine returning home, followed by eight bells to signal Engine Company 8, the Mason Square company that was his first assignment when he was hired in 1969. Haryana Vidhan Sabha on Thursday paid rich tributes to those prominent personalities, who expired between the period from the end of the previous session and the beginning of the current session. Chief Minister Manohar Lal paid tributes and read out the obituary resolutions. The members of House also observed silence to pay their homage to the departed souls. Haryana Vidhan Sabha Speaker Gian Chand Gupta and Leader of Opposition Bhupinder Singh Hooda also read out the obituary resolutions and paid tributes to the departed souls. Tributes were also paid to freedom fighters Chhotu Ram of village Dhor, district Jhajjar and seven martyrs of the State, who showed indomitable courage and made supreme sacrifice of their lives while safeguarding the unity and integrity of the motherland. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A new fire engine has arrived at the Marine City Area Fire Authority. Wed like to thank the authority board for their support in this process and the purchase of the engine, the Marine City Area Fire Authority posted on its Facebook page on Jan. 26. The engine cost about $380,000, Mayor Pro Tem Lisa Hendrick said at the Marine City Commissions Dec. 19 meeting. Which actually is a very, very good price for this engine, she said. She said that originally, the department was looking at another truck in another community that was $570,000. The departments previous engine was sold to a small fire department in Boyd, Minnesota. It was sent out Feb. 1. They have no engine at all, so they have smaller trucks, Hendrick said. So this is going to be like a big improvement for them. Emily Pauling, MediaNews Group New York, Feb 20 : Nazia Aibani, a New York-based Indian-American Muslim entreprenuer, has launched a special type of clarified butter called 'Holi Ghee' to add more taste to the Holi delicacies like 'matthis' and 'gujiyas', a media report said. Aibani, who originally belongs to Mumbai, owns Gourmet Ghee Company who she founded in 2017, Indica news said in the report on Wednesday. Asked about why she chose to come up with 'Holi Ghee', she said: "Holi Ghee is a specialty flavoured clarified butter we made to pay homage to my Indian roots. Also with the turmoil going on, I felt it was important to show the one thing Indians have in common which is a love for food." On the unique flavour and what does it taste like, the entrepreneur told Indica news: "This flavour was inspired by Holi, the festival of colours. We used rainbow-coloured crunchy sprinkles. This ghee is on the sweeter side with a rich spreadable taste and texture. "I wanted this ghee to appeal to kids especially, to get into the spirit of the holiday, and to use all year around not just for one particular day. The taste is very smooth with a soft crunch, it can be used as a spread or also in baking." Gourmet Ghee offers clarified butter in other different flavours including roasted garlic, Celtic sea salt and toasted almond. It sells for $14 to $18 for a 9-ounce jar. Latest updates on Holi Festival 2020 -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Six pilgrims from Nepal, including two women, were killed and 24 others injured in a road accident near Salem on Thursday, police said. The accident happened on the Salem-Bengaluru highway after a bus rammed the minibus the pilgrims were travelling in when its driver tried to swerve to the right near Omalur in the district, police said. Chief Minister K Palaniswami condoled the death of the six pilgrims and said the accident happened in the early hours of Thursday when they were proceeding to Rajasthan from Kaniyakumari. READ | 7 Minors Hurt In Chicago Shootings, Including 3 Accidents Speaking in the Tamil Nadu Assembly, he said that the accident happened around 1 AM. "Six Nepalis including two women travelling in the bus were killed," he said and expressed his condolences. The injured have been admitted to hospital, he said, adding he has directed the Salem Collector to ensure they received the best medical treatment. READ | Couple, Their Minor Daughter Killed In Road Accident In MP READ | Three Killed, Two Injured In Highway Accident In J-K Michael R. Bloomberg bobbed behind his lectern, as if the motion might deliver him somewhere more comfortable. He blinked, then blinked some more. He appeared unsteady for all the preparation his billions might buy him on questions of race and gender that could not have come as a surprise. Pressed about allegations of a hostile workplace at his company, Mr. Bloomberg wandered into a legalistic defense of nondisclosure agreements, adding that perhaps women didnt like a joke I told. Questioned on his longstanding support for stop-and-frisk policing, a signature policy of his mayoralty in New York, he professed himself embarrassed before suggesting others onstage also had plenty to apologize for. Remember, he said in one exchange, explaining why he had not yet released full tax documents. I only entered into this race 10 weeks ago. That much was clear. Until Wednesday, as Mr. Bloomberg spent heavily and campaigned atypically, bypassing the early-voting states to focus on delegate-rich contests in March and beyond, his candidacy had existed almost in parentheses: Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was the early front-runner. (But Mr. Bloomberg wanted his voters.) Senator Bernie Sanders won New Hampshire. (But would Mr. Bloombergs fortune bury him by the spring?) Janet McLaughlin raised the alarm about a porn film which was recorded at a public library in Santa Monica: CBS Los Angeles A porn film shot at a public library during opening hours has provoked outrage from residents in California, according to local reports. The video, which showed a woman exposing herself and carrying out sex acts, was filmed at a library in Santa Monica, Los Angeles, while members of the public were inside the building. Resident Janet McLaughlin said she was sent the video by a concerned parent and used social media to alert the city to the incident. God forbid, a child walked in the library and walked right in on the middle of it. Thats my biggest concern, Ms McLaughlin told CBS Los Angeles. Children dont need to be exposed to this. If you want to do porn, stick to the hotels. The video has since been removed from the pornography website where it was uploaded. Although the man in the video could not be identified, the woman is said to have appeared in other adult films. City officials have described the incident as deeply disturbing. Lewd acts in the public library are a violation of library rules and against the law, a spokesperson said in a statement. Staff did not have knowledge of the incident when it took place. "The Santa Monica Police Department is investigating." A post about the video on the Instagram page Santa Monica Problems said an earlier investigation into the incident determined that no library employees had been involved in the video. Luis Carrillo, a Los Angeles lawyer, told NBC Los Angeles there could be serious legal consequences for the two people involved in the film, if they were found guilty of performing and recording lewd activities in a public space. If a person is found to have committed that crime, the punishment may include, apart from jail, registering as a sex offender, Mr Carrillo said. Read more Women 'tricked into doing porn' given $12m by judge in California (Bloomberg Opinion) -- Behind the headlines about Brexit, a counter-revolution has quietly occurred in Britain in recent years. Its reverberations seemed certain to reach beyond the English Channel when last week the guillotine unexpectedly came down on Sajid Javid, the Chancellor of the British Exchequer. Javid, a devotee of the libertarian philosopher Ayn Rand and alumnus of Deutsche Bank, was edged out of Boris Johnsons cabinet largely because he seemed too much a foot soldier of the ideological revolution that occurred in the 1980s in, first, Britain, and then, the United States. In that upheaval, the hyper-individualist free-marketeering of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan became dominant across the West. Thatcher aimed to roll back the frontiers of the state. Her ideological kin Ronald Reagan claimed that government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem. In this view, the primary, if not the only, legitimate economic role of the government is to guarantee price stability rather than to intervene repeatedly to stem inequality and protect the weakest members of the population. Today, however, many citizens buffeted by global economic headwinds have come to see government yet again as a necessary player in the national economy. Javid is actually the latest casualty of the counter-revolutionary urge to overthrow obsolete pieties. The much bigger victims have been left-leaning parties across Europe, such as the Labour Party, the creator of Britains welfare state. Rebranded as New Labour under Tony Blair, it embraced Thatcherism to the point where Thatcher identified Blair as her heir. During its 13 years in power, New Labour pushed through Thatcher-style deregulation and privatization, often disguising it through public-private partnerships. Failing to check de-industrialization, or rising social inequality, New Labour started to lose the partys traditional working-class base in the manufacturing and mining districts of North England. Story continues Claiming to be Blairs true heir, the Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, together with his Chancellor of Exchequer George Osborne, more aggressively advanced policies of austerity that further shrunk the remnants of the welfare state. The eventual outcome of Thatcherism on steroids was Brexit: a furious rejection by Britains working class of a long ideological status quo that seemed to benefit only a rich metropolitan minority. An early beneficiary of the anti-establishment mood was Jeremy Corbyn, who, in elections held one year after the Brexit referendum, dramatically increased his partys vote share. Corbyn belonged to the marginalized left wing of the Labour Party, which had always seen the European Union (EU) as an enforcer of free-market fundamentalism, drastically constraining the British states ability to intervene in the economy. Accepting that Brexit had to get done, Corbyn offered in his popular election manifesto of 2017 a bonanza of spending promises. The manifesto was pathbreaking not only because it broke with the Thatcherite orthodoxy of non-intervention that for decades had prevailed inside the Labour Party. It was extraordinary also because the Conservative party, traditionally representatives of big business and the landed aristocracy, rushed to imitate Corbyns rhetoric, and to disown Thatcherism, claiming in own manifesto that we do not believe in untrammeled free markets and that we reject the cult of selfish individualism. She has even adopted, the Economist complained of the then-British Prime Minister Theresa May, Labours Marxist policy of energy-price caps. In last years elections, the Conservative Party under Johnson competed even more fiercely with Labour to offer spending plans (much to the despair of orthodox economists and balanced-budget diehards). Johnson carefully distanced himself from his posh Tory pals, such pro-EU architects of austerity as Cameron and Osborne. He promised to use Brexit to re-engineer British laws in favor of British people. He even abandoned an earlier promise to cut corporation tax from 19% to 17%. Johnson, closely identified all his life with Tory free-marketeers, was responding to an altered public mood. According to a recent British Social Attitudes survey, 60 percent support more government spending. As it turned out, Johnsons gamble succeeded. While the London-based leadership of the Labour party strove futilely for a second referendum on Brexit, many of its lifelong voters in the Northern England lent their support to a party that seemed more capable of extracting Britain from the EU and turning on the spending taps. Johnson is moving fast to please his new and potentially fickle constituency, nationalizing Northern Rail and increasing public spending. Sajid Javid, with his tattered copy of The Fountainhead, clearly stood in his bosss (and neighbors) way, insisting that Britain should run a balanced budget by 2023. Javids replacement, Rishi Sunak, a hurriedly promoted Johnson loyalist, has no such constricting goal. As a political insider told the Financial Times about the new occupants of Downing Street: It wasnt a question of what they wanted to spend more money on; it was more a question of whether there was anything they didnt want to spend more money on. Johnson is, of course, an opportunist; and his actual ability to spend, already limited, may shrink even more by the time Brexit gets done. Moreover, he has barely started on his impossible task: triangulating the clashing demands of rich Tory grandees and North Englands immiserated working class. Nevertheless, the political alignments and re-alignments of the last three decades are now in plain sight. During the ideological hegemony of Reagan and Thatcher, left-leaning parties with electoral bases among working classes moved right or, to the center, in their preferred euphemism. One unexpected outcome of this shift is that, today, they appear complicit in extensive social and economic breakdown. Worse: Their founding ideas about beneficent government, which they have steadily discarded since the 1980s, are being stolen by carpetbaggers and the far-right. Indeed, Boris Johnsons success in the UK could be paralleled by Marine Le Pen in France. Presidential elections are due in two years, and Le Pen, pitted against a weakened Emmanuel Macron (hailed early and fatefully in his tenure as the French Blair) is surging on the back of her promise to deepen the activist role of the state in the national economy. France may witness in 2022 what has already occurred in Britain: a counter-revolution that sends both free-marketeers and self-proclaimed centrists to the guillotine. To contact the author of this story: Pankaj Mishra at pmishra24@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners. Pankaj Mishra is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His books include Age of Anger: A History of the Present, From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia, and Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinion Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source. 2020 Bloomberg L.P. Watch the latest videos from Yahoo Finance UK A British tourist claims she was sexually assaulted by a bell boy at a TUI hotel on a birthday getaway to Cape Verde. Megan Holmes, 26, was staying at the five-star Hotel Riu Touareg in Boa Vista when she claims a bell boy knocked at her door. She had just come back from the pool and was alone in her room because her mother had fallen ill with pneumonia and was being treated at a nearby hospital. The support worker, from the Scottish Borders, then claims the member of staff pushed his way into the room before kissing her and groping her bottom during the 2,000 holiday in September last year. Megan Holmes, 26, is pictured in her hotel room at the Hotel Riu Touareg in Boa Vista, Cape Verde before she claims she was sexually assaulted by a bell boy She told The Sun: 'I had just come back from a swim in the pool and was wrapped in a big towel in my room and was waiting for dinner.' The 26-year-old claims the bell boy stopped by her room with the pretense of delivering a message about an activity she had booked. She says he offered her a card put tried to 'play games with her' by pulling it away before she could grab it. He allegedly asked if she had drunk any of the birthday champagne he delivered to her earlier. When she said no, he is said to have poured her a glass and asked her to drink with him. The support worker, from the Scottish Borders, claims the member of staff pushed his way into the room before kissing her and groping her bottom during the 2,000 TUI holiday in September last year She obliged, in a bid to hurry him along, but when she told him to leave, she claims he kissed her on the neck and touched her bottom. Miss Holmes told the newspaper: 'He squeezed my bum and was saying how nice it was and that I should show it off.' She reported the incident to staff and police, but claims to have heard nothing back. However as the whole conversation with the authorities had to be translated into Creole, the local language, she does not know how well her statement was conveyed. She added: 'I've been trying to forget about it but it was awful. Now I'm worried he's still working there, and it could happen again to somebody else'. A TUI spokesman told MailOnline: 'We were very concerned to hear of Ms Holmes' experience in Cape Verde. 'We contacted her as soon as we became aware, and continue to support her while we investigate this further with the hotel.' Pictured: Inside Hotel Riu Touareg in Boa Vista, Cape Verde, where Miss Holmes was staying Goldman Sachs had plenty of chances to make an offer for discount brokerage E-Trade before rival Morgan Stanley made its $13 billion move, but the bank didn't throw its hat in the ring, according to people with knowledge of the situation. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman acted as his bank's deal-maker-in-chief when he approached E-Trade in December with an offer, according to the people. With him was CFO Jon Pruzan, who had spent the bulk of his investment banking career advising financial institutions on just such types of transactions. Conditions were ripe for a takeover: TD Ameritrade, long seen as the likely buyer of E-Trade, had just consented to another corporate marriage: It was being bought by industry leader Charles Schwab for about $26 billion in stock. Amid the backdrop of collapsing fees for retail stock trades that pressured E-Trade and its competitors, the timing of Gorman's bid was perfect, the people said. E-Trade's availability was "no secret" to anyone in the industry, according to one of the people. Media reports and analysts speculated that Goldman or possibly Morgan Stanley could purchase E-Trade. But by the time Gorman's initial offer came in, E-Trade's board of directors were well versed in who would be a viable partner. So when E-Trade engaged its bankers from JPMorgan Chase on the offer, the mandate wasn't to run an open process to examine every possible suitor, according to the people. Goldman "had the opportunity to express their interest and they didn't," said one of the people with knowledge of the matter. Goldman had examined the possibility of a deal internally and decided against it, said another person. One reason: The bank's own direct-to-consumer play, Marcus, had already gathered more than $50 billion in consumer deposits, the cheap funding source that Morgan Stanley would be getting in the E-Trade takeover. 'Eagle' and 'Moon' The directive was to run a speedy process to protect against word getting out "information leakage," in Wall Street-speak. After the seller persuaded Morgan Stanley to increase its all-stock offer at least twice, the broker's board finally became comfortable with the valuation. During talks, Morgan Stanley referred to E-Trade with the code name "Eagle," according to the people. It referred to itself as "Moon." In other words, this was Morgan Stanley's moonshot -- a transformative deal that management likened to the first manned landing on the moon. He thanked the police for their professionalism. Over 10 police officers have been badly injured amid clashes with local residents in the town of Novi Sanzhary, Poltava region, who were protesting against the arrival of evacuees from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak. "Disappointment in people, in that moral system. It's a shame before the whole world! People [the evacuees] spent 22 hours on their way [home] and got such a reception... Let everyone think about it," he told journalists during a briefing in Novi Sanzhary on Thursday, February 20, after those who were evacuated from China had been accommodated in a local health center. Read alsoEvacuees from China arriving in Novi Sanzhary, police dispersing protesters to unblock roads (Live stream) "Then drunk people [those who took part in the protest] tried to misuse the notion of patriotism. People don't think much about social values. I am ashamed of many things that have happened today. They may say that the authorities are bad, they may not trust the authorities, but people must always remain humans deep down in their heart," he said. He thanked the police for their professionalism and called the events in Novi Sanzhary one of the biggest disappointments in his life. As UNIAN reported, chartered flight PQ 7302 with Ukrainian citizens and foreigners evacuated from China landed at Kharkiv Airport on February 20. Then the evacuees were bussed to the National Guard's medical center in Novi Sanzhary. Ukraine's Health Ministry reported there were 45 Ukrainians, 27 foreigners and crew members, including three doctors, on board the plane. They all will be placed under 14-day observation with a strict biosecurity regime. Shah and Agarwal, who now live in Puerto Rico and Texas, respectively, appeared in court Thursday morning for a hearing regarding the frozen funds. Judge Thomas Durkin declined to rule on the issue. He said if he did decide to keep the $10.3 million frozen, he would give Shah and Agarwal time to discuss whether they want to find new attorneys. G5 Enquire Summit 2020 Silver Sponsor "G5 is proud to return to Enquire Summit as a Silver Sponsor," Jamison Gosselin, Vice President of Senior Living Strategy, G5. Enquire, a leading provider of cloud CRM, marketing automation and sales contact center solutions for senior living and post-acute care, is proud to announce G5 as a Silver Sponsor of Enquire Summit 2020, scheduled for April 20 - 22, 2020 in Denver, CO. G5 is proud to return to Enquire Summit as a Silver Sponsor. This event truly empowers sales and marketing professionals in the senior living and post-acute care industries with the resources, tools and technology they need to be more efficient and drive performance, stated Jamison Gosselin, Vice President of Senior Living Strategy, G5. Enquire Summit is an experience where ambitious sales and marketing professionals can discover, learn and shape the future together. It is three days of best practice sessions, hands-on workshops and interactive training to help attendees build, grow and monetize their sales and marketing processes and technology. With dynamic curriculum providing educational takeaways, it is the only event that truly reflects the innovative, strategic and tactical job of sales and marketing professionals in senior living and post-acute care. Key-insights will be provided by industry experts on topics including: Advanced Strategies for Senior Living and Post-Acute Leadership Relationship Management and Creating Effective Sales Plans Enquire CRM Best Practices (Revenue Attribution, Targeting Referral Sources and Effective Follow-Up) Marketing Automation Strategy How to Reduce Paid Referrals Data and Analytics Training Jamison will lead a session on The Trials and Tribulations of the Modern Day Marketer: How to Get Your Data to Work For You on Tuesday, April 21 from 2:15-3 p.m. Full agenda including registration and hotel details are available here: https://www.enquiresummit.com/ ABOUT G5 As the leader in real estate marketing optimization, G5 is a predictive marketing SaaS company that uses AI and other emerging technologies to help marketers turn marketing into move-ins. More than 8,000 properties throughout the US and Canada leverage the power of G5 technologies to increase occupancy and NOI. Media Contact: Natalie Dent, G5, Natalie.Dent@getg5.com ABOUT ENQUIRE Enquire is the premier CRM, marketing automation and contact center solution provider in senior living and post-acute care. Headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Enquire serves senior living communities and healthcare facilities throughout the United States and Canada. Enquires vision is to improve the experience for prospects and family members through customer service centric products paired with cutting-edge technology and analytics. Media Contact: Joshua Darnell, Enquire, Joshua.Darnell@enquiresolutions.com Trent Davies, international business advisory manager from consultancy firm Dezan Shira & Associates The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has had negative impacts on the Vietnamese economy. The key difficulties that have arisen are supply chain disruptions, labour shortages, and changes to consumer behaviour. Businesses in many industries have begun to face initial pressure in the first quarter. We expect this to continue over the next quarter, if not for longer. The Vietnamese tourism industry will be hit particularly hard as China is the largest market for outbound travel in the country, accounting for one-third of international visits to Vietnam. Tourism operators such as Vietravel, Saigontourist, and Hana Travel have recorded significant loss of revenue due to trip cancellations and travel restrictions. In particular, Vietnams coastal tourist destinations like Nha Trang will be affected significantly as Chinese tourists account for more than 70 per cent of foreign visitors to the province, according to Khanh Hoa Department of Tourism. Many hotels have also received a significant number of cancellation requests recently from all segments including tourist groups, business, and independent travelers. Furthermore, hotel and resort projects under construction by large investment funds and developers are also being put on hold, as many Chinese laborers are not permitted to re-enter Vietnam. The cash burn rates on these projects will hurt investors the longer the situation continues. Impact on manufacturing In the Vietnamese industrial sector, major concerns are disruptions to supply chains caused by labour shortages in China. These labour shortages are being caused due to the extension of the Lunar New Year holiday, travel restrictions, and city lockdowns. If the factories stop production for an extended period, it will heavily impact supply chains and the flow of materials. In fact, the disruption to Chinas operations has already impacted businesses ability to obtain goods and materials throughout the ASEAN. Vietnamese businesses will not be an exception. If your Vietnamese business is sourcing from China, we strongly recommend frank discussions with your suppliers over the situation. Factories in China are expected to start opening again this week although there are regional variations across the country. However, regional travel restrictions still in place mean that some employees will not be able to return immediately. If you are unsure about the situation in China and what your Chinese supplier can deliver, the best solution is to contact a consultancy who can help liaise with our Chinese colleagues to get you the latest updates on factory re-openings. Now is an ideal time to conduct a health check on your business to assess potential risks and impacts. If you do not have business continuity plans already in place or updated, it is very important that you consider any potential changes in the current situation and be prepared in the event the situation worsens. In terms of human resources, it is important for investors in Vietnam to be prepared should the outbreak worsen. This includes having a thorough understanding of employee and employer rights and being prepared to be understaffed. The immediate impact will be the possibility of staff being unable to return to work or choosing to work from home. In Vietnam, given the school closures, employers need to be much more flexible for staff with children. Companies can help to prevent the spread of the disease by promoting hygienic information, such as the regular washing of hands, and the disabling of machinery such as fingerprint scanners at this time. Impact on FDI Last year, foreign direct investment (FDI) pledges to Vietnam surpassed $38 billion, marking a decade high and an on-year increase of 7.2 per cent. The disbursement of FDI increased 7 per cent to $20.38 billion, according to Vietnams Ministry of Planning and Investment. In January 2020, Vietnams FDI pledges, including newly-registered, newly-added, and stake acquisition reached $5.3 billion, representing a remarkable 179.5 per cent on-year increase. FDI disbursement saw an increase of 3.2 per cent from a year earlier, recording $1.6 billion in capital. The statistics imply very positive signs to Vietnams FDI in 2020. However, as China, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan are facing serious issues related to COVID-19, it seems likely that FDI into Vietnam may be delayed during this period. While it may be delayed, it is unlikely to be scrapped. In our assessment given Vietnams continued development as a promising investment destination, once the virus is under control, we will continue to see strong growth in FDI. We recommend investors remain cautious and informed. During this period many necessary steps for investment can be handled from businesses such as ours, who remain on the ground. ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A former police dispatcher in a small Alaska town filed a lawsuit Thursday, alleging her colleagues in the Nome Police Department didnt investigate after she filed a rape report. Clarice Hardys lawsuit claims the inaction was part of the citys systemic and ongoing failure to protect Alaska Native woman from sexual abuse and assault. The Associated Press does not normally name alleged victims of sexual assault but Hardy has repeatedly spoken in public about her experience. The lawsuit filed in federal court on behalf of Hardy by the ACLU seeks unspecified monetary damages and a jury trial in Nome. It came after complaints by Alaska Native women were investigated by The Associated Press, the Anchorage Daily News and other media outlets. The six counts in the lawsuit includes a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Last year, the ACLU sent a demand letter, seeking $500,000 on Hardys behalf if the city was willing to settle out of court. Those claims were essentially ignored, much like Miss Hardys have, and the city refused to negotiate with us, Stephen Koteff, ACLUs legal director in Alaska, told reporters. The lawsuit also seeks an injunction to force the City of Nome to cease any discriminatory practices and ensure all sexual assault reports are investigated thoroughly. It also seeks punitive damages from the city and separately from two former police officers. Hardy said she no longer felt safe in Nome and moved to her home village, Shaktoolik, where she said girls and men tell her similar stories of abuse. It reminds me that no matter how bad my trauma is, or how real my depression, is that I have a voice for a reason, she said, holding back tears. I cant undo the harm done to the hundreds of women the Nome Police Department failed to help, but maybe I can stop this from happening again. Maybe thats my purpose. Nomes own police data showed between 2008 and 2017, only 8% of calls about sexual assaults against adults resulted in arrests with charges filed in the city of about 4,000 residents located on the Bering Sea coast. Nome City Manager Glenn Steckmann, who has been on the job since November, told the AP he hadnt seen the lawsuit, and wouldnt be able to comment on pending litigation anyway. Besides the city, two former officers, Lt. Nicholas Harvey and Chief John Papasodroa, were also named as defendants. Both no longer work for the police department. The lawsuit claims Papasodroa was aware of these failures and ratified his staffs persistent practice of inadequately responding to sexual assault reports and allowed it to continue. An audit by Papasodoras successor, Robert Estes, found that 76 of the 182 sexual assault reports made between 2015 to 2018 were inadequately investigated. The lawsuit claimed Harvey was responsible for many of those faulty investigations. In some of those cases, Lt. Harvey conducted no investigation at all, the lawsuit said. Phone message and email messages to Harvey seeking comment were not returned. Efforts to find phone contact information for Papasodora were unsuccessful. Estes quit in October 2019, a day after the Nome City Council rejected his request for more resources to investigate cases. Hardy, of Inupiaq heritage, was a 911 dispatcher for Nome police from 2015 to 2018. In March 2017, she awoke one morning, sore and bruised, with no memory of getting home the night before. Friends called her, she said, telling her about photos and a video posted on Snapchat that seemed to show a man having sex with her while she was unconscious. Hardy told Harvey she believed shed been drugged at a local bar and then sexually assaulted. She said she gave him a list of witnesses but they later told her no one from the police department contacted them. Meanwhile she took calls from others who were seeking updates on their sexual assault reports from Harvey. Just tell her Im working on it, was his response, Hardy previously told the AP. It was the same thing he told her every time she asked about her own case, Hardy said. Thats when it sparked, she said. Oh my God, hes not doing anything. She told Papasodora, and she said he said he could not find a report. He asked her to fill out another report and said he would give it to the Alaska State Troopers so they could investigate. Two months later, Hardy said she asked him the status of the report. Chief Papasodora told Ms. Hardy that he had been meaning to get to it, but that he had not yet taken any action, the lawsuit said. Before I was raped and before I learned the truth about the Nome Police Department, I considered my colleagues family, she told reporters. So thats who I turn turned to after I was raped. They told me that theyd help me. They didnt. Hardy added: Instead, they lied to me over and over and over again. ___ The Associated Press previous stories were produced through a partnership with National Native News with support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and the Fund for Investigative Journalism. / -- Firmenich announces the retirement of Armand de Villoutreys as President of its Perfumery and Ingredients business on June 30th, 2020 after a remarkable tenure of over 21 years with the company. The Group is delighted to appoint Ilaria Resta as President Perfumery and member of the company's Executive Committee. Resta will join on March 2nd, 2020 and will officially take over the leadership of Perfumery on July 1st, 2020, following a smooth handover with de Villoutreys. Having most recently served as Vice President of North America Hair Care at Procter & Gamble, Resta joins Firmenich with deep experience in the Beauty, Fabric and Home Care markets globally. She brings an outstanding track record in delivering superior growth by building iconic brands, leading disruptive business models and developing a positive culture as well as winning teams. "I warmly welcome Ilaria to Firmenich's Executive Committee as President of our Perfumery business," says Gilbert Ghostine, CEO, Firmenich. "Ilaria is an inspiring leader with a great track record of empowering people, building iconic brands and outperforming markets. With her deep consumer understanding and passion for fragrance and innovation, I am confident she will be a partner of choice for our customers to make their brands stronger," adds Ghostine. "I would like to sincerely thank Armand de Villoutreys who has served Firmenich remarkably over more than 21 years," continues Ghostine. "Under his leadership, our Perfumery business deepened its strategic partnerships with our customers, while strengthening its innovation and creative signature. Loved by his teams, Armand relentlessly inspired them to win bigger for our customers. He leaves a strong and distinctive mark on the industry, as he played a leadership role in key fragrance associations, including IFRA and RIFM. I personally have the greatest respect for Armand, from whom I learned a lot over the years. I look forward to continuing our friendship in the future and wish him much fulfillment as he opens this new chapter in his life," concludes Ghostine. "I am very pleased to join Firmenich as President of Perfumery. Fragrance plays a critical role in connecting people with positive experiences and memories, which has been a personal passion for me throughout my career," said Resta. "It is an honor for me to lead Firmenich's Perfumery Business into the future, building on an incredibly strong base of renowned creativity, talent and pioneering innovation. In my new role, I will focus on continuously strengthening the Group's leadership with the most loved and sustainable fragrances. I have the deepest respect for Armand and the Perfumery excellence he has built at Firmenich. It is with great esteem and admiration that I take the baton from him today to shape the future of Perfumery as a member of Firmenich's Executive Committee," she adds. Resta joins Firmenich with more than 22 years of experience in building iconic brands at Procter & Gamble. She has held leadership roles across its Beauty, Fabric and Home Care markets in Europe, North America and globally. In her most recent role as P&G's Vice President North America Hair Care, Resta delivered record growth results, led innovative digital and e-commerce programs as well as purpose-driven sustainable experiences, and received the esteemed WWD Beauty Inc 2019 Brand Builder of the Year Award. An Italian and Swiss citizen, Resta has a Bachelor's degree in Marketing and Economics from the University of Naples and a Master's degree in Financial Mathematics. She will relocate from the US to Geneva with her family. About Firmenich Firmenich is the world's largest privately-owned perfume and taste company, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1895. Driven by its purpose to create positive emotions to enhance wellbeing, naturally, Firmenich has designed many of the world's best-known perfumes and tastes, bringing delight to over four billion consumers every day. Renowned for its world-class research and creativity, as well as its leadership in sustainability, each year, Firmenich invests 10% of its turnover in R&D to understand and share the best that nature has to offer responsibly. Firmenich had an annual turnover of 3.9 billion Swiss Francs at end June 2019. More information about Firmenich is available at www.firmenich.com. Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/798187/Firmenich_Logo. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Chief Judge of Oyo State, Munta Abimbola, on Thursday released 37 inmates in Abolongo Nigeria Correctional Service (NCS) in the state. News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the chief judge with members of the Administration of Criminal Justice Law Monitoring Committee had on Wednesday freed 32 inmates in Agodi Correctional Centre in Ibadan making it a total of 69 inmates released in Oyo State. Mr Abimbola said a total of 123 cases were attended to by the committee in Abolongo and the committee unanimously freed 37 inmates. Seven of them were released on medical ground, two convict freed on grounds of good behaviour, two released on bail and a legal practitioner released on self-recognition. The remaining 25 were released on compassionate ground. What happened today was practically as a result of inefficiency of our trial process and we need to be alive to our responsibilities, he said. The chief judge urged the judiciary, prosecutors, and the Department of Public Prosecution (DPP) to be passionate and dedicated to duty and ensure matters were dispensed with speedily. He cautioned lawyers against seeking for unnecessary adjournment in court. The chief judge said that the judiciary in the state was doing its best but needed to improve in order to fast track justice delivery. Mr Abimbola said the visit of the committee was not just to release any inmate but those deserving of the gesture. It is fundamental to decongest the facility but we are not going to release those not worthy to be released. If offender cannot refrain from committing offence, we have the power to keep such a criminal from the society, the chief judge said. Earlier, the Oyo State Controller of Nigerian Correctional Services, Tosin Akinrojomu, said the capacity of Abolongo NCS was 160. READ ALSO: Mr Akinrojomu, represented by Deputy Controller of Corrections, Bamidele Bello, said the total inmates currently at the centre was 452. The controller said the number of awaiting trial was 252 while 66 were convicts. He said this was an indication that the facility was overcrowded and called on the committee to release those worthy to be released so as to decongest the centre. NAN reports that those in company of the Chief judge are Adegboye Gbolagunte, Olajumke Aiki and Muhammed Owolabi, all justices. (NAN) The federal judge overseeing PG&E Corp.s criminal probation lashed out at the company for falling far behind on fire safety progress as he considers whether to make the bankrupt California utility owner hire more tree trimmers and restrict how it pays managers bonuses. PG&E has fallen so far behind on its own mitigation plan and is not in compliance with the state law and has violated its terms of probation, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said Wednesday at the start of a hearing in San Francisco. PG&E remains on probation after it was convicted in 2016 of gas-pipeline safety crimes. Failure to comply with any law is a violation of probation. Alsup is testing how far he can push the utility to prevent its equipment from causing another devastating wildfire as it simultaneously navigates a complicated exit from bankruptcy. While the company admitted in January to not meeting up to its own vegetation management goals, PG&E is resisting Alsups proposals to intervene in its efforts. It has argued that being forced to hire more tree trimming crews would be counterproductive because theres a shortage of qualified workers. The judge started the hearing on a somber note, reminding lawyers that the company is a convicted felon and that he holds it responsible for much of the havoc wrought by wind-whipped firestorms over the last three years. In order to pump more dividends out and pay more bonuses, PG&E had neglected the maintenance budgets even though they wont admit it, resulting in trees blowing onto distribution lines and starting fires, he said. Its quite simple. Alsup also had sharp words for a U.S. prosecutor who didnt make any recommendation at the hearing about tightening the leash on the company during its remaining 23 months on probation. Are you just going to let California burn up? Youre going to shrug your shoulders and say we cant do anything about it, the judge said. The state of California is in the hands of this convicted felon and you dont have anything to say? The judge gave the company credit for implementing mandatory power shutoffs across wide swaths of the grid during high fire-danger weather this year. During 2019 there was no house burned and no one died in California as a result of trees falling onto the distribution lines of PG&E, Alsup said. Kevin Orsini, a lawyer for PG&E, aggressively defended the company from the judges harsh criticism of its vegetation management program. An eight-year backlog in cutting back overgrown bushes and trees isnt due to negligence, Orsini said, but because the old rules dont work. He told the judge PG&E has fundamentally realigned its approach to vegetation management in the era of climate change. It trimmed or cut more than 1 million trees in 2019, he said, adding that another 22,000 trees it identified are in the workflow right now. PG&E has committed to cutting a 12-foot radius of vegetation around its equipment instead of four feet, Orsini said, and is going beyond requirements to clear overhanging branches, he said. Im not trying to suggest were perfect, but strides have been made, he said. Alsup asked Orsini to report to the court how many tree cutters its hiring. The has also threatened to force the utility to redirect bonuses and dividend payments to safety measures. PG&E lawyer Reid Schar said such payments are needed to attract and retain the best and brightest employees focused on preventing fires. PG&E is working to answer the existential questions that threaten it every single day, Schar told the judge, adding that climate change and wildfires wont go away when the companys probation ends. Safety is the number one priority, Schar said. This is a company that is in bankruptcy due to wildfires. If things go poorly theyll be right back where they were. PG&E shares fell sharply when the judge made his initial comments, then rebounded. The stock was trading at $16.84, up by 4.7% percent, at 1:54 p.m. in New York. Copyright 2022 Bloomberg. Thunder Bay, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 20, 2020) - Benton Resources Inc. (TSXV: BEX) ('Benton' or 'the Company') is pleased to announce that it has acquired a 100% interest in a new project by staking 2 multi-cell mining claims totaling 845 hectares. The new claims cover an east-west magnetic high which extends from the Disraeli mafic-ultramafic intrusion, which is prospective for Midcontinent Rift-style ('MCR'), magmatic Ni-Cu-PGE mineralization. These new claims cover what could represent a conduit feeder zone located just east of the Disraeli intrusion. While the body of the Disraeli intrusion has been explored in detail, minimal historical exploration has been conducted on the new property extending from the intrusion. The Disraeli, as well as the Seagull Lake intrusion (located approximately 8km south of Disraeli and held by White Metal Resources Corp.), are described as being composed of ultramafic rocks with a high olivine content that has been derived from a deep mantle source. Ultramafic rocks are a key component to Ni-Cu-PGE mineralization associated with the MCR and other Platinum-Palladium occurrences in this region which include the high grade TBN and Escape Lake deposits which Benton has optioned to Regency Gold Corp. Regency is now being led by mining executives Abraham Drost (CEO) and Jim Gallagher (Executive Chairman), the latter being the former CEO of North American Palladium which recently sold to Impala Platinum for C$1 Billion. Benton will hold 24.6M shares of Regency. Benton will complete ground inspection of the new claims when weather permits. Thunder Bay North (TBN) Property includes high-grade intercepts of 46.65m @ 10.1g/t Platinum+Palladium+Gold (5.267g/t Pt + 4.555g/t Pd + 0.324g/t Au) with 1.62% Copper+Nickel (1.154% Cu + 0.465% Ni), incl. 13.0 m @ 33.2 g/t Pt+Pd+Au (17.305g/t Pt + 14.817g/t Pd + 1.061g/t Au) and 4.91% Cu+Ni (3.755% Cu + 1.308g/t Ni), incl. a spectacular intercept of 2.6 m @ 97.9 g/t Pt+Pd+Au (52.769g/t Pt + 41.538g/t Pd + 3.630g/t Au) and 14.9% Cu+Ni (11.599% Cu + 3.289% Ni) in drill hole BL 10-197. Drilling highlights on the 220 hectare Escape Lake Property include 121.6 m @ 2.49 g/t Pt+Pd+Au (1.04g/t Pt + 1.37g/t Pd + 0.07g/t Au) and 0.86% Cu+Ni (0.52% Cu + 0.34% Ni), incl. 33.4 m of 7.28 g/t Pt+Pd+Au (3.01g/t Pt + 4.08g/t Pd + 0.19g/t Au) and 2.26% Cu+Ni (1.49% Cu + 0.77% Ni) in drill hole 12CL0009, and 162 m @ 1.42 g/t Pt+Pd+Au (0.61g/t Pt + 0.76g/t Pd + 0.06g/t Au) and 0.47% Cu+Ni (0.28% Cu + 0.19% Ni), incl. 40.67 m 4.5 g/t Pt+Pd+Au (1.92g/t Pt + 2.48g/t Pd + 0.18g/t Au) and 1.26% Cu+Ni (0.89% Cu + 0.36% Ni) in drill hole 11CL0005. In addition Benton would like to announce that it has granted 2.25m stock options at an exercise price of $0.10 for a period of five years from the date of issuance to directors, officers, employees and consultants of the Company. The options are subject to the vesting provisions contained within the Company's stock option plan. QP Nathan Sims (P.Geo.), Senior Exploration Manager for Benton Resources Inc., the 'Qualified Person' under National Instrument 43-101, has approved the scientific and technical disclosure in this news release and prepared or supervised its preparation. On behalf of the Board of Directors of Benton Resources Inc., "Stephen Stares" Stephen Stares, President About Benton Resources Inc. Benton Resources is a well-funded Canadian-based project generator with a diversified property portfolio in Gold, Silver, Nickel, Copper, and Platinum group elements. Benton holds multiple high-grade projects available for option which can be viewed on the Company's website. Many projects have an up-to-date 43-101 Report available. Parties interested in seeking more information about properties available for option can contact Mr. Stares at the number below. For further information, please contact: Stephen Stares, President & CEO Phone: 807-475-7474 Email: sstares@bentonresources.ca Website: www.bentonresources.ca Twitter: @BentonResources Facebook: @BentonResourcesBEX THE TSX VENTURE EXCHANGE HAS NOT REVIEWED AND DOES NOT ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ADEQUACY OR ACCURACY OF THIS RELEASE. The information contained herein contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. Forward-looking statements relate to information that is based on assumptions of management, forecasts of future results, and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. Any statements that express predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions or future events or performance are not statements of historical fact and may be "forward-looking statements." Forward-looking statements are subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties which could cause actual events or results to differ from those reflected in the forward-looking statements, including, without limitation: risks related to failure to obtain adequate financing on a timely basis and on acceptable terms; risks related to the outcome of legal proceedings; political and regulatory risks associated with mining and exploration; risks related to the maintenance of stock exchange listings; risks related to environmental regulation and liability; the potential for delays in exploration or development activities or the completion of feasibility studies; the uncertainty of profitability; risks and uncertainties relating to the interpretation of drill results, the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; risks related to the inherent uncertainty of production and cost estimates and the potential for unexpected costs and expenses; results of prefeasibility and feasibility studies, and the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with the Company's expectations; risks related to gold price and other commodity price fluctuations; and other risks and uncertainties related to the Company's prospects, properties and business detailed elsewhere in the Company's disclosure record. Should one or more of these risks and uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those described in forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned against attributing undue certainty to forward-looking statements. These forward looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances. Actual events or results could differ materially from the Company's expectations or projections. To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/52591 Conspiracies and mysteries abound in a book written by Midland native Nicholas Crivac. His debut novel, "Apotheosis," is a science fiction thriller that centers around the murder of a scientist, a medical process that keeps aging at bay and a puzzling series of clues left to the protagonist. "It's in the vein of a Michael Creighton or Dan Brown novel," Crivac said during a recent phone interview. Crivac, now a resident of Troy, grew up in Midland, graduating from H. H. Dow High School in 2001 and majored in English at Central Michigan University. The idea for the book came from a dream he had in 2009, when he woke up and started writing everything he could remember about the vision. In the end, he used the setting, characters and ambiance of the dream in his novel. "I kind of worked backwards, taking those elements and expanding the story from there," he said. While apotheosis can be defined as the highest point in something's culmination, Crivac explained that he focused on the word's secondary meaning of the process of elevating someone or something to the status of a deity. "There are aspects of that in the book," Crivac said. "Apotheosis" also includes a real-world aspect in its narrative. Since the plot of the book centers around medical rejuvenation, Crivac researched current trends in anti-aging medicine and technology. His search uncovered a medical research paper that was published within the last year that provided information to give more details to the story. "I was able to pull details from that research into the novel and it made it more believable." In 2010 Crivac finished a first draft of the story within five weeks before setting it aside for other projects. He passed it around to family and friends to review before realizing it was one of his strongest pieces of writing. Three years ago he focused on fine-tuning the novel and had it published on Jan. 7. "The feedback I've gotten back has been positive so far," he stated. "Apotheosis" is available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Apple Books. For more information, visit Crivac's website at www.nicholascrivac.com. Global warming and acidic ocean waters is set to kill all coral reefs by the year 2100, a new study says. Climate change caused by human greenhouse gas emissions is on course to eliminate 70 to 90 per cent of coral reefs over the next 20 years. Coral reefs are most at risk from emission-driven changes in their environment, a study by Hawaiian scientists revealed. Scroll down for video Increasingly frequent marine heatwaves have been creating dead patches in the barrier reef, as pictured, by 'bleaching', in which corals are forced to expel their symbiotic algae Restoration projects to protect coral reefs, including Australia's 1,400-mile-long Great Barrier Reef, will also face serious challenges in years to come. Future increases in human pollution will only have a minor impact on the elimination of reef habitat, because humans have already caused them such extensive damage. 'By 2100, it's looking quite grim,' said Renee Setter, a biogeographer at the University of Hawaii Manoa who presented the new findings at Ocean Sciences Meeting in California this week. 'Trying to clean up the beaches is great and trying to combat pollution is fantastic we need to continue those efforts,' Setter said. 'But at the end of the day, fighting climate change is really what we need to be advocating for in order to protect corals and avoid compounded stressors.' As ocean temperatures rise, warmer waters stress corals, causing them to release algae that lives inside them, which gives them up to 90 per cent of their energy. This event causes the vibrantly-coloured communities of coral to turn white an effect called coral bleaching. Bleached corals are not dead, but are at a higher risk of dying, and these bleaching events become more common under climate change. Conservationists have warned for years about the danger of coral bleaching, which killed about 30 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef's coral in 2016. Pictured, a clownfish peeps out from behind an anemone on the Great Barrier Reef. Fish are crucial for coral reefs to function as healthy ecosystems Coral can survive bleaching if it receives nutrients soon enough, but if not, it can cause death within days, previous studies have shown. Rising ocean temperatures are caused by an increase of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, such as CO2. Excessive C02 emissions caused by humans are also absorbed into the sea, making it more acidic and having harmful consequences for marine life. The underwater speakers played recordings of the sounds of a healthy reef including the noises made my shoals of fish, shrimps, and other reef dwellers. Pictured, young cardinal fish swimming around healthy coral on the Great Barrier Reef One promising development has been scientific attempts to transplant live corals grown in the lab to dying reefs in the ocean. It's thought that these new lab-grown corals will boost the reef's recovery as a whole and bring it back to a healthy state. However, these transplanted corals often face low survival rates due to poor planning and site selection based on convenience, the University of Hawaii Manoa team said. Other coral relief efforts have included playing the ambient sounds of a healthy reef via loudspeakers to lure young fish back to damaged areas. File photo taken in October 2016 shows coral bleaching at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, a World Heritage Site Image obtained Monday, April 10, 2017 of bleaching damages on the Great barrier Reef. Recent aerial surveys by the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies has revealed only the southern third of the Great Barrier Reef has escaped unscathed from coral bleaching In her coral bleaching study, Setter and her colleagues mapped which areas of the ocean would be suitable for further such coral restoration efforts. They simulated ocean environment conditions like sea surface temperature, wave energy, acidity of the water, pollution and overfishing in areas where corals exist. They found that most parts of the ocean where coral reefs exist today won't be suitable habitats for coral at all by 2045. By the turn of the next century, the simulation worsened, with few to no suitable sites by the year 2100. 'Honestly, most sites are out,' Setter said The few sites that would still be viable ocean habitats for coral reefs in 2100 include small portions of Baja California and the Red Sea east of Africa but these particular locations are too close to rivers for coral. The team said their findings 'can inform necessary modifications to restoration practices' as well as increasing efforts to decrease CO2 emissions to prevent the loss of coral reefs. 'Identifying more suitable sites in a higher atmospheric CO2 future will assist in the effectiveness of current programs and the likelihood for successful restoration efforts,' they say. More than 5,000 scientists are expected to present the latest research findings about the world's oceans at the Ocean Sciences Meeting 2020, which runs until Friday in San Diego. Also this week, Australian scientists have warned that the Great Barrier reef is set to undergo its third mass bleaching event in the space of five years. Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, cited NASA data showing heat stress in the Australian summer. 'Will we see mass coral bleaching again this year on the Great Barrier Reef? The next 2-3 weeks are critical,' Professor Hughes tweeted. The ARC Centre of Excellence has previously estimated that only the southern third of the Great Barrier Reef has escaped unscathed from coral bleaching. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, Februay 20) Scrapping the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) merely based on the visa cancellation of a presidential ally is a "serious mistake," a former senator warned Thursday. Former senator Francisco "Kit" Sarmiento Tatad was referring to President Rodrigo Duterte's decision to abrogate the two-decades-old military pact after the US government revoked Sen. Ronald "Bato" dela Rosa's visa. "This decision based on the cancellation of the [visa] of former colleague Senator dela Rosa is a serious mistake that cannot be inflicted in the history of our diplomacy or in the posterity of our Filipino people, " said Tatad, a sponsor of the Senate resolution concurring with the VFA ratification in the 11th Congress. The former lawmaker appeared as resource person in the Senate foreign relations committee which is currently discussing the status of Senate Resolution 305. The panel, headed by Senator Aquilino Pimentel III, tackled the validity of termination or withdrawal from treaties upon the concurrence of the upper chamber, following Duterte's decision to terminate the deal with the US government. "No treaty is possible without the approval of 16 of our 24 senators. From a layman's point of view, it is the Senate concurrence that gives validity to a treaty. Without Senate concurrence, there is no treaty, and there will be no treaty to abrogate," he said. This number is equivalent to the required concurrence of 2/3 of all members of the Senate when voting on an international agreement requiring participation of Congress, Tatad stressed. "Since [Duterte] cannot have a valid treaty without Senate concurrence, [then he can not be] able to abrogate a treaty without Senate concurrence. I think that is quite clear," he added. Senators are still trying to fight for their power to have a say on the matter. Pimentel noted that they are already drafting the petition which they will file before the Supreme Court to question the role of the upper chamber in the termination of the VFA. Tatad and former senator Rodolfo Biazon, both sponsors of the resolution concurring with the VFA ratification in 1999, are also joining the incumbent senators in the filing of the petition. Senator Franklin Drilon said that if the high court sides with them and lets the Senate concurrence bear weight on the matter, this could deem the Duterte administration's VFA termination invalid. Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) special assistant Igor Bailen, noted during the hearing that the VFA termination does not require Senate concurrence as the validity of Duterte's power as President is "judged under less stringent standards." However, Dean Melencio Sta. Maria of the Far Eastern University Institute of Law said that the cancellation of the VFA did not have to be based on a knee-jerk reaction of the country's top public official in the first place. "Cancelling the VFA does not require a knee-jerk reaction but a response resulting from a circumspect analysis intrinsically of its content," said Sta. Maria. He added that Duterte did not even "utilize much of the DFA's expertise" in the issue, which would bear more weight in the Philippines' military capability amid the "Chinese aggressiveness" in the West Philippine Sea. The Philippine government has already sent an official notice of termination of the VFA to the US Embassy last February 11, which will become effective after six months or 180 days. The US government has already received this notice, but President Donald Trump simply shrugged it off, noting that "they would save a lot of money" under the military accord which used to allow the US to provide military assistance and financial grants to the Philippines. The issue first stemmed from the US Senate's move to ban Philippine officials involved in the detention of opposition Senator Leila de Lima from entering the US. However, Dela Rosa suspected that the revocation of his visa could be traced back to alleged extrajudicial killings in anti-narcotics operations under his watch as former Philippine National Police chief. Duterte also previously urged his Cabinet members to boycott travel to the US in January, around the same time he decided to terminate the VFA. EXPLAINER: The Visiting Forces Agreement For his part, Dela Rosa recently bared that he is not joining his colleagues in contesting the VFA abrogation even after admitting earlier that he is "bothered" by the President's move. HOW DID THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 2020 DEBATE PLAY IN KANSAS CITY??? WHO WON & CAN THEY BEAT PREZ TRUMP??? Live Updates . . . Las Vegas Democratic debate live updates: Six candidates face off in Nevada Watch the Las Vegas Democratic debate live stream at NBC News. Watch the Las Vegas debate live streaming video, votes, polls with the latest debate updates. The debate features Mike Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Tonight's Serving Of Outrage Sanders, Warren Attack Bloomberg for "Outrageous" Record at Democratic Debate From the opening bell, Mike Bloomberg faced fierce attacks from his Democratic rivals over race and gender at Wednesday night's high-stakes debate in Las Vegas as the former New York City mayor faced off on the debate stage for the first time. BEST SNARKY READ!!! The One With Bloomberg-Yet Another Democratic Debate Liveblog How many debates is too many? In 2015 the Democratic National Committee concluded six to be a "reasonable number," enough to give candidates ample airing without diverting from the party's bylaws. Yet there's nothing reasonable about this year's all-out Democratic brawl, egged on by a constant drumbeat of debates, which have now ballooned to 12; six are crammed in the first quarter of 2020. Vigilante Fires Back George Zimmerman sues Warren, Buttigieg for $265M, accuses them of attempting to garner black votes by defaming him George Zimmerman, the onetime neighborhood watch volunteer who was acquitted in the 2012 shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida, is suing Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg for $265 million, claiming both 2020 Democratic presidential candidates defamed him in an attempt to "garner votes in the black community." Democratic Party Fires Off Slings & Arrows Warren calls Bloomberg an 'arrogant billionaire,' criticizes sexist comments at Nevada Democratic debate U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wasted no time to unleash a brutal attack against former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg for sexist comments he made before running for president. In her opening remarks at the Nevada Democratic debate, Warren called Bloomberg an "arrogant billionaire" who demeans women. Everybody Against Bloomberg Bloomberg the early focus at the Democratic debate in Nevada The 78-year-old former Republican was making his debate debut as one of the Democrats' strongest six White House hopefuls -- as determined by national polls -- while the party's moderate wing struggles to unify behind an alternative to polarizing progressive Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg Counterpoint Michael Bloomberg: No chance Bernie Sanders beats Trump Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Wednesday there is zero chance Sen. Bernard Sanders can beat President Trump in the November election. "I don't think there is any chance of the senator beating President Trump," Mr. Bloomberg said, taking issue with his support for Medicare for All. UPDATE: LAS VEGAS DEBATE AFTERMATH HIGHLIGHTS!!! Six Democratic Candidates Take The Nevada Debate Stage Tonight at A Crucial Moment In the 2020 Primary Cycle. Follow Along Live Six candidates will face off in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada primaries. Follow along for live updates. As always we turn to our blog community for unique perspectives and insight into the underground discourse that will ultimately determine the fate of the nation.Accordingly . . .So far it looks like they're doing a very good job destroying the political career of former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg.Of course we'll see a few whackadoodles in the comments but, occasionally, there are comments worthy of consideration.To start tonight's discussion, we'll share the relevant links we're reading on the topic:You decide . . . The Bombay high court on Thursday summoned the head of department (HoD) of the gynaecology and obstetrics department at the BYL Nair Hospital to ascertain if the three accused arrested for allegedly driving Dr. Payal Tadvi to commit suicide can be allowed to complete their Masters course in gynaecology and obstetrics. Justice Sadhana Jadhav has asked the HoD to remain present in court on Friday afternoon when the court is likely to pass an order on the plea filed by the three accused - Hema Ahuja, Bhakti Meher and Ankita Khandelwal - seeking modification of the August 9, 2019 order by which Justice Jadhav has granted bail to the trio. They have sought modification of the order so as to complete their post-graduate course in gynaecology and obstetrics. While granting bail to them, the court has restrained them from entering the jurisdiction of the Agripada police station, where the offence has been registered against them for allegedly driving Dr. Payal Tadvi to commit suicide, more particularly the Topiwala National Medical College affiliated to Nair Hospital. During the course of hearing, the judge indicated that she was inclined to allow the three accused to complete their post-graduate medical courses. It is true that the victim has lost her life, but we cannot stop their (accused) education. The trial court will decide their fate. They cannot be victimized because in our society we do not go by an eye for an eye, the court observed. The special public prosecutor objected to the plea saying the concern was that all the witnesses would be there, at Nair Hospital and most of them will be subordinate to the accused women. Senior advocate Abad Ponda, who represented the accused, said there are three units of gynaecology and obstetrics in Nair Hospital and the problem of the accused possibly coming in contact with the witnesses can be resolved if the three women were shifted to some other unit - other than their parent unit, where most of the witnesses in the case are posted. The court has summoned the HoD to ascertain if such an arrangement can be made. Dr. Payal Tadvi, a second-year post-graduate student of the Topiwala National Medical College committed suicide on May 22, 2019 inside her hostel room in the hospital premises. Tadvi in her suicide note held three senior women doctors responsible for her condition and for harassing her over her caste and the fact that she had secured admission for the post-graduate course through quota earmarked for her category. On May 29, 2019, the police arrested Ahuja, Mehar and Khandelwal - for allegedly making casteist slurs and driving Dr. Tadvi to end her life. The three accused have been booked under Sections 306 (abetment to suicide) and 201 (destruction of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 3(2) (v) of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. Fears are mounting over the spread of coronavirus as many Chinese students are coming back to Korea after their winter break. There is a shortage of about 14,000 dorm rooms of major universities in Seoul alone to quarantine all Chinese students in the capital. In a meeting on Feb. 5, the Education Ministry decided to allow Chinese students to attend classes unless they have symptoms 14 days after they return. They can quarantine themselves while the university monitors their health and movements. But there are not enough dorm rooms for Chinese students at 15 of 17 universities in Seoul with more than 1,000 Chinese students each. Supposing that all 18,305 dorm rooms at these 15 universities is given to Chinese students, there will still be 14,285 Chinese students without a room. Hanyang University has only 1,015 rooms capable of accommodating fewer than half of its 2,949 Chinese students if they occupy a room alone to prevent any potential infections. But in reality even fewer are available since Korean students from the provinces also use them. Kyunghee University has emptied about 100 additional rooms at two dorm buildings to make them available exclusively for Chinese students in self-quarantine. But the university expects some 3,000 Chinese students to arrive for the spring semester. "It's physically impossible for universities to manage all Chinese students," a Kyunghee staffer said. Sungkyunkwan University has made some 400 rooms available in a separate dorm building, and so far about 330 Chinese students have applied for self-quarantine there. The university also expects some 3,000 students to return from China before the spring semester starts. Those who cannot be accommodated will fall through the net. A Chungang University official said, "About 90 percent of our Chinese students board off campus, so it's difficult for us to check whether they're abiding by self-quarantine." [The stream is slated to start at 10 a.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.] World Health Organization officials are holding a press conference Thursday to update the public on the coronavirus outbreak, which has infected more than 75,700 and killed at least 2,130 so far. Named COVID-19, the virus has shuttered commerce across much of China and is hitting company earnings, global stock markets and manufacturing across the world. WHO officials declared the virus a global health emergency last month, while urging the public against over-reacting to the virus. On Thursday, China's National Health Commission reported an additional 114 deaths and 394 new confirmed cases, which is a drastic drop in daily additional cases. However, China revised its diagnostic guidelines to exclude "clinically diagnosed" cases from the count in Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak thereby lowering the count. What was previously termed "clinically diagnosed," or those confirmed through CT scans and symptoms, will now fall under the "suspected" category. They will no longer be counted as "confirmed" cases as they were in the previous diagnosis protocol. Meanwhile, South Korea reported a surge in cases as well as its first COVID-19-related deathy. On Wednesday, Iran reported its first two cases of the virus, and health officials in the country later announced both patients had died. Also Wednesday, International Monetary Fund head Kristalina Georgieva said the COVID-19 outbreak is the "most pressing uncertainty" facing the global economy right now. The virus has already slowed China's economic growth this year, Georgieva said, just how much depends on efforts by world leaders to contain the fast-spreading outbreak. "It is a stark reminder of how a fragile recovery could be threatened by unforeseen events," she said. Read CNBC's live updates to see the latest news on the COVID-19 outbreak. A second man charged with the suspected gangland murder of Malcolm McKeown has been granted High Court bail. Andrew Martin, 24, is accused of involvement in the killing at a petrol station in Waringstown, Co Down last year. McKeown, 54, was shot six times in the head and body during the fatal attack on August 19. Police have said his murder is tied in with a drugs-related feud between rival criminal groups. Martin, of Trasna Way in Lurgan, Co Armagh, sought bail following a successful application by his co-defendant. Jake O'Brien, also 24 and from Rectory Park in Lurgan, secured a release from custody last week. Expand Close Andrew Martin / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Andrew Martin Both men deny any role in the murder of McKeown, who was found dead in his car parked on Main Street. Prosecutors said CCTV footage shows a Volkswagen Passat speeding away from the garage within a minute of the shooting. About ten minutes later that car was set on fire, with two men in boiler suits viewed running away. O'Brien is also allegedly linked to the shooting by DNA on a glove found close to the suspected getaway vehicle. But after he was granted bail lawyers for his co-accused argued that he should not be kept in custody. Barrister Damien Halleron told the court Martin is not forensically linked to either the scene of the murder or the getaway car. Mr Justice McAlinden granted bail to Martin, with conditions including the case being reviewed again next month. Omicron variant of COVID-19 identified in Antrim, Charlevoix counties The omicron variant of COVID-19 has been identified in one Antrim County resident and one Charlevoix County resident. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 20) Filipinos on board the coronavirus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan are set to return to the country on Sunday, the Health Department said. In a media briefing, Health Secretary Francisco Duque III said around 500 Filipinos are expected to be evacuated this weekend. There are seven passengers and 531 crew members in the virus-hit vessel. There are now 44 Filipinos on the cruise ship who have tested positive for the novel coronavirus or COVID-19. READ: Diamond Princess cruise passengers disembark after 14-day quarantine ends in Japan Duque said they will tap medical personnel from various hospitals in Luzon to attend to the Filipinos who will be heading home from the cruise ship. Passengers will also be screened before disembarking the ship and will be staying at the quarantine site in the New Clark City Athletes Village. Magsaysay Maritime Corp., will be shouldering the costs of accommodation, food, and other peripheral items for the evacuees, according to Duque. Magsaysay is the manpower agency that deployed the Filipino crew of the ship. Duque has yet to provide the exact time and details of the return, pending information from the Foreign Affairs Department. READ: Filipino on Japan ship recovers, number of remaining coronavirus-infected at 40 According to a report by CNN International, Japan's health ministry confirmed Thursday that two passengers of the cruise ship have died from novel coronavirus. The two individuals are both in their 80s. READ: Two Diamond Princess passengers die of coronavirus Rajesh Kumar Thakur By Express News Service PATNA: A revelation by a woman Maoist that the Left-wing extremist outfit in Bihars Gaya has started funding anti-CAA and NPR-NRC agitations has sent the Bihar Police brass into a tizzy. This comes on a day when the ultras blew up a school in southern Gaya and left a trail of anti-CAA posters at the site. Police said, Nanhaki Devi alias Kalawati, 45, who was arrested on Sunday in Gaya while going to take part in a anti-CAA and NRC protest under the banner of Jan Abhiyan. She said she was asked by a top Maoist commander to organise protests against CAA and to reach Katari road area on Gayas western periphery where a dharna was staged last Sunday. She was also promised financial assistance. She was held when she was on a motivational round to get people to demonstrate. ADG(Operations) Sushil M Khopde said, Some pamphlets have been recovered from the school blast site from Banke Bazaar area of Gaya, suggesting the Maoists are against CAA. A transport aircraft of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force arrives at Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 17, 2020. (Xinhua/Li He) The Chinese military will adopt a new regulation on confidentiality in a move to better manage cybersecurity risks amid the increasingly intense strategic games between China and the US, experts said on Wednesday. President Xi Jinping, who is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, recently signed an order to publish the new military confidentiality regulation, which will come into force on March 1, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Daily reported on Wednesday. The regulation will provide a strong basis for military development, reform and preparations for military struggle, the report said. It aims to effectively deal with the current grim situation in confidentiality work, use innovations in management of carriers of military secrets and focus on the confidentiality of information network systems and smart electronic devices, according to the report. Cybersecurity has become an urgent issue for the Chinese military, since some electronic information facilities remain relatively vulnerable and may cause leaks of secrets if not used with caution, Li Daguang, a professor at the National Defense University of the PLA in Beijing, told the Global Times on Wednesday, noting that some hardware and components are imported and may have backdoor programs. "The confidentiality work of the military, particularly in terms of cybersecurity, is very important at a time when China and the US are in the midst of increasingly intense strategic games," Li said. The US government and relevant departments have engaged in large-scale, organized and indiscriminate cyber theft, tapping and surveillance of foreign governments, businesses and individuals, said Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang at a daily briefing on Monday. Most cyberattacks against Chinese networks in 2018 came from the US, according to a report by China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team published in June 2019. Military secrets, including strategic and tactical deployments, weapons and equipment development plans and personnel information, are crucial and should never be leaked by any means, analysts said. The regulation also aims to tackle dilemmas in confidentiality work by reshaping management mechanisms, standardizing the designating and rescinding of secrets and optimizing education measures on secret-related personnel, the PLA Daily reported. Li said that while confidentiality work is crucial, some people have used it as a bureaucratic excuse to work passively. They might cite the risk of leaking a secret and facing penalties to refuse to do practical work that not necessarily involves any secrets, Li said, noting that the new regulation will allow people to actively solve problems. The regulation will also enhance confidentiality work in key fields including major military events, publicity work, military-civilian integration, international military cooperation and weapons and equipment, the PLA Daily said. It also bars the agency from holding migrants more than 48 hours if theyve been fully processed, which is common when other agencies involved in taking the migrants, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, dont have the capacity to pick them up in a reasonable amount of time. Jeffrey Ho looked like a typical traveler at San Francisco International Airport, wheeling a suitcase and shouldering a green cargo backpack except for a blue plastic wrist band marked with the date of his release from what federal officials describe as the first U.S. quarantine in more than 50 years. On Wednesday, two weeks after Ho scrambled to get on a flight evacuating U.S. citizens from Hubei province, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China, he finally left Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield on his way home to the San Bernardino area. But his wife and 1-year-old daughter are still in the Chinese province where the outbreak began and they dont know when theyll see each other again. He understood why he had to spend two weeks in lockdown and is hopeful things wont get worse for his family. I felt more relieved day by day, minute by minute, when I boarded the plane, Ho said. I think it was a good decision for keeping the general population of the U.S. safe. ... Its safe to try to keep people quarantined just to make sure they dont cause an outbreak in San Francisco or something. The 33-year-old was on the second plane evacuated from Wuhan and the first batch of quarantined travelers to show up at the Solano County base. On Thursday, the last 53 people in that group of evacuees from Wuhan were released from quarantine at Travis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. But well over 100 other people remained quarantined at Travis passengers who arrive from Tokyo and had been trapped onboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship, where hundreds contracted the coronavirus. Ho and other quarantined travelers said information was unclear he didnt even know where he was going on the evacuation flight until he landed in California and turned on his GPS and experiences under lockdown seem to differ depending on location and luck of the draw. It really does not feel like a quarantine, Ho said of his experience. Its a normal hotel room, where you get three meals a day and theres no one looking over your shoulder making sure youre doing certain things. I like to think of it as a vacation since its not often that I get anything from Uncle Sam; if theyre giving me an all-expense stay for 14 days, I might as well enjoy it. During an unseasonably warm February, Ho developed a regimen of exercising, eating and streaming movies. While a Northern California couple who ended up in San Antonio dont have movies on demand, Ho binge-watched around 60 films. The couple in San Antonio failed to get two wine deliveries, while Ho received a care package of oranges and Taiwanese beer from a friend on Valentines Day. Ho had his temperature checked twice a day and wore a mask when he went outside. CDC staff covered their mouths and noses when coming within 6 feet of quarantined travelers, Ho said. Most people in quarantine avoided one another except for a daily town hall meeting until the last few days, he said. Hos only deprivation was when he started running out of his hotel portion-size hand soap ironic, he noted, given that hand-washing is one of the only prevention measures for the coronavirus. When he told Centers for Disease Control and Prevention staff, they said they would look into it but didnt get more supplies for three days. (The CDC did not respond to a question about whether supplies temporarily ran out.) You wash your hands a lot over there, so that was the first thing to run out, Ho said. I knew there was a huge bottle of laundry detergent, I knew that if I run out, thats my plan B. Eventually I went over there and filled up my normal bottle of hand soap with laundry detergent, and thats what I used for a day. When his contact lens solution ran out, Ho ordered more on Amazon. It arrived, true to form, in a day. Where Ho did lose out is around $1,500 out of pocket in travel expenses. He said he paid $360 for a four-hour taxi ride from his in-laws home in Yichang to Wuhan, around $1,000 for a cargo flight from Wuhan to Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, and $115 for the flight from SFO to Ontario airport in Southern California. And thats not counting the income the self-employed business owner lost from clients during his two weeks in limbo. That was different from Diamond Princess cruise passengers, whose flight costs were covered by the Carnival Corp., a State Department spokeswoman confirmed. For Ho, the reason to leave his wife, who is working remotely, and daughter in China was purely financial. Staying there, Im not making any money and bills dont stop coming, Ho said. If Im stuck there for a half a year, thats half a year that Im not doing work. Thats quite a financial hit. Its a hard decision, but I really have to leave, because if I dont leave, I dont know how Im going to pay for all the bills. Ho had been in China since early January, his wife and baby since December, to celebrate the Lunar New Year and the birthdays of his daughter and her great-grandmother. Around the third week of January, coronavirus cases started to mount. Thats when the city of Yichang in Hubei province, where his wifes family lives, went into lockdown. It was a ghost town, Ho said. A lot of people were hiding, they self-quarantined. The government allowed only one person from every household to go out every three days to the pharmacy or grocery store. The family nearly ran out of masks and used them longer than the recommended period. 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. As the situation worsened, Ho contacted the U.S. Embassy and learned that in two days, there was a flight out. In an agonizing decision, he left his wife and baby there, after his in-laws noted that its hard to keep masks on babies, who can be more vulnerable to viruses. Even getting to the airport was hard: He had to find a taxi driver willing to drive him four hours through the locked-down province to Wuhan. Finally, he found one for 250% of the usual price. Hos flight was first delayed for a day, then another 12 hours while he waited, anxious, at the Wuhan airport. It was nerve-racking. ... All the information is extremely fuzzy and last-minute, Ho said. I didnt touch anything, I didnt want to sit down. ... Im trying to stay away from everybody since Wuhan is ground zero. I didnt feel safe around people there. I was trying to hide. He finally left China on a cargo flight on Feb. 5. Ho told his wife, Jill, that he didnt know when she would be able to return. Most commercial flights to and from the U.S. are canceled through the end of April. Travel restrictions, including a mandatory quarantine for U.S. citizens coming from Hubei province, are in effect indefinitely. Hos daughter, Joylin, is confused about where he is when they chat on video. Shes trying to find me. She doesnt understand why Im trapped in a small box, he said. Ho is hopeful that the virus and the travel restrictions could blow over in a month or two so he can go back to China to bring his wife and daughter home. I dont think it will get worse, since the more knowledge they gain and the tighter the quarantine is, China has been slowly stepping up on the quarantine to try to hold the spread of the virus, he said. Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@mallorymoench London: The Queen is to leave the door open for Prince Harry to return to his honorary military roles after a year, it has emerged, as Buckingham Palace announced that the Sussexes will undertake a final flurry of engagements before stepping down as full-time working members of the royal family on March 31. Harry, the Duke of Sussex, and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, will close their palace office and abandon the "Sussex Royal" branding to set up a new non-profit foundation. It follows their announcement last month that they would step back from their senior royal family roles. Prince Harry and wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, sent shockwaves through the establishment when they announced they would step back from their royal roles. Credit:Getty Images They will be welcomed back at key points throughout the coming year, however, with dates understood to include the Queen's Birthday Parade in June, as well as a series of final official engagements in March. CHANDIGARH: The opposition Shiromani Akali Dal on Thursday held a protest outside the Punjab assembly over the issue of rising power tariff. The protest came ahead of the start of the budget session of the Punjab Assembly. Leading the protest, senior Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia accused the Congress government of putting additional burden on power consumers. Power is the costliest in Punjab at this moment, claimed Majithia and added that when the SAD-BJP left the government, the power rate was much cheaper than what its now under the Congress-led regime. The opposition party also brought some families who had received steep power bills to the protest site. The Congress had promised to provide electricity at 5 per unit. But now, people are being charged 9-10 per unit which is exorbitant, said Akali leader Parambans Singh Romana. The Akalis also accused the Congress of striking underhand deals with the management of private thermal plants which resulted in a loss of 4,100 crore to the state exchequer. Power rates in Punjab were hiked by 36 paise a unit from January 1 for domestic consumers. The Delhi Police detained 99 people on Thursday when they were marching towards the Uttar Pradesh Bhawan here demanding the release of Gorakhpur doctor Kafeel Khan and Ulema Council national general secretary Tahir Madni. While Madni was arrested in Azamgarh on February 5 on the charge that the anti-CAA protester he was leading used foul language against Hindus and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Kafeel Khan was held for allegedly promoting enmity between religious groups through his speech at a protest against the amended citizenship law at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on December 12. The call for the protest was given by the Jamia Coordination Committee, a group comprising students and alumni of the university formed to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act. However, students from other universities also joined them. While marching towards the Uttar Pradesh Bhawan, the protesters raised slogans against the state government. They were detained and taken to the Mandir Marg police station, Delhi Police officials said. However, another group of students arrived near the UP Bhawan with posters against the amended citizenship law and the National Register of Citizens. They too were detained and taken to the Mandir Marg police station, the police said. In total, 65 men while 34 women were detained. All of them were released later, they added. Kafeel Khan has been slapped with the stringent National Security Act (NSA) and lodged in Mathura jail in connection with his anti-CAA speech at the Aligarh Muslim University. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) However, after getting back to the room we realized it was not a savings at all, and they had not told us the true cost hidden in the fine print. We quickly alerted our credit card company and disputed the charge. Palladium has reached out saying we cannot cancel and the dispute cannot stand. We are reaching out in hopes you can help us. Lesotho Prime Minister Thomas Thabane will be charged with the murder of his estranged wife, who was gunned down ahead of his inauguration in 2017, police said Thursday, as the beleaguered premier announced he would quit by the end of July. Lilopelo Thabane, 58, was killed in June 2017 by unknown assailants on the outskirts of the capital Maseru, two days before the premier, now aged 80, took office. The couple had been embroiled in bitter divorce proceedings when Lipolelo was murdered in front of her home in the capital Maseru. Her death shook the tiny mountainous kingdom of Lesotho, which is entirely surrounded by South Africa. Police investigations found that communications records from the day of the murder included his cell phone number. Deputy Police Commissioner Paseka Mokete told AFP that the 80-year-old prime minister "will be formally charged with... murder". "It does not necessarily mean he was there but that he was acting in common purpose," Mokete said. The case also drew in the prime ministers current wife, Maesaiah Thabane, 42, who has also been charged with the same murder of her rival. "She was charged under common purpose even though she did not pull the trigger, but people she was acting in consent with pulled the trigger," said Mokete by phone. Sporting a bright yellow outfit complete with a matching headscarf, she sat straight-faced, next to the prime minister during his inauguration that was held at a stadium in Maseru, two days after the murder. The long unresolved murder had plunged the PM's leadership into question, forcing his All Basotho Convention (ABC) party to ask him to resign. - 'Old man should go' - The ABC had given him until Thursday to step aside but he snubbed their deadline, instead saying he will only go by July 31. "I effectively retire as prime minister with effect from the end of July this year, or at an earlier date if all the requisite preparations for my retirement are completed before then," he said in an address on national radio. He said the decision to step "has been the hardest to make in my over half-a-century career as in the public service. I have been battling with this idea for over a year now". "The truth is at my age I have lost most of my energy. I'm not as energetic as I used to be a few years ago," he added. "I hope that the remaining months that I will spend in office will afford parliament and my party enough time to work on transitional arrangements." Thabane's re-election in 2017 had brought hopes of stability to Lesotho, a country with a long history of turmoil. He first came to power in 2012 as head of the country's first coalition government, formed after an inconclusive vote. But his second term was rocked by Lipolelo's murder and ructions in the ruling party, buffeting the picturesque kingdom of 2.2 million people. Opposition parties and many ordinary people in the country also want Thabane gone. "It defies logic how he still wants to remain in office despite the controversy that surrounds him," said street vendor Malefa Mpobole, 42. Another citizen, Lenka Ntjabane, 43, said: "This old man should just go. He should just take his wife and go". Heart-breaking footage has captured the moment the wife of a hospital chief in Wuhan bade a tearful farewell to her husband after he died of coronavirus. Devastated Cai Liping, a nurse, was caught on camera wailing and chasing a van which was taking her husband's body from a hospital to a crematorium in the epicentre of the outbreak. Her partner, 51-year-old Dr Liu Zhiming, was declared dead Tuesday morning after contracting the deadly disease while fighting the epidemic on the front line, according to Wuhan health officials. Scroll down for video New footage has emerged of Dr Liu Zhiming's wife wailing and chasing a van carrying his body Dr Liu, the head of Wuhan Wuchang Hospital at the centre of the coronavirus outbreak, died of the disease at around 11am on Tuesday after contracting it at work, health officials confirmed Dr Liu, the former director of Wuhan Wuchang Hospital, was the first Chinese hospital leader who has lost his life to the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 2,100 people. He had just celebrated his birthday a week before his death and had refused to let his wife look after him during his treatment out of concerns that she could have caught the virus from him, reported Hubei Daily. His family, friends and colleagues gathered outside the Zhongfa Xincheng branch of Wuhan Tongji Hospital Tuesday afternoon to give him a send-off. A video trending on Chinese social media shows one hazmat-clad mourner, reported to be Dr Liu's wife, crying out loud and running after a van. The clip shows another person, also donning the full-body protective suit, trying to drag back the grief-stricken spouse when the vehicle slowly drives away from the hospital building to Yusunshan Crematorium. Dr Liu's family, friends and colleagues gathered outside the Zhongfa Xincheng branch of Wuhan Tongji Hospital Tuesday afternoon to give him a send-off after the leader died Dr Liu's relatives and colleagues sobbed inconsolably while wearing face masks at the solemn occasion. Dr Liu was the first Chinese hospital leader who has lost his life to the coronavirus Another video shared by Hubei Daily shows Dr Liu's other relatives and colleagues sobbing inconsolably while wearing face masks on the solemn occasion. When Dr Liu was critically ill, her partner repeatedly expressed her intention of going to quarantine units to take care of him, but Dr Liu firmly rejected her request. Cai, the chief nurse at the Intensive Care Unit of Wuhan No. 3 Hospital, had not been able to see her husband for nearly a month prior to his passing. She said her husband caught the virus on January 23. Just two days earlier, Dr Liu's hospital had been appointed by the city to be a dedicated coronavirus hospital. 'It is possible that the hospital was so busy and he did not pay special attention [to protect himself],' she told Chinese news outlet The Paper. The novel coronavirus has killed at least 2,245 people and infected more than 76,000 globally Li Wenliang, 34, succumbed to the deadly contagion in the early hours of February 7 local time, despite attempts to resuscitate him. The ophthalmologist caught the public's attention after he was reprimanded by police and accused of spreading 'fake news' for warning on social media of 'SARS at a Wuhan seafood market'. His hospital initially denied reports of his death Mourners pay their respect to deceased Chinese doctor Li Wenliang during a vigil ceremony in Hong Kong on February 7. The public have accused Dr Li's hospital of trying to cover up truth Dr Liu died in Wuhan Tongji Hospital after 'all-out rescue efforts failed', officials said. Pictured, throngs of people queue to receive treatment at the hospital in Hubei Province on January 22 Dr Liu was taken into the ICU on February 4 and the couple stayed in touch by messages and video calls. 'His condition was serious throughout the course. He had constant high fevers right after being hospitalised. He was transferred [to Tongji Hospital] on the 14th and was given intensive care straight away,' she said. Cai added that she planned to go back to work after dealing with the aftermath of her husband's death because 'many patients still need to be treated'. Dr Liu died at around 11am on Tuesday after 'all-out rescue efforts failed'. Wuhan Municipal Health Commission expressed its deepest condolences to Dr Liu's family members. It said: 'Since the epidemic started, comrade Liu Zhiming put aside his personal safety, led all medical workers at Wuchang Hospital to fight on the counter-epidemic front line and made important contributions in the work of fighting and controlling novel coronavirus. 'The work of fighting and controlling the epidemic in our city is at a critical juncture. We hope the city's many medical workers can unite as one to rise up to the challenges and fight heroically, to resolutely win the battle of epidemic prevention and control.' More than 75,700 patients have been infected, including nearly 1,000 outside of China Over 2,100 people have now died from the killer coronavirus rapidly sweeping the world Dr Liu's death sparked a fresh wave of anger just two weeks after another medic, whistle-blower Dr Li Wenliang, succumbed to the virus. In both cases, reports of the medics' deaths were retracted by officials who claimed that doctors were still trying to revive them. The director of the Wuchang Hospital was hailed for his 'important contributions in the work of fighting and controlling novel coronavirus'. But many users on Chinese social media platform Weibo drew comparisons between Dr Liu's death and that of Dr Li, who was reprimanded for trying to raise the alarm about the virus. Doctors in Wuhan face shortages of masks and protective bodysuits, with some even wearing makeshift hazmat suits and continuing to work despite showing respiratory symptoms. 'Has everyone forgotten what happened to Li Wenliang? They forcefully attempted resuscitation after he died,' one Weibo commenter wrote. A hashtag about Liu's death had 29million views by Tuesday afternoon. Originating in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the new coronavirus - known as COVID-19 - has infected more than 74,000 people inside China. Pictured, members of a neighborhood committee stand guard to control people entering the local area on February 19 in Beijing Overnight, Hubei health officials reported 349 new cases out of a nationwide total of 394 and 108 of the 114 new deaths across China. The figures are the lowest daily tolls in a month Originating in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the new coronavirus - known as COVID-19 - has infected more than 74,000 people inside China. The government has locked down tens of millions of people in several virus-hit cities, extended Lunar New Year holidays and pulled flights in a scramble to contain the virus. Hubei, situated in central China, accounts for more than 80 per cent of the confirmed cases and 95 per cent of the deaths globally. Overnight, the Hubei health officials reported 349 new cases out of a nationwide total of 394 and 108 of the 114 new deaths across China. The figures are the lowest daily tolls in a month and Beijing said outbreak control efforts 'are working'. Globally, the coronavirus epidemic has killed at least 2,128 people and infected more than 75,700, and has spread to at least two dozen countries. Homes and businesses in the city of Willis may see lower insurance rates due to what fire officials are describing as a remarkable accomplishment. Montgomery County Emergency Service District 1 Fire Chief Jason Oliphant had exciting news to share with the city officials as he introduced Deputy State Fire Marshal and Public Protection Classification Officer Jesse Williams and Skip Gibson with the Insurance Service Office on Tuesday night at City Hall. The officials announced the fire department has been graded with a new solid Class 1 rating, the best on the class 1-10 scale measuring a communitys fire protection system. The special ISO class rating is based on a score out of about 100 points, for which the community picked up a total of 93 points. Oliphant said insurance reduction rates depends on the vendor. Across the country with those 46,000 (fire protection) areas there are only less than 400 Class 1s, so you are in a very elite category, less than a half percent or so, Gibson said. Within the state of Texas, which is a very progressive state, we have about 80 class 1s, 77. Out of almost 3,300 protection areas in state you can see what elite class you are in there with Montgomery County ESD providing you with superior fire protection. The officials evaluated various criteria including the fire department and its training, communication which scored an excellent perfect 10 the communitys water services, risk-reduction efforts, and code enforcement. Gibson said the score ultimately reflects a culmination of whats available in the community and of all the stakeholders working together from the time 911 is call to the structure fire response and what kind of water is available. The effort is brought forth with the city council, beginning with the funding, picking your leaders, fire department, water department, 911 communication, Williams said. It is a community wide rating, it is not just a fire department rating. It is quite an honor to achieve. Youre providing exemplary fire protection services to the community and with that better fire protection. We look at better insurance rates but sometimes we overlook the obvious which is better fire protection, Williams said before presenting a plaque to the mayor. I am sure the city of Willis is proud of the job that the city is doing, the fire department is doing, and everything that comes with that. Oliphant said in a phone interview on Wednesday the evaluators were specifically impressed by the quality of the citys water system, including the availability of fire hydrants, which played a big role in the accomplishment. He added that ESD 1 has 85 full time employees and covers a total of 200 square miles, including the Willis and Panorama Village, which both previously held a Class 2 rating. Both cities now share the new Class 1 rating, since Panorama Village also ranked up a month ago, with The Woodlands Fire Department and South Montgomery County Fire Department. On the fire side, it is heavily on the amount of man power we have, training, Oliphant said. Without the adequate staff levels and training we also would not have been able to reach our goal of class one. Mayor Leonard Reed joined the fire officials to receive the award recognizing the achievement and commitment and commended the fire department. We really appreciate the job that they do here, Reed said referring to Oliphant the fire department. We are looking forward to more continued success. Councilman Thomas Belinoski also commended the chief and his department. I can tell you Jason and them do an excellent job, Belinoski said. I was a volunteer here for 20 years. It has come a long way. mellsworth@hcnonline.com Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Thursday assured some MLAs in the House of having a through probe into their allegations that purported Akali leader Anwar Masih, arrested after the "discovery" of 194 kg of heroin from his house near Amritsar, had links with senior Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia. The chief minister gave the statement to the House after Congress MLA Kulbir Singh Zira and AAP MLA Harpal Singh Cheema raked up the issue of the recent seizure of the drug and alleged that Masih had "relations" with Majithia. Anwar Masih has relations with Bikram Singh Majithia and I demand there should be an inquiry into it. He was made the Subordinate Services Board member and he is a right-hand man of Majithia, alleged Zira while waving purported pictures of Masih with Majithia. Cheema, who is the leader of the Opposition, also alleged that Masih had links with Majithia. Will the CM inform the House that STF would probe the matter? Cheema asked. Responding to the MLAs' claims, the CM said, We will definitely get it inquired and send it to the appropriate authority for the investigation. The anti-drug Special Task Forceon Wednesday had arrested former SSB member and Akali leader, Anwar Masih in a case of seizure of 194 kg of heroin after he failed to provide evidence of renting out the premises in village Sultanwind in the border region of Amritsar, from where a massive drug haul was made last month. The narcotics were seized from Masih's house in Sultanwind village in Amritsar district on January 31. On January 31, the STF had seized heroin and other contraband from a rented house in Akash Avenue in Sultanwind village of Amritsar district after the arrest of six persons, including an Afghanistan national and a woman. Talking to reporters later outside the assembly,Majithia said the CM's announcement of the probe was intended to divert attention from the burning public issues of Punjab. Majithia also demanded that an inquiry should be held into Masih's connection with Congress leaders in Amritsar, claiming that Masih was a Congressman. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A university student has been jailed for leaving his Maremma Sheepdog named Milk to starve to death on his balcony. Horrific photos show the shockingly underweight animal lying in filth when she was found dead by inspectors at Kingsford in Sydney's inner-east in June last year. Hongyou Zou, 25, was sentenced in Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday. She was severely emaciated and the balcony was covered in faeces and dog hair The balcony was covered in faeces and dog hair. Milk's body was taken to the RSPCA Sydney Veterinary Hospital for a post-mortem examination. The exam found the dog had no fat on her body and she had severe muscle atrophy. Her bones were protruding and she had an extreme abdominal tuck. Maggots covered Milk's body, as well as blood and faeces. She weighed just over 10kg when she was found - a third of the minimum standard weight for her breed, size and gender. The vet determined emaciation was the cause of death and it is believed she wasn't given food for at least three months before she died. Severe dehydration is also believed to be a factor. Her owner let her condition deteriorate for two months - in which time Zou could have taken her to the vet, the court heard. Between July 8 and October 10 inspectors from the RSPCA tried to speak with the University of New South Wales student repeatedly. The following month they were given evidence to prove he was Milk's owner before charging him. Zou was jailed for 16 months, with a non-parole period of eight months, on the charge of aggravated cruelty. Milk was found dead on the Zetland property's balcony without food or water insight in June 2019 She weighed just over ten kilograms when she was found - a third of the minimum standard weight for her breed, size and gender He was handed an additional four months for not taking Milk to the vet, which would be served concurrently. Zou is also banned from owning an animal for a decade. Judge Henson said this case was at the top end of animal abuse and called the man's actions 'egregious' and 'wicked'. The judge added that the community would be 'sickened and appalled' by the case. RSPCA NSW Chief Inspector Scott Meyers called the man's behaviour 'inexcusable'. Her owner is believed to have let her condition deteriorate for two months - in which time he could have taken her to the vet 'This dog starved to death, alone, on a cold balcony, surrounded by her own urine and faeces. She had nothing but a cardboard box,' he said. 'It was a cruel, needless death. Pet owners are responsible for the lives and welfare of their animals. 'This sentence reflects community expectations that serious animal cruelty offenders will be punished.' Mr Meyers added it is important people educate themselves on the needs of a dog. 'A Maremma Sheepdog is a working breed, and requires plenty of space and exercise, and a small balcony in a city was not an appropriate home for this type of dog,' he said. Samantha Sammi K. Palmer, 16, of Oswego, died Sunday, February 16, 2020, after a battle with cancer. According to Palmers obituary, she was born September 11, 2003. She attended both Mexico Central and Oswego City Schools. Her obituary said she loved pickles, nature and animals and had a particular fondness for Piggies and had a small collection of photos, stuffed animals and ceramic knick-knacks. If you have a suggestion for a feature obituary, please email the link and any other information youd like to share to bduncan@syracuse.com More recent feature obituaries: Thanks for visiting Syracuse.com. Quality local journalism has never been more important, and your subscription matters. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work. Contact Brenda Duncan anytime: 315-470-2265 | Email | Twitter ROCHESTER, N.Y. Meet Herman and Lundy, recent cuddle buddies and rescue animals. The two are an unlikely pair: Herman, a pigeon, suffered neurological damage more than a year ago. He can't fly. Little Lundy, a newborn chihuahua puppy, can't use his back legs. But stick them together, and the two will snuggle up as though they were members of the same litter or nest. The two met through the Mia Foundation, a rescue organization in Rochester, New York, that rehabilitates animals with birth defects and physical deformities. Sue Rogers, the nonprofit's founder, sends most of her rescues to foster homes around the United States but keeps a few of them for school programs about bullying. Their interspecies friendship has inspired scores of supporters to donate to the foundation. And the animals, Rogers said, make each other better. Two rough beginnings Herman was found more than a year ago in a car dealership parking lot, where he sat on the pavement, unmoving, for three days. Eventually his rescuers realized the poor pigeon couldn't fly. Neighboring wildlife rescues said he couldn't be rehabilitated and would need to be euthanized, so Rogers took care of him herself. He now rests in a baby crib for some of the day, but she takes him outside daily to stimulate him. Lundy, an infant chihuahua, is a new arrival. His breeders in South Carolina sent him to Rogers because he had trouble using his hind legs, a condition known as swimmers syndrome. At just 6 ounces, he was small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. Rogers said she suspects Lundy's difficulty walking is due to damage to his teeny spinal cord. When Lundy met Herman The two were bound to meet eventually. Rogers set them together while attending to Lundy and saw the way the two snuggled up almost immediately. Herman didn't peck, and Lundy didn't nibble. Rogers snapped some pictures of their cuddles. The "oohs" and "ahhs" followed soon after. People from every corner of the world flooded Rogers' inbox with donations, messages of support and, naturally, pleas to adopt Lundy or the other cute pups in her care. "I was blown away," she said. And the donations keep coming. The foundation raised $6,000 in two days, she said. That's enough to cover the high-end cost of a veterinary surgery that many of her rescue animals require. Lundy needs to get stronger Herman will likely stay in Rogers' care for the rest of his life. She's hopeful Lundy stays strong and survives. "With animals born with defects, there's a chance we could lose them," she said. "So we don't want to make anyone really excited. But now I think we've gotten a thousand emails asking, 'Please, don't ever separate those two!'" One of Lundy's rescuers fell in love with him while traveling with him to Rochester, so he may already have a new home lined up. The question, then, is if Herman will ask to tag along too. The-CNN-Wire & 2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved. You must be logged in to react. Click any reaction to login. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 A JUVENILE offender who violently assaulted a number of workers at Coovagh House has been sentenced to 18 months imprisonment. Jason Smith, now 19, of no fixed abode, was before Limerick Circuit Court in relation to four separate incidents on dates between December 2017 and March 2018. At the time, the teenager, who is originally from County Louth, was being detained at Coovagh House, on the grounds of St Josephs Hospital, on foot of a High Court Order. In one incident, a care worker sustained soft tissue injuries when he was punched across the back of the head while a second care worker was injured when he was struck while escorting Mr Smith to the bathroom. Judge Martina Baxter was told that following the second incident, the defendant had to be restrained as he threatened to stab and kill the care worker. The worker underwent a CT scan following the assault and has not returned to work since. Mr Smith has also admitted assaulting a security guard on January 26, 2018. The man was on duty near the entrance to St Josephs Hospital, when he was confronted, threatened and struck in the face. It was extremely frightening, said John OSullivan BL, prosecuting, who told the court that while the security guard sustained minor physical injuries, he was in fear of his life and continues to suffer from anxiety as a consequence of what happened. On March 5, 2018, Mr Smith grabbed a care worker by the arm and struck him three times. He also attempted to headbutt him and spat in his face. Imposing sentence, Judge Baxter said the thuggish, aggressive behaviour was not acceptable particularly as the victims was there to assist vulnerable people such as Mr Smith. She imposed a number of concurrent prison sentences totaling two years, suspending the final six months. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Asip Hasani (The Jakarta Post) Kediri Thu, February 20, 2020 19:13 691 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad2065ae550 1 National Jokowi,Kediri,East-Java,jayabaya,prophecy,kingdom,history Free When Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anung visited Lirboyo pesantren (Islamic boarding school) in Kediri, East Java, last week, he joked about advising President Joko Jokowi Widodo not to come to the city for the planned groundbreaking of the Kediri airport scheduled for April. Frankly I personally suggested that the President not come to Kediri because I still remember, believe it or not, after Gus Dur came back from visiting Lirboyo, political chaos erupted in Jakarta," Pramono said, referring to the political turmoil that resulted in then-president Abdurrahman Wahids impeachment and ouster in 2003. "But it's okay for the Vice President [to visit Kediri]," Pramono added. The statement raised some eyebrows, causing Pramono to clarify that it was just a joke in response to an earlier speech by pesantren leader Abdullah Kafabihi Mahrus, in which Abdullah mentioned a myth that presidents, vice presidents, and other high-ranking state officials will face misfortune if they visit Kediri. Pramono, a Kediri native, would most likely have been aware of the myth about Kediri's curse on rulers who visit the city. Indonesias first president and founding father Sukarno visited Kediri several times during his presidency, and was forced to hand over power to then Army general Soeharto in 1965. Former president BJ Habibie faced a vote of no confidence from the Peoples Consultative Assembly (MPR) a few months after a visit to the city While Gus Dur, as Pramono mentioned, was impeached three days after attending an event at the Lirboyo pesantren in Kediri. Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) chairwoman Megawati, meanwhile, did not visit Kediri during her presidential term. Believers see Kediri's supernatural power as being rooted in the power of King Jayabaya, who ruled the Hindu kingdom of Kediri in the 12th century and unified the then-divided realm and brought justice and prosperity to its people. Jayabaya is also credited with writing a number of prophecies, including one about the emergence of a messianic ruler called Ratu Adil in Java after a long period of being ruled by corrupt and evil leaders. Jayabayas immense power, the myth goes, thus overrides the power of rulers who dare to visit his capital city. Historian Agus Sunyoto, a native of Surabaya, East Java, believes the curse is not related to Jayabaya but rather to Kartikea Singha, a king of the South Kalingga kingdom, which is believed to have existed in the sixth century, with its capital city located in Keling district, some 35 kilometers east of Kediri. Kartikea, Agus said, was the first ruler of Java to write a criminal law code, called the Kalingga Dharmasastra, which was emulated by later Javanese kingdoms such as Singhasari and Majapahit. "One day he swore that rulers of Java who did not use their power to bring justice and prosperity for the people would be cursed," Agus a lecturer at the Nahdlatul Ulama University in Jakarta told The Jakarta Post. Agus said that the practice of law enforcement in Kalingga was reported by a Chinese Tang Dynasty envoy who visited Kalingga during the reign of Queen Shima, Kartikea's wife from North Kalingga in modern Jepara. The Chinese envoy witnessed the crown prince's leg being cut off as a punishment for breaking the law. He said there were only two Indonesian presidents of Indonesia who had managed to avoid King Kartikeas curse: Soeharto and Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Soeharto visited Kediri in the 1980s but, in fact, managed to hold on to the presidency for almost two more decades. "Soeharto visited Kediri with Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX [of Yogyakarta]. He acted as an ordinary person while the sultan, the ruler, was Hamengkubuwono. Then as we can see the sultan died not long after the visit," Agus said. Meanwhile, Yudhoyono visited Kediri twice as president in 2007 and 2014 to visit residents who were affected by the Mount Kelud eruptions. Agus explained that Yudhoyonos lineage descends from the Kalingga kingdom and he was thus better able to neutralize the curse. "Seeing people who were suffering from a disaster, the Kelud eruption, protected him from the curse," he added. So should Jokowi, who has yet to visit Kediri since he first won the presidency in 2014, brave the curse to attend the groundbreaking of the citys new airport in April? "If Pak Jokowi thinks he has upheld the law and the peoples interests then he shouldn't be afraid of the curse," Agus, who also heads the Nadhlatul Ulamas arts and culture board, said. The official Twitter page for the Sergeants Benevolent Association of the New York Police Department is under fire for sharing a 'disgraceful' post mocking a homeless person sleeping on a train in the city. In a Wednesday afternoon post, the SBA NYPD appeared to mock the city's homeless population while also poking fun at fare evasion protesters in an attempt to criticize Mayor Bill de Blasio. 'New York City: One bedroom, convenient transportation to D Train- NYC Subway, only $2.75 entrance fee unless of course you choose not to pay & prefer to jump turnstiles,' the SBA said in the post that showed a person sleeping on the train. 'If caught not paying $2.75 you will be given FREE Mets tickets. Welcome to NYC! Thank you Mayor DeBlasio.' In a Wednesday afternoon post, the SBA NYPD appeared to mock the city's homeless population while also poking fun at fare evasion protesters in an attempt to criticize Mayor Bill de Blasio Officers with the New York Police Department and protesters have clashed in recent months over the extensive police presence on the city's subways in response to increase fare evasion as train prices have gone up. In January, New York's attorney general, Letitia James, launched an investigation into whether the New York Police Department has been targeting communities of color for subway fare evasion. The SBA has notoriously ragged on Mayor de Blasio for what they perceive as the general public's disdain for police in the city. After the initial post mocking the homeless person, they shared the photo again in response to a tweet the mayor made about the city's housing market. But the post with the offensive caption gained a majority of the fury of those online. Officers with the New York Police Department and protesters have clashed in recent months over the extensive police presence on the city's subways New York Senator Zellnor Y Myrie said: 'This is disgraceful and @SBANYPD should be roundly admonished for mocking someones misfortune. Disgusting.' The sentiment was shared by historian Kevin M Kruse, who added: 'Has this account been hacked, or is it actually your intent to make everyone on the NYPD look like a raging a*****e?' Many took issue with the SBA making phone of the homeless person instead of offering them help. 'This is really disgraceful,' said one user. 'The thought that police, who are supposed to serve and protect all of the public, are photographing and mocking the poor and homeless should be sad and terrifying to us all.' New York Senator Zellnor Y Myrie said: 'This is disgraceful and @SBANYPD should be roundly admonished for mocking someones misfortune. Disgusting' The sentiment was shared by historian Kevin M Kruse, who added: 'Has this account been hacked, or is it actually your intent to make everyone on the NYPD look like a raging a*****e?' Many took issue with the SBA making phone of the homeless person instead of offering them help Another person asked: 'Were you able to direct this individual to a nearby shelter where they could be warmer and safer?' Several folks noted that the NYPD paid close to $69million in misconduct settlements in 2019. There were roughly 1,383 suits filed against the department. 'Last year, you paid out almost $69 million on lawsuits for excessive use of force, wrongful arrest and imprisonment, malicious prosecution and more,' said one user. 'Your problem isn't the homeless, turnstile jumpers, or a mayor with limited political capital it's you.' Several folks noted that the NYPD paid close to $69million in misconduct settlements in 2019. There were roughly 1,383 suits filed against the department And while there were those who critiqued de Blasio in the post, the bulk of the responses chastised the 'benevolent' association and Edward Mullins - President of the Police Sergeants Union. Others also directed the SBA's fury with the homeless crisis to Michael Bloomberg, noting that homelessness rose 40 per cent under his administration when he was mayor of the city. Last summer, Mullins was scolded for circulating a video that referred to black people as 'monsters' and made derogatory statements about those living in public housing. The SBA has been slammed for making controversial posts that appear to be in favor of police brutality, including tweets slamming protests in Ferguson, Missouri. And while there were those who critiqued de Blasio in the post, the bulk of the responses chastised the 'benevolent' association and Edward Mullins - President of the Police Sergeants Union YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 20, ARMENPRESS. President of the Republic of Artsakh Bako Sahakyan addressed a congratulatory message on the Artsakh Revival Day, the Presidential Office told Armenpress. The message says: Dear compatriots, On behalf of the Artsakh Republic authorities and myself personally I extend my most heartfelt congratulations on the Artsakh Revival Day. On the 20th of February 1988 an extraordinary session of the Regional Council of the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Region was held in Stepanakert and lent legitimacy to our people's perennial aspirations and announced the start of realizing their cherished dreams and goals. The session took place despite the brutal oppressions of the dictatorial Azerbaijan, it took place in strict conformity with democratic principles and norms, complying with the letter and spirit of the law. And for the decision was made, a decision for which our people had been fighting for decades. It was a struggle aimed at the restoration of historical justice, the protection of human rights and freedoms, universal and national values. It was a struggle the whole Armenian people stood for in Karabakh, Mother Armenia and the Diaspora. This day became the symbol of our people's courage, determination and love for freedom, our nation-wide solidarity. Dear compatriots, I once again congratulate our whole people on this memorable holiday and wish peace and greatest success on the path of building our national state. She's known for her daring outfit choices on Married At First Sight. And Natasha Spencer almost revealed a little too much as she arrived at Sydney Airport to jet out to Bali last year, following filming for the show. The stunning 26-year-old narrowly avoided a wardrobe malfunction as she walked through the international departures terminal in a plunging kimono playsuit. Careful! Married At First Sight's Natasha Spencer (pictured) narrowly avoided a wardrobe malfunction in a plunging kimono playsuit in Sydney Airport, last November Natasha almost revealed her bust in the stylish number. She accessorised the fashionable look with nude strappy heels, a Hermes handbag and opted for a subtle makeup palette for her flight. The beauty picked up some last minute essentials from an airport pharmacy, as she enjoyed an animated phone call on her mobile. Raunchy! Natasha almost revealed her bust in the stylish number Stylish! She accessorised the fashionable look with nude strappy heels, a Hermes bag and opted for a subtle makeup palette Natasha was waiting for co-star Tash Herz at the airport, before the pair fled Australia after leaving their spouses halfway through filming last year. The duo, who formed a strong connection on set, were pictured kissing before catching a flight to Bali, Indonesia. The overseas trip took place when MAFS still had five weeks of production to go, which means that both women chose to leave the experiment early. Forgot your toothbrush? She picked up some last minute essentials from an airport pharmacy Besties! Natasha was waiting for co-star Tash Herz in the airport, before the pair fled Australia after leaving their spouses halfway through filming last year The two women first met when production of MAFS began in September. Their flirty friendship reportedly caused tensions between Tash and her 'wife', Amanda Micallef. Although they are both still with their partners on the show, Tash and Natasha have spoiled their storylines by revealing that things didn't work out. Married At First Sight returns Sunday at 7.30pm on Channel Nine An Ethiopian crown from the 18th century has been returned to its home country after being hidden in a flat in the Netherlands for two decades. Ethiopian Sirak Asfaw, who fled to the Dutch port city of Rotterdam as a political refugee in the late 1970s, discovered the crown in a visitor's suitcase in 1998 and realised it was stolen. He protected it until he thought it was safe to return the crown to Ethiopian authorities. Last year he contacted independent Dutch art crimes investigator Arthur Brand - known as the "Indiana Jones of the art world" - who placed the crown in a high-security art facility in the Netherlands and alerted the police. On Thursday the crown was received by Ethiopia's Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for his role in ending two decades of conflict with neighbouring Eritrea. In a tweet he said he was grateful to Mr Asfaw and the Netherlands government for facilitating the return of the "precious crown stolen several years ago". It went missing in 1993 and is thought to be one of only 20 in existence. The crown features depictions of Jesus Christ, God and the Holy Spirit, along with Jesus' disciples. "This is a historic day for us," said Hirut Kassaw, Ethiopia's minister for culture and tourism. "I still don't know how this crown and the other items were looted and taken out of Ethiopia." The Dutch government said the crown was the property of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. It said the crown went missing from the Holy Trinity Church in the village of Cheleqot. The crown is on display at Ethiopia's national museum in the capital Addis Ababa for a few days and will then be returned to the church. The Dutch minister for foreign trade, Sigrid Kaag, attended the handover ceremony. "We're honoured and delighted to have been able to facilitate the rightful return," she said. Tehran: Iran said on Thursday that three more people have been infected with the new coronavirus that originated in central China, following an announcement the day before that two people had died of the illness caused by the virus in the Iranian city of Qom. All schools and universities, including religious Shiite seminaries, were shut down in the holy city of Qom, according to the official IRNA news agency. Other news reports said Iran had recently evacuated 60 Iranian students from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicentre of the epidemic. Qom, located around 140 kilometers south of the capital, Tehran, is a popular religious destination and a centre of learning and religious studies for Shiite Muslims from inside Iran, as well as Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan and Azerbaijan. It is also known for its cattle farms. An official in Iran's health ministry, Kiyanoush Jahanpour, said on his twitter account that the number of confirmed cases of the virus in Iran was five, including the two elderly Iranian citizens who died on Wednesday in Qom. IRNA reported that the three new cases are all Iranians residing in Qom, with one of the infected having visited the city of Arak. Mohammad Mahdi Gouya, Iran's deputy health minister, said they did not appear to have had any contact with Chinese nationals. Iranian authorities were now investigating the origin of the disease, and its possible link with religious pilgrims from Pakistan or other countries. Iran's health minister Saeed Namaki said the roughly 60 Iranian students evacuated from Wuhan had been quarantined upon their return to Iran and were discharged after 14 days without any health problems. Iran once relied heavily on China to buy its oil and some Chinese companies have continued doing business with Iran in the face of US sanctions. Unlike other countries - such as Saudi Arabia, which barred its citizens and residents from travelling to China - Iran has not imposed such measures on travel there. The new virus emerged in Wuhan, China in December. Since then, more than 75,000 people have been infected globally, with more than 2,000 deaths being reported, mostly in China. The new virus comes from a large family of coronaviruses, some causing nothing worse than a cold. It causes cold- and flu-like symptoms, including cough and fever, and in more severe cases, shortness of breath. It can worsen to pneumonia, which can be fatal. The World Health Organisation recently named the illness it causes COVID-19, referring to both coronavirus and its origin late last year. The virus has had few cases in the Middle East so far. There have been nine cases of the virus confirmed in the United Arab Emirates, which is a popular tourist destination, and one case in Egypt. Of the nine in the UAE, seven are Chinese nationals, one is a Filipino and another an Indian national. Meanwhile, Egypt's national air carrier announced on Thursday that it would resume flights to China as of February 27 after nearly three weeks of suspension. Egypt Air said in a statement it will operate one flight a week between Cairo and two Chinese cities, Beijing and Guangzhou. Before the suspension, the carrier used to operate a daily flight to Guangzhou and three weekly ones to Beijing and Hangzhou. A middle-aged man and woman were found dead Wednesday night inside their Third Ward home, believed to be victims of carbon monoxide poisoning. The couple recently moved into the home in the 3000 block of Burkett, according to Houston Police Department Lt. Ronnie Wilkins. Family members curious about the couples wellbeing traveled to the home around 9:30 p.m. and found the two dead inside, Wilkins said. On the left is an image of the Sombrero galaxy (M104) that includes a portion of the much fainter halo far outside its bright disk and bulge. Hubble photographed two regions in the halo (one of which is shown by the white box). The images on the right zoom in to show the level of detail Hubble captured. The orange box, a small subset of Hubble's view, contains myriad halo stars. The stellar population increases in density closer to the galaxy's disk (bottom blue box). Each frame contains a bright globular cluster of stars, of which there are many in the galaxy's halo. The Sombrero's halo contained more metal-rich stars than expected, but even stranger was the near-absence of old, metal-poor stars typically found in the halos of massive galaxies. Many of the globular clusters, however, contain metal-poor stars. A possible explanation for the Sombrero's perplexing features is that it is the product of the merger of massive galaxies billions of years ago, even though the smooth appearance of the galaxy's disk and halo show no signs of such a huge disruption. Credit: NASA/Digitized Sky Survey/P. Goudfrooij (STScI)/The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Surprising new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled "brim" of the Sombrero galaxy's disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble's sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero's vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy's central portion, typically made of older stars. These latest observations of the Sombrero are turning conventional theory on its head, showing only a tiny fraction of older, metal-poor stars in the halo, plus an unexpected abundance of metal-rich stars typically found only in a galaxy's disk, and the central bulge. Past major galaxy mergers are a possible explanation, though the stately Sombrero shows none of the messy evidence of a recent merger of massive galaxies. "The Sombrero has always been a bit of a weird galaxy, which is what makes it so interesting," said Paul Goudfrooij of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, Maryland. "Hubble's metallicity measurements (i.e., the abundance of heavy elements in the stars) are another indication that the Sombrero has a lot to teach us about galaxy assembly and evolution." "Hubble's observations of the Sombrero's halo are turning our generally accepted understanding of galaxy makeup and metallicity on its head," added co-investigator Roger Cohen of STScI. Long a favorite of astronomers and amateur sky watchers alike for its bright beauty and curious structure, the Sombrero galaxy (M104) now has a new chapter in its strange storyan extended halo of metal-rich stars with barely a sign of the expected metal-poor stars that have been observed in the halos of other galaxies. Researchers, puzzling over the data from Hubble, turned to sophisticated computer models to suggest explanations for the perplexing inversion of conventional galactic theory. Those results suggest the equally surprising possibility of major mergers in the galaxy's past, though the Sombrero's majestic structure bears no evidence of recent disruption. The unusual findings and possible explanations are published in the Astrophysical Journal. "The absence of metal-poor stars was a big surprise," said Goudfrooij, "and the abundance of metal-rich stars only added to the mystery." In a galaxy's halo astronomers expect to find earlier generations of stars with less heavy elements, called metals, as compared to the crowded stellar cities in the main disk of a galaxy. Elements are created through the stellar "lifecycle" process, and the longer a galaxy has had stars going through this cycle, the more element-rich the gas and the higher-metallicity the stars that form from that gas. These younger, high-metallicity stars are typically found in the main disk of the galaxy where the stellar population is denseror so goes the conventional wisdom. Complicating the facts is the presence of many old, metal-poor globular clusters of stars. These older, metal-poor stars are expected to eventually move out of their clusters and become part of the general stellar halo, but that process seems to have been inefficient in the Sombrero galaxy. The team compared their results with recent computer simulations to see what could be the origin of such unexpected metallicity measurements in the galaxy's halo. The results also defied expectations, indicating that the unperturbed Sombrero had undergone major accretion, or merger, events billions of years ago. Unlike our Milky Way galaxy, which is thought to have swallowed up many small satellite galaxies in so-called "minor" accretions over billions of years, a major accretion is the merger of two or more similarly massive galaxies that are rich in later-generation, higher-metallicity stars. The satellite galaxies only contained low-metallicity stars that were largely hydrogen and helium from the big bang. Heavier elements had to be cooked up in stellar interiors through nucleosynthesis and incorporated into later-generation stars. This process was rather ineffective in dwarf galaxies such as those around our Milky Way, and more effective in larger, more evolved galaxies. The results for the Sombrero are surprising because its smooth disk shows no signs of disruption. By comparison, numerous interacting galaxies, like the iconic Antennae galaxies, get their name from the distorted appearance of their spiral arms due to the tidal forces of their interaction. Mergers of similarly massive galaxies typically coalesce into large, smooth elliptical galaxies with extended halosa process that takes billions of years. But the Sombrero has never quite fit the traditional definition of either a spiral or an elliptical galaxy. It is somewhere in betweena hybrid. For this particular project, the team chose the Sombrero mainly for its unique morphology. They wanted to find out how such "hybrid" galaxies might have formed and assembled over time. Follow-up studies for halo metallicity distributions will be done with several galaxies at distances similar to that of the Sombrero. The research team looks forward to future observatories continuing the investigation into the Sombrero's unexpected properties. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), with a field of view 100 times that of Hubble, will be capable of capturing a continuous image of the galaxy's halo while picking up more stars in infrared light. The James Webb Space Telescope will also be valuable for its Hubble-like resolution and deeper infrared sensitivity. Explore further Astronomers conduct one of the most detailed studies of a stellar halo More information: Roger E. Cohen et al, The Strikingly Metal-rich Halo of the Sombrero Galaxy, The Astrophysical Journal (2020). Journal information: Astrophysical Journal Roger E. Cohen et al, The Strikingly Metal-rich Halo of the Sombrero Galaxy,(2020). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ab64e9 EDMONTONThe Alberta government, fresh off failed contract talks with doctors, is ending its long-standing master agreement with them and putting new rules in place in the spring. Changes include new fee rules on extended patient visits that doctors have already said will devastate the bottom line for some family and rural practices. Health Minister Tyler Shandro says ending the agreement is a difficult but necessary move, given that the province was at an impasse with doctors on how to reduce costs and improve service in the $20.6-billion health system. Its not a decision we take lightly, but since May weve been talking to (the Alberta Medical Association) about our fiscal imperative, said Shandro in an interview Thursday. Unfortunately, we werent successful in being able to get them to work with us on that issue. The current master agreement with physicians ends March 31. Both sides have tried and failed to agree on new terms in negotiations since November. Last fall, Premier Jason Kenneys United Conservatives passed legislation giving the government the right to unilaterally end the agreement. Dr. Christine Molnar, president of Alberta Medical Association, said in a statement Thursday that its a sad day for health care in the province. The association, which is the bargaining arm for doctors, had agreed to some cost-saving changes, she said, and it was going to put another offer to the government Friday. It became clear today that government is not interested in collaboration, she said. Moving forward will be difficult and I am genuinely concerned for patients. This attack on physicians particularly the disproportionate attack on family physicians is disturbing. Starting April 1, physician compensation will remain at its current level of $5.4 billion a year. But the changes are expected to prevent $2 billion in added costs tied to physician services over this current fiscal year and the three after that. There wont be any changes to the current rates doctors charge for individual procedures and benefits such as parental leave will remain in place. The key change, which has also been the focus of a fiery dispute between doctors and the government, will be to a billing designation known as complex modifiers. Under Albertas current fee-for-service model, doctors can bill $41 as a base fee for each patient visit no matter how short or how long. A decade ago, Alberta added in an extra fee called a complex modifier to recognize that some patients have multiple or complex issues and doctors should be compensated for overly long visits. If a visit went more than 15 minutes, doctors were able to extend it 10 minutes and bill the province a complex modifier fee of $18, for a total of $59. As of April 1, the fee will be halved from $18 to $9, for a new total fee of $50. As of April 1, 2021, the $18 complex modifier will return. But physicians wont be allowed to bill for it until the 25-minute mark. Shandros ministry says the change is necessary for two reasons: more time is needed to assess complex patients and the current complex modifier is being abused, with too many doctors billing $59 at the 15-minute mark. The AMA has said extending a visit to 25 minutes would reduce fees by $200 million and devastate many family and rural practices. It has argued complex modifiers are not only for exceptional cases and take into account all the work preparation, follow-up and face-to-face time needed for patients with complex needs. It also keeps those patients out of the hospital. The issue has riled up some doctors, many of whom have put up signs warning patients they may have to cut future visits short to recoup funds needed to keep their practices going. The government has made the changes based on two reports that say Alberta is paying more on physician services than other provinces, but has too many performance measures below national averages. It estimates gross clinical earnings for an Alberta doctor in 2018-19 at almost $390,000 a year about $90,000 more than a comparable one in Ontario. The AMA has said the governments position is built on flawed data that doesnt take into account differences in fee rules and that Alberta doctors are paid in line with those other provinces. Opposition NDP health critic David Shepherd labelled the announcement a heedlessly aggressive move by the province that could see physicians leave and patient care compromised, particularly in rural areas. Its a spectacular failure of this premier, his (health) minister, his entire cabinet that they couldnt reach an agreement with physicians or even find a basis for further talks. Alberta has more than 10,800 doctors split evenly between general practitioners and specialists. Most work in urban areas. Read more about: Patna: Former JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar has raised the political temperature in Bihar by leading a massive Jan Gan Man Yatra to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), NPR and NRC. While addressing a public meeting in Bihars Purnea on Thursday the former student leader criticized the BJP-led government at the Centre for the divisive Citizenship Act. The battle against this divisive CAA, NPR and NRC are not being fought to become a leader but to save the country. Unemployment has increased, farmers and unemployed youths of this country are committing suicide but they are discussing issues like CAA, NPR and NRC. Around 3 crore youths in the country have lost their jobs in the last few months, he said. Targeting the BJP over number of issues including Bihar Assembly elections he said that Religion is being used as a political tool. Whenever there is election the issue of saving religion surfaces. Instead of talking about development and other core issues they are discussing the CAA and NRC. Activists and organisers of Jan Gan Man Yatra told this newspaper that Kanhaiya Kumar is also likely to address anti-CAA protesters who have been sitting in Patna on February 22. Kanhaiya Kumars state-wide tour which began on December 30 from Bhitiharwa Gandhi Ashram in West Champaran is scheduled to conclude with a rally on the theme Naagrikta Bachao, Desh Bachao (Save Citizenship, save the country) in Patna on February 27. Kanhaiyas supporters said that leaders associated with Congress and Jitan Ram Manjhis Hindustani Awam Morcha have also extended their support to the rally. Had he not been a student, admirer and follower of Amartya Sen, TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan feels it might have been a Padma Bhushan. Illustration: Dominic Xavier/Rediff.com The year was 1971. The place Delhi School of Economics, which was undergoing a major upheaval. Amartya Sen, who taught welfare economics and social choice theory, had just left for the London School of Economics. So had Manmohan Singh, who taught international trade theory, for the commerce ministry. So, too, had Arjun Sengupta who taught economic policy. Into the breach left by Sen and Singh walked a 28 year old, ex-student of Sen. He had done both his MA and PhD at DSchool, as it is called, and then gone off abroad somewhere. His name, we were told, was Prasanta Pattanaik. He was shy and self-effacing. He spoke with a strong Oriya accent and slight lisp, almost in a whisper. We students were not impressed. But slowly and surely he began to show his real prowess. This had three aspects. One was phenomenal patience when confronted with scores of intellectually heterogeneous students. He understood how deeply students from Delhi University's undergraduate system were baffled by all that advanced economics theory and maths. The other was the ability to explain things till everyone -- or almost everyone -- had comprehended some arcane point. It took time, but it was reassuring. He would start with a statement of the problem and solution. Then would come geometry. And finally the algebra. The international trade classes were especially problematic. They were large and, therefore, more heterogeneous than the social choice ones. Most wanted stuff written on the board that they could copy and regurgitate in exam. The third aspect was extraordinary kindness to students, which was notoriously lacking amongst the senior faculty. Pattanaik stayed at DSchool for just five or six years. He left around 1975 or 1976, much to the dismay and despair of students. They could sense how much he cared. Once, I couldn't find a book in the library that he had said needed to be read. He cycled home five kilometres, one way, in the heat of a late April afternoon to fetch the book for me. The last I saw him was in 1972 or 1973 when I went to ask him about a topic for research. He suggested environmental economics and a study of Chilika lake in Odisha, which was under some sort of threat. It's the second largest brackish water lake in the world covering around 1,000 sq km. Pattanaik was awarded a Padma Shri this year. Had he not been a student, admirer and follower of Amartya Sen, it might have been a Padma Bhushan. But he qualifies on one other, unassailable ground. No one outside the narrow circle of choice theorists knows him. This is consistent with the Modi government's approach which has made it a point to go outside the NDMC-PLU line-up. You may well ask, what did Pattanaik do after he went away to a university in the US? He persisted, nearly for his entire career, with social choice theory which kind of faded away in the 1980s. Rather like game theory it had had a clear run for three decades. But then the empiricists took over and purely theoretical efforts had no takers any longer. And what is social choice theory? No one quite knows because it seeks to achieve the impossible, namely, devising consistent rules for arriving at social consensus over how to order a country's affairs -- more-or-less, that is. And, of course, it fails because it quickly becomes apparent that whatever set of rules you draw up, different rules can and do contradict each other (for instance, CAA). To find a way out of this problem in a mathematically-acceptable way is the challenge. But it leads nowhere. Despite this, Pattanaik devoted himself to this endeavour. Some would say it was the waste of a colossal brain. But a lot of mathematics, like number theory, is like that. I mean, who but a true maths bhakt would care about, say, the Fibonacci Sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers? In fact, there's even a journal devoted entirely to them. That's not unlike social choice theory which, too, has a journal devoted to it, and which Pattanaik once edited. It's not for the faint-hearted. So why do academics like Pattanaik devote themselves to solving what are essentially unsolvable problems? The best answer was given by George Mallory who was asked why he wanted to climb the Everest. 'Because it's there,' he replied. Pattanaik and other social choice theorists, too, can say the same thing. A section of track where a train derailed killing two people and injuring 11 had been an accident waiting to happen. Daily Mail Australia has been told drivers who frequently travelled alongside the fatal section of track where an interstate train derailed on Thursday was 'as rough as guts'. The driver, 54, from the Australian Capital Territory and his male pilot, 49, from Victoria died at the scene after the train from Sydney to Melbourne derailed with 160 passengers on board. Authorities remain at the scene of a fatal derailment of an XPT train north of Melbourne Passenger Finley Arkless (pictured) told how he tried to save the driver but it was too late The derailment occurred along a stretch of deteriorated track, which V/Line drivers had refused to travel along as it awaited maintenance. 'Conditions were altered and V/Line drivers rightly refused to traverse this section over the past week,' Rail Tram and Bus Union Victorian secretary Luba Grigorovitch said. The express passenger train (XPT) - which can reach speeds of up to 160km/h - came off the tracks just before 8pm Thursday near the town of Wallan, 50km north of Melbourne. A driver, who wished to remain anonymous, told Daily Mail Australia the stretch of track was 'notoriously rough' and had been so for months. 'It was a bloody nightmare,' the driver said. Passengers have recalled the horrifying moment of impact where 'everyone was screaming' as they were violently thrown around the carriages. 'There was almost silence and then an awful thud as the world turned upside down,' one woman told The Herald Sun. 'People were yelling in confusion and started gasping like the air had been knocked from their lungs.' Finley Arkless told how he used a fire extinguisher to smash the driver cabin window in a desperate attempt to free the driver, cutting his hand in the process. 'I ran over to try and smash the window but I couldn't get him out,' he told reporters. Other passengers said the driver had made an announcement on the PA system minutes prior that they were planning to make up time on the service, which was running two hours behind schedule. Two people were killed when a train derailed outside of Wallan. The stretch of rail was feared by Victorian train drivers The incident came just weeks after another derailment on tracks in Barnawartha, just south of Albury, in northern Victoria. That derailment, on January 29, saw a north bound Pacific National freight train lose several wagons and grind to a halt. Shortly after a V/Line train hauling passengers travelling from Albury to Melbourne on an adjacent track struck a container from a derailed wagon from the freight train. Seventeen passengers and three crew were assessed by ambulance services but were lucky to avoid injury or worse. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigation into that derailment was still underway when Thursday's tragedy happened. While all fingers are pointed directly at the condition of the federally owned track, politicians and authorities refused to jump to any conclusions when questioned by a media pack at the crash scene in Wallan on Friday. Just hours before the crash, V/Line had warned its customers that delays of up to 80 minutes were expected 'due to a ongoing rail equipment fault near Wallan'. It also warned about 'signalling issues' in the area. V/Line runs an adjacent track to the federal line, which was operating out of Albury to Melbourne. Victorian Transport Minister Melissa Horne said repair works had been 'kicking off' in the area when the crash happened, but refused to link the Barnawartha derailment to the Wallan crash. Two people have died after a train from Sydney to Melbourne derailed with 160 passengers on board. The Sydney-Melbourne express train is pictured with one carriage lying on its side A passenger is taken into an ambulance by paramedics after being rescued from the wreckage 'There was the incidents at Barnawartha and we will continue to continue our maintenance schedule along that V/Line track,' she said. Ms Horne said she had written to the CEO of the Australian Rail Track Corporation to 'encourage' it to continue its maintenance works on its section of track. 'I'm not aware if V/Line drivers were refusing to use the track,' she said. V/Line boss James Pinder said V/Line drivers had operated on the track yesterday and refused to say whether drivers had expressed concerns over its condition. 'I'm unaware of those comments that have been made,' he said. Mr Pinder said the ARTC had given V/Line assurances the section of track where the Barnawartha incident occurred had been deemed safe following the derailment there. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said he had confidence the track where yesterday's derailment took place was also safe. 'No authorities would ever let a train go on an unsafe track and I want to make that very, very clear,' he said. Victorian Transport Minister Melissa Horne attended the crash scene at Wallan on Friday. Two people were killed in the tragedy Police assess the damaged train on Friday as investigators work to discover exactly what caused it to derail One man told Channel Nine how train crew were handing out complaint cards to passengers moments before the horror derailment. There are also reports of a signal fault and ongoing problems on that section of the track for weeks prior to the accident. In the two days leading up to the derailment, the V/Line Seymour Line, which operates on the same stretch of railway as the interstate service - took to social media to warn passengers of extensive delays on multiple services due to 'an ongoing rail equipment fault near Wallan'. Authorities remained at the scene on Friday as investigations continue. The track is expected to be closed for a number of days. All Seymour, Shepparton and Albury train services have been replaced by coaches until further notice. The overnight Sydney to Melbourne XPT service terminated at Albury, where passengers are making their way to their final destination via coach. Friday morning services between the two cities have been replaced by coach for the entire journey. One person was taken to hospital in a stable condition and 11 others were taken to hospital with minor injuries. There are 20 people still unaccounted for, but Victoria Police told Daily Mail Australia they are believed to have evacuated the train before emergency crews arrived. They are urged to contact authorities to confirm they are safe. Rescue workers at the scene treat a patient on a stretcher. Some 160 people were on board when the train crashed One passenger reported the carriages crumpling when the train derailed and items going 'flying' including tray tables All passengers who were able to walk from the train have been taken to the Wallan McDonald's and the BP Truckstore area being used as a triage centre At a triage centre set up at a nearby service station, a Sydney couple who had taken the train to visit their son in Melbourne said the tragedy had been terrifying. 'You just hang on for grim death. You're being thrown around, the things going along tilting over and all you can look out the window and just see dirt and debris and stuff flying up past the windows and the track itself is just twisted and bent,' the man said. 'It probably went about 150 metres before it stopped, there were carriages going sideways - pretty horrifying.' The woman said her thoughts were with those who had died. 'We're very sad about that. Two people who went off to work this morning and never went home,' she said. The train, pictured on Thursday night, had left Sydney's Central Station at 7.40am on Thursday and was scheduled to arrive at Melbourne's Southern Cross Station at 6.30pm Police officers are seen outside the triage centre created at a service station near the derailed train in Wallan on Thursday The train had left Sydney's Central Station at 7.40am on Thursday and was scheduled to arrive at Melbourne's Southern Cross Station at 6.30pm. It was running more than two hours late at the time of the crash. The track buckled and both carriages shifted at least 10 metres from their normal trajectory. The train was reportedly gaining speed prior to coming off the tracks after stopping for a signalling issue. Luggage is pictured on railway tracks after the train from Sydney to Melbourne derailed on Thursday evening Another passenger reported the carriages crumpling when the train derailed, but said most people were able to walk off the train by themselves. 'Fortunately only a few people injured in our carriage,' the passenger Dr Scott Rickard wrote on Twitter. 'Stuff flew everywhere. Carriages crumpled at edges. We walked out. Most people able to walk out. 'We're in a bit of shock, but OK. Drinking cuppas now.' Another passenger told The Age the derailment lasted about a minute from the moment the train left the tracks to when it came to a halt. Emergency responders pictured at the scene of the derailment near Wallan station. The rail lines between Melbourne and Sydney have been closed as the injured are assessed at a nearby truck stop People were tossing around there was some screaming - everyone was just grasping on, some in the brace position, preparing for the possibility of something worse,' the passenger Rob Jennings said. When the train finally stopped, he said passengers who were mostly unscathed by the derailment tried to free the driver - while others tried in vain to smash the windows of their carriage. Pictures taken at the scene showed one of the train's carriages on its side and luggage lying on the railway tracks. In the days before the derailment the V/Line Seymour Line had posted dozens of times on Twitter about delays due to a 'rail equipment fault' at Wallan Passengers are pictured after the train derailed. Eleven people have been taken to hospital - one of whom is in a stable condition Shocking scenes at Wallan. Ive been sent this video that shows the aftermath of the passenger train derailment @theage pic.twitter.com/ry6v9YCv0N erin pearson (@epearson_3) February 20, 2020 Police and fire emergency services are pictured at the scene. At least three helicopters were deployed to the scene, which was described by the Country Fire Service as 'very chaotic' A triage centre has been set up nearby following the derailment which happened about 7.50pm on Thursday The rail lines between Melbourne and Sydney have been closed. At least three helicopters were deployed to a scene the Country Fire Authority described as 'very chaotic'. All passengers who were able to walk from the train were taken to the Wallan McDonald's and the BP Truckstore area being used as a triage centre. BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 20 Trend: The body of the missing Azerbaijani soldier Akif Abbasov has been evacuated from neutral territory, Head of the Public Relations Department of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) Azerbaijan Office Ilaha Huseynova told Trend. On Feb. 19, after the appeal and consent of the parties, ICRC participated as a neutral intermediary in the operation to evacuate the body of the dead soldier from the territory on the border of Azerbaijan with Armenia. A soldier of the Azerbaijani Army Akif Abbasov had gone missing some time ago. The soldier's body was discovered on the Azerbaijan-Armenia border a few days ago. 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, 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 Nagorno Karabakh and the surrounding districts. CicLAvia: South Los Angeles Presented by Metro kicks off its 10-year anniversary season with an event in South Los Angeles on Feb. 23 CicLAvia kicks off its 2020 season on Feb. 23 in South Los Angeles, launching the celebration of its 10-year anniversary. This is the second time CicLAvia hosts an event in South Los Angeles. CicLavia: South Los Angeles Presented by Metro will travel along Central Avenue between South Central, Florence-Firestone and Watts from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. The route has no starting or ending point. Participants can start and end anywhere they like. Participants are welcome to use any form of non-motorized transportation and all ages are encouraged to attend. The event hours are from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. A list of activities along the route is available here. ADVERTISEMENT The event will kick off with an opening press conference. Details below: Date: Sunday, February 23, 2020 Time: 8:30 am 9:00 am Location: 2603 S Central Ave, LA CA 90011 (near corner of S. Central Ave and Adams) RSVP: [email protected] or (951) 205-4676 (M) About event: CicLavia: South Los Angeles presented by Metro is a six-mile route along Central Avenue that travels between South Central, Florence-Firestone and Watts from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. It is the 35th CicLAvia since its founding in October 2020. Every year Google releases a new version of Android. - last year, it was Android 10, and now we're looking at Android 11. And before releasing the final version of the software to all of its users, Google sends out test builds of its software, so the interested users and developers can get their hands on it and see what's new. It's worth pointing out that these test builds of Android usually come with a lot of bugs, so we don't recommend installing it on your primary phone. And it's also the reason we installed the developer preview of Android 11, so you don't have to. Here are the best features that we think are worth checking out this year - Chat Bubbles YouTube/ TheVerge Yes, this particular feature is exactly similar to how Facebook handles chat bubbles with its Messenger app. Right now, the feature is only supported by Android's native messaging app. but it looks like the idea is to let each and every messaging app take advantage of it and help users manage chats in a better way. Conversation in Notification Shade Google is also making it super easy to interact with a message notification on the notification screen without having to open the app. In addition to being able to respond to messages from the notification shade, users will now be able to do other things like sending pictures and more. Also, the message thread notifications will be the first thing you'll see on your notification shade going forward, with all the other notifications lining up after that. The idea is to give a rich user experience when it comes to messaging and just communicating, in general. After all, it's the primary function of the phone, so prioritizing that is the key here. One-Time App Permissions YouTube/ TheVerge "App Permissions" was a huge part of Android 10 update and that's something Google is once again focusing on this year with the Android 11 update. This time around, Google is making it very easy to grant one-time permissions for access to things like the location, microphone and camera. This temporary access is revoked as soon as you leave the app. Mute Vibrations While Using Camera Getting new notifications while taking a picture or shooting a video can be super annoying. Especially in videos, both the notification sound and the vibration gets captured in the video, ruining the shot. Well, that's set to change with Android 11 as there'll be an option to mute them while using the camera app. The developer preview of Android 11 comes with a host of other features apart from the ones we've mentioned. There are things like support for better 5G connectivity, new API to handle waterfall and pinhole display better, improved privacy and more. It's pretty cool that we're getting to use an early build to check out everything that's new. Again, we'd like to inform you that this developer preview of Android 11 is a very early version of what we'll be getting later this year at Google I/O, so it's not ideal to expect anything radically new or stable here. You can head to XDA's guide here to follow the same steps that we did to install the Android 11 Developer Preview 1. But it's probably a good idea to stay away from it unless you have a spare Pixel phone lying around. For the past week vocal critics have attacked Justin Trudeau for travelling to Africa to lobby for support for Canadas bid for a seat on the United Nations Security Council while vital rail traffic at home was coming to a screeching stop. Lame-duck Conservative leader Andrew Scheer sneered at Trudeaus efforts to obtain a Security Council seat as a vanity project. Trump-loving isolationists in our midst who have long hated both the UN and Trudeau ranted about what one called Trudeaus ego-driven campaign to obtain a powerless seat on a dysfunctional international organization. Commentators in right-wing publications and on social media whined about how the PM is pandering to dictators and despots as he seeks support for a seat on the council. Others complained about what they described as Trudeaus soft and confusing foreign policies and how they are supposedly hurting Canadas bid. Despite the naysayers, though, Trudeau is right to push for a seat on the Security Council. The 15-member council is arguably the most important forum in the world for international issues, from armed conflicts to disease prevention, famine relief, climate change and more. Simply, if Canada wants to regain its reputation as an international player, its in our interest to be a non-permanent member of the Security Council, which is in effect the cabinet of the 193-nation UN General Assembly. True, the Security Council is flawed and at times completely ineffective. You just have to watch whats happening in Syria to understand the challenges the council faces. But thats no reason to abandon our efforts to win a seat on the council when the General Assembly votes in June. In fact, theres no real alternative to the council. Its the place where middle powers such as Canada can punch above their weight on the world stage. For Canada, membership might even help prevent the country from sliding further into Trump-like isolationism thats gaining more and more favour in conservative circles here. Canada is up against Norway and Ireland for two seats on the council, which has five permanent members, namely the U.S., China, Russia, the United Kingdom and France, as well as 10 non-permanent members. Each year, the General Assembly elects five of the 10 seats for a two-year term. Its been 20 years since Canada last sat on the council. Much has changed since then, including Canadas stature on the world stage. Under Stephen Harper, our reputation as an honest broker declined sharply. Harper was dismissive of the United Nation, cosying up to the U.S. and President George W. Bush while neglecting multinational bodies. It was so bad that in 2010 Canada was embarrassed when Portugal won out in the contest for a Security Council seat. It was only time in the UNs history that Canada lost a bid for one of these influential posts. Over the past year, Trudeau could have bolstered our bid even more by signalling the country is willing to play a bigger role in international security, such as by increasing aid and pursuing stricter environmental controls. Still, our case is strong for a Security Council seat. Today, Canada remains one of top 10 largest contributors to the UNs regular budget. We are a diverse nation. We have a strong democratic tradition. Importantly, when Canada was previously on the council we played decisive roles in many of the overriding issues of the day. We contributed thousands of peacekeepers, fought for arms control, opposed apartheid in South Africa, was a leader in efforts to combat AIDs and other diseases, was instrumental in an international landmines ban and worked to help thwart genocide in the Balkans. Back in 1999-2000, when Canada last served on the council, we spearheaded two major campaigns that are still making a difference in the lives of millions of people in conflict zones. We championed moves to protect civilians in armed conflicts and control the traffic of blood diamonds sold to fund wars in Africa. Trudeau is right in suggesting Canada still has a lot to offer the world. A seat on the UN Security Council is the right place to show the world just that. Bob Hepburn is a politics columnist and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: is a politics columnist and based in Toronto. Follow him on Twitter: @BobHepburn Read more about: As the much-anticipated visit of US President Donald Trump comes round the corner, the Indian media is busy covering all aspects related to it. Accompanied by First Lady Melania Trump, he will arrive in India on February 24 and 25. Along with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, he will inaugurate the Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad which is touted to be the world's biggest stadium. Also, in his list is to visit the Taj Mahal in Agra. On Wednesday, while WION News was reporting on the many details of the royal welcome to be accorded to Trump on his upcoming visit to India, one of their tweet's was retweeted by the US President himself. A 22-kilometre long roadshow is planned for his royal welcome in Gujarat's Ahmedabad. While in New Delhi has spent Rs 120 crore for Trump's 3-hour visit to Ahmedabad. That's Rs 1.5 crore per minute that the US president spends in the Gujarati city. In Photos: Meet Bussa Krishna from Telangana who worships 'God' Donald Trump Reports suggest a 10-member all-women team led by an IPS officer will assist Melania during her stay. They have been instructed on cyber monitoring and security aspects. They have been told to wear trousers and blazers instead of the traditional khaki. People often resort to using hate speech when searching about terrorism on a community social media platform, a study has found. Community question answering sites (CQAs) are social media platforms where users ask questions, answer those submitted by others, and have the option to evaluate responses. Previous studies have mainly looked at terrorism-related data drawn from Facebook and Twitter, this was the first to examine trends on the CQA site, Yahoo! Answers. The University of York study explored the use of Yahoo! Answers on the topic of terrorism and looked at a dataset of 300 questions that attracted more than 2,000 answers. The questions reflected the community's information needs, ranging from the life of extremists to counter-terrorism policies. Sensitive questions outnumbered innocuous ones. A typical innocuous question was: Who exactly created ISIS?, while a more sensitive question was: Do you agree with Donald Trump that we should ban Muslims coming from countries seized by ISIS, Al Qaeda and other terrorists? Author, Dr Snehasish Banerjee, lecturer at the York Management School, University of York, said: "It seems that people are really curious to know about terrorists, what terrorists think, their ideas etc. "While portrayed as a threat to society and human civilization by mainstream media, terrorists sell terrorism as freedom fighting via social networking sites and private messaging platforms However, the actual workings of terrorism are largely shrouded in secrecy. For the curious, a convenient avenue to turn to is the community question answering sites." Sensitive questions were significantly more likely to be submitted anonymously than innocuous ones, the study found. While no significant difference arose with respect to answers, the paper found that identities were seldom recognisable. Using names non-traceable to themselves, CQA users become embolden to use provocative, inflammatory or uncivil language. Dr Banerjee added: "We found that answers were laden with negative emotions reflecting hate speech and Islamophobia, making claims that were rarely verifiable. "Users who posted sensitive questions and answers generally tended to remain anonymous. "This paper calls for governments and law enforcement agencies to collaborate with major social media companies, including CQAs, to develop a process for cross-platform blacklisting of users and content, as well as identifying those who are vulnerable." ### The study is published in the Aslib Journal of Information Management. Jihadi groups funding Rohingya migration from India to Nepal: Intel report Rohingya Muslims living in India have started to infiltrate to Nepal, according to a report sent by intelligence agencies to the union home ministry. These migrants with no legal status pay bribes amounting to thousands of rupees to secure citizenship documents on Nepal. A Zee News report citing an intelligence agency officer said that Rohingyas planning to migrate to Nepal get in touch with Rohingyas already settled in Nepal and pay between Rs4,000 and Rs50,000 to brokers to settle in Nepal. According to intelligence reports, at least 378 Rohingyas have moved to Nepal and some of them are in touch with real estate brokers to buy land in the land-locked Himalayan nation. The report also mentions that some Islamic organisations of Nepal like the Islami Sangh Nepal, whose activities are suspect, are funding the Rohingyas to settle in the country. According to intelligence reports, at least 35 temporary shelters have come up in Nepal's Dhading district in the last few days. Similarly, 104 Rohingyas have settled in Lanstoor and some of them are in Panauti municipality. Home ministry official point to the urgent need to keep a close watch on the movement of such Rohingyas as the area has become a hot-bed of anti-India activities. Even Pakistan's notorious intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) has been building bases of terror groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammad along the Indo-Nepal border. Given ISI activity in Nepal, the funding of Rohingyas to help them settle in Nepal can be a part of a huge anti-India conspiracy, they say. A few months back, Indian intelligence agencies had uncovered ISI's sinister plot to open terror camps in Mae Sot district of Thailand along the Myanmar border. Pakistani Taliban fighters were tasked with training young Rohingyas to carry out terror strikes in the camp. The report had raised apprehensions that Rohingyas were being trained for terror activities in India and Bangladesh. The details of the Mae Sot camp came to light during the interrogation of a group of Khalistani terrorists. Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Saeed had met Rohingya terrorists to help them in setting up the camp. ISI sponsored jihadi group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami-Arakan (HuJI) leader Maulana Abdul Quddus, who is helping in running the Mae Sot camp, is currently in Pakistan, according to the Zee News report. She is a household name with millions of adoring fans. And Kim Kardashian commanded attention yet again on Wednesday. The reality star, 39, flaunted her famous curves in an extraordinarily tight yellow dress as she headed to the studio to film David Letterman's My Next Guest Needs No Introduction in Los Angeles. Ray of sunshine! Kim Kardashian commanded attention as she made her way into the studio to film David Letterman's TV series, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, on Wednesday Kim's brunette tresses were styled into a single long braid draped over her shoulder, allowing her perfectly done up complexion to be put on full show. Amplifying her radiant complexion was a glossy slick of berry lipstick, a dash of blush, and a coat of mascara upon her long, curled lashes. She wore a large pair of gold hoop earrings which complimented her strappy metallic high heels. Heads turned as Kim made her grand entrance to the Netflix show with an air of confidence. Dangerous curves ahead! The fitted dress clung to every inch of Kim's body Best tressed! She styled her long brunette hair into a long braid that draped over her shoulder Well heeled! She strutted her way into the studio rocking a strappy pair of heels that snaked their way around her ankles If you've got it, flaunt it! All eyes were on Kim and her particularly tight yellow number Walk this way! The reality star had an air of confidence to her as she strolled onward with a subtle smile Also at the studio was Kim's mother, Kris Jenner, who was working her customary all-black attire. The momager rocked a black blazer with matching trousers whilst carrying a white handbag. After filming the show with the former late night icon, the women headed out to dinner at Armenian restaurant Carousal with Kim's sisters Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian. Momager's here! Kris Jenner headed to the studio working her customary all-black attire What a dish! The 39-year-old arrived to Carousal for dinner later that evening in Glendale Va va voom: Once again, heads turned as Kim made her way inside the eatery Stopping traffic: The star looked cool stepping outside of her car Kourtney put on quite a stylish display in all-leather everything. The reality star was decked out in an edgy, Western inspired black outfit. Beige shoes diverted from the otherwise all-black ensemble. Khloe was the definition of business cool in a nude and glossy suit that clung to her long legs. Golden girl! She swapped out her earlier earrings for a cool pair of gold hoops Va va voom: Kim ducked her head while walking outside She carried a pink purse, injecting a hint of femininity to her edgy ensemble. It's been a big few days for Kim, who had recently added to her real estate portfolio. The aspiring lawyer and her husband Kanye West recently paid $6.3M for a two-acre parcel of land in the Palm Springs, California area, on the same street as residences owned by Kris Jenner and Kylie. The reality TV star and Grammy winner, 42, purchased the the site for a future home at La Quinta, California's Madison Club, which is a resort enclave in the upscale desert community, according to the Los Angeles Times. Kim and Kanye married in a lavish wedding in Florence, Italy in 2014, and share daughters North West, six, Chicago, two, and sons Saint, four, and Psalm, nine months. Sister act! Khloe Kardashian and Kourtney were seen heading to the restaurant VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 / PowerBand Solutions Inc. (TSXV:PBX) (OTCQB:PWWBF) (Frankfurt:1ZVA) ("PowerBand", "PBX" or the "Company") is pleased to announce its Driveaway consumer app for iOS devices has been approved for publication by Apple and is now available for download in the US App Store. The Driveaway app introduces a new way for consumers to easily sell vehicles from their smart phone, tablet, or computer. Simply by uploading their vehicle information directly to the app, consumers instantly access a network of potential buyers. It is the latest advancement in the PowerBand consumer platform to revolutionize how vehicles are bought, sold, leased and traded around the globe. The Driveaway app will initially be available to residents of Northwest Arkansas and, after feedback, will be expanded across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It will later be available in all of the United States and Canada. Consumers can also visit us at www.driveawaypro.com. An android version will also soon be available. Built by PowerBand, the launch of the Driveaway app in the United States is being piloted by D2D Auto Auctions LLC ("D2D"). D2D is co-owned by PowerBand and Arkansas-based financier Bryan Hunt, Director of J.B Hunt Transport. "This is a revolutionary advance that empowers people to easily sell and trade cars in the used car market," said PowerBand CEO Kelly Jennings. "People now have at their fingertips - whether it's on their smart phone, tablet or computer - a way to sell vehicles to a wide network of buyers. Our mission is to make selling a car as easy as using Amazon or ordering an Uber." The Driveaway app is supported by D2D Auto Auctions, a network facilitating live vehicle auctions between dealers nationwide. D2D Auto Auctions' direct link to the new Driveaway app provides consumers the ability to secure live bids on their vehicle sale via 20-minute auctions, with participation from a network of dealer buyers. "People deserve a fast, trustworthy, simple way to sell their cars and trucks," said Bryan Hunt. "A few swipes and clicks in the Driveaway app will instantly provide this opportunity to millions of Americans." PowerBand, with its partners, is building a highly disruptive global transaction platform to transform the experience of buying, selling and leasing cars and trucks for millions of vehicle owners and automotive dealers. PowerBand is also in the process of securing multi-billion-dollar credit facilities to allow the purchase and leasing of vehicles on the PowerBand platform. Recent company milestones include: An agreement with RouteOne to put the PowerBand cloud-based platform in the hands of up to 18,000 automotive dealerships in the United States and Canada. An agreement with Phoenix Capital to raise up to CDN250-million for its Canadian operations. An agreement with Citation Capital, based in London, England, to assist in the raising of further credit facilities. Citation will use its proven, international network of financial channels to raise credit facilities for PowerBand operations in the U.S., European, Australian and Asian Markets. PowerBand has strategically positioned itself in the U.S. automotive market, by acquiring a majority share of MUSA Auto Finance, LLC ("MUSA") in July, 2019. Founded in 2016, MUSA's innovative transaction platform modernized the new and pre-owned vehicle leasing experience, providing dealers and consumers with the most advanced leasing options in the industry. The technology takes applications, calculates leases, auto-decisions applications, provides approvals back to dealer partners and prefills lease contracts accurately. Approvals can occur in less than eight seconds. As a result of its proprietary technology, MUSA was awarded a contract by Tesla Motors to become a national leasing partner in 2018. About PowerBand Solutions Inc. PowerBand Solutions Inc. is a technology provider listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. The Company's cloud-based platform is revolutionizing how we buy, sell, lease, and auction vehicles. With the receipt of its exporter license and its acquisition of MUSA Auto Finance, the Company is well positioned to become a leader in the cross-border used vehicle export market, the used vehicle auction market, and the vehicle leasing market in the U.S. and Canada. For further information, please contact: Richard Goldman, VP Corporate Development P: 1-866-768-7653 rgoldman@powerbandsolutions.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the Company 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, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of the Company, 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. 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. As a result, we cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and 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 at the date of this news release, and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by Canadian securities law. 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 news release. This press release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the 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 unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws, unless an exemption from such registration is available. SOURCE: PowerBand Solutions Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/577102/PowerBand-and-US-Financier-Bryan-Hunt-Launch-Driveaway-App-for-Public-To-Sell-Vehicles-in-The-United-States Bengaluru: Playing down the simmering discontent among the disgruntled legislators who missed a cabinet berth again, Karnataka BJP has denied any revolt brewing against Chief Minister BS Yediyurappa. "An unsigned letter in Kannada circulating in the social media is bogus, as it was fabricated in the name of Santosh, a private secretary to Yediyurappa. No revolt is brewing against the Chief Minister," party spokesman G Madhusudhana had told IANS on February 19. In the second cabinet expansion on February 6, only 10 newly-elected legislators, who defected from the Congress and the Janata Dal-Secular (JD-S) in July 2019, were inducted, leaving the party`s many aspiring lawmakers miffed. "The talk of about 20 loyal MLAs ganging up against Yediyurappa is speculation as rumour mills are working overtime. No rebellion is brewing against the Chief Minister," the official had asserted. On the charge that Yediyurappa`s younger son BY Vijayandra was acting like a `super or de facto CM` and medalling in the state administration, Madhusudhana said the latter was only assisting his father in party activities as he was also a party worker. "As Yediyurappa is 76 years old and ageing, Vijayandra is helping his father in party affairs so that he (Chief Minister) could be free to attend to administration," Madhusudhana had said. Yediyurappa`s elder son BY Raghavendra is a three-time BJP Lok Sabha member from Shimoga in the state`s Malnad area. With six cabinet posts vacant in the 34-member ministry, many legislators, including eight-time MLA Umesh Katti, are upset that they have not been rewarded for their loyalty to the party even six months after the BJP returned to power again in the southern state. On the purported meeting of about 20 BJP MLAs at the residence of state Industries Minister Jagadish Shettar on February 17, Madhusudhana said it was a "get-together" as they were all in Bengaluru again to attend the budget session of the state legislature which began on February 17. "There is no crisis in the party. Our government is stable and will complete the remaining three-year term in office till May 2023," he had added. N ine people were shot dead in gun attacks on two shisha bars in Germany before the suspect was found dead at his home. A manhunt was launched after witnesses told how the gunman used a getaway car to speed off from the scene of the bloodbath in the city of Hanau on Wednesday night. Two separate shisha bars were targeted in the city, which is near Frankfurt at about 10pm (9pm UK time). A shisha lounge in the city centre was the first target, according to regional public broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk. Germany: Hanau Shooting - In pictures 1 /28 Germany: Hanau Shooting - In pictures Reuters A car that alegdgedly belongs to a supect in a killing is lifted on a truck, near the home of the suspect in Hanau, western Germany, AFP via Getty Images Police officers stand near a house that is being searched after a shooting in Hanau, Germany AP Candles lay behind a police cordon in front of one of the bar target in a shooting in Kesselstadt, near Frankfurt AFP via Getty Images Police officers at the scene outside the Midnight hookah bar, one of two bars that were targeted Getty Images Special police forces work at the scene following a deadly shooting attack in Hanau AP Forensic police work at a crime scene in front of a bar at the Heumarkt in the centre of Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, western Germany AFP via Getty Images Emergency services work at the scene of a shooting in Hanau AFP via Getty Images Forensic police work near a crime scene in front of a bar at the Heumarkt in the centre of Hanau AFP via Getty Images Police handcuff a man near the scene of a shooting in Hanau, Germany AP Forensics enter a building at the scene after a shooting in central Hanau, Germany AP A special forces officer guards the road in front of a house that is searched through by police in Hanau, German AP Gun attacks: Police stand guard near the scene of one of the shootings in central Hanau AP A car covered with rescue blankets stands in front of a bar in Hanua, Germany AP A projectile lies on the sidewalk near a restaurant at the scene of a shooting in central Hanau, Germany AP Forensics investigate at the scene AP A police officer stands guard AP Officers detain a man near a damaged car at the scene after a shooting in Hanau, Germany Reuters Forensic experts outside a shisha bar after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt Reuters Police officers secure the area after a shooting in Hanau Reuters Forensic experts are seen outside a shisha bar after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt Reuters It said witnesses reported hearing eight or nine shots and seeing at least one person lying on the ground. Three people were killed and at least one seriously hurt. At the second site, about one and a half miles away, five people were killed, police said in an initial statement. The suspect and another body were later found dead at the alleged gunmans home in the early hours of Thursday. Police officers secure the area after a shooting in Hanau (REUTERS) / Reuters "There are currently no indications of further perpetrators, officers said. They did not give details of his possible motive or how he died, nor did they specify why they believe that he was the assailant. Loading.... The number of people killed the shootings Wednesday evening rose to nine, a police statement said. "This was a terrible evening that will certainly occupy us for a long, long time and we will remember with sadness," Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky told the Bild newspaper. Officers detain a man near a damaged car at the scene after a shooting in Hanau, Germany (REUTERS) / Reuters Lawmaker Katja Leikert, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right party who represents Hanau in the German parliament, tweeted that the incident was "a real horror scenario for us all." A car covered in thermal foil also could be seen with shattered glass next to it as forensic experts in white overalls collected evidence. There has been reports that shots were fired at passersby from a car, but this has not been confirmed. Forensic experts outside a shisha bar after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt (REUTERS) / Reuters Forensic experts in white overalls collected evidence from the scene. A short police statement gave no information on the victims other than that eight people had died. Heavily armed police sealed off two streets in the aftermath of the attacks. A police helicopter hovered over the city, which is 12 miles east of the financial hub Frankfurt. Listen to today's episode of The Leader podcast: This article, Larry Tesler, Apple employee who created cut-and-paste, dies at 74, originally appeared on CNET.com. Computer scientist and user interface guru Larry Tesler, a key figure at Apple during its early years, died Monday at the age of 74, according to Apple Insider. Tesler pioneered the concept of "cut-copy-paste" during his time at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. In the following two decades at Apple, he would be deeply involved in the user interface design of the Lisa, Macintosh and Newton, a precursor to the iPhone . In 1979, Tesler was assigned to show Apple co-founder Steve Jobs around Xerox PARC, including the tour in which Jobs and a few other Apple employees got to see Xerox's Alto computer in action. The computer featured icons, windows, folders, a mouse, pop-up menus, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) text editor, Ethernet-based local networking and network-based printing and games. The concept of "cut, copy and paste" was also part of the demonstration. "Steve was very excited and was pacing around the room, and occasionally looking at the screen," Tesler said in 2011 at a Churchill Club event in San Jose, California. He recalled Jobs' reaction as he led them on the product tour. "'You are sitting on a goldmine. Why aren't you doing something with this technology... you could change this world.' It was clear to him that Xerox was never going to do the kind of revolution things he was envisioning." The result of the meeting was that Apple got to see the graphical user interface (GUI) that ended up making it into the Mac OS. Jobs also persuaded Tesler to leave Xerox to go work for Apple the following year, managing the Lisa applications team. As Tesler also explained in 2011, the fact that the meeting even got that far can largely be traced back to a deal made by Xerox's business development team, who at the time was eyeballing Apple as a source of cheap hardware production. "Xerox was facing a lot of competition from Asian companies and copiers when their patents expired. They had higher production costs. But at the same time they had PARC inventions like the GUI, Ethernet, and improved mice," Tesler said at a 2011 remembrance for Jobs. "They started worrying they wouldn't be able to build them fast enough. They looked at Apple pumping out Apple IIs for real cheap, and thought 'we should partner with Apple so they can make computers really cheap for us.'" Tesler left Apple in 1997, moving on to serve as vice president of the shopping experience at Amazon and later, as head of user experience design and research at Yahoo . After he left Yahoo, he briefly worked for 23andMe. His LinkedIn profile says he's been a semi-retired consultant living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The cause of his death wasn't immediately available. Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. Nandini Yadav Samsung Galaxy Z Flip is the first clamshell design foldable phone that Ive managed to get my grubby hands on, and I have to say, I felt super greedy when I looked at that mirror purple variant. I wanted to flick that flipping phone and run. Morals be damned! In India, the Galaxy Z Flip has been announced at Rs 1,09,999, which one would naturally call expensive. However, at a time where an iPhone costs close to a lakh and a half, and to be honest isnt as cool and doesnt feel as Star Trek-y, this seems like great pricing. I got to use the Galaxy Z Flip for about 40 minutes, and I think I am in love. I know Im sounding like an ad right now, but I swear these are my initial impressions from using that phone. The flip phone had me flipping As a 27-year-old, the Galaxy Z Flip, reminds me of the time when nothing was cooler than a flip phone. Yet, when I used the phone, the device felt expensive, and, if I havent mentioned it already, rather futuristic. I mean, which other phone can go from a monster 6.7-inch display to something tiny enough to slip into the tiny pockets we women have to live with? The phone is super compact when folded and easily fits in the palm of my hand (which is quite tiny, if I might add). Though I have to admit, the phones a proper smudge magnet and you wouldnt want to palm it. The phone has a glass body and Samsung even includes some dedicated literature in the phones box which guides a user on how to avoid contracting too many scratches on the phone. The display and design add to the phones premium-ness The Galaxy Z Flip, when unfolded, has a 6.7-inch FHD+ AMOLED display, which is bright and displays crisp colours. After the Galaxy Fold fiasco, like everyone else, I was a little skeptical of the concept actually working. I was especially focused on the hinge, the fold, and was looking for cracks from the moment I got my hands on the device. But the display seemed seamless. Well, almost. When you swipe your finger along the centre where the display folds, you can feel a little dent. The dent doesnt do anything to your viewing experience, and you can barely notice it when you watch something on the device. You would only know about it when you swipe your finger on the part where the display folds. Samsung's second foldable display smartphone #GalaxyZFlip is in India and is priced at Rs 1,09,999. @nandiniwhy brings you a closer look at the phone. @SamsungIndia @SamsungMobile pic.twitter.com/ADNg0chLk6 Firstpost (@firstpost) February 25, 2020 I also spoke to Samsung at the briefing about how confident they are about the display and the hinge this time, and they claim that with the Galaxy Z Flip, even if you fold and unfold the device 100 times a day, it can comfortably last you five years. Samsung also said that they are offering a Complete screen protection program wherein, along with a one-time screen replacement, they will also cover accidental damages. After the first time, screen replacements will also be subsidised. Besides that, I found the display really beautiful. If you fold the phone at 90 degrees, you can actually use the phone in a split-screen mode. It sits like a mini laptop in front of you. Similar to my old-old Sony Walkman phone, the Galaxy Z Flip also has a secondary screen that you see when the phone is folded. This, however, is a much superior 1.1-inch Super AMOLED display that shows you information like time, date, calls, alarm, etc. You can swipe on it to see any missed call alerts, message alerts, and other such notifications. I also found a very cool use of that mini display. If you double-tap the power button when the phone is folded, you can use the secondary screen as a viewfinder to click pictures from the dual rear cameras. Speaking of cameras, the ones I clicked with the phone turned out quite nice, featuring vibrant colours, adequate sharpness and decent saturation. Ill give you a proper verdict when I really get to use the phone though. #GalaxyZFlip switches to split screen when you flip the phone half way. @Nandiniwhy pic.twitter.com/eVToTP6xOQ Tech2 (@tech2eets) February 20, 2020 Performance is great, so far Although I used the Galaxy Z Flip quite briefly, the 40 minutes I spent with the phone were quite all right. Even with the phone slightly bent, I was easily able to swipe through the screen. When using at different angles, the phone immediately changes modes. App switching worked quite smoothly too. I also played a few videos on the phone. The audio output was very clear and decently loud. Although, you will have to opt for a Bluetooth headset with the phone, since its missing the 3.5 mm jack. The phone has a 3,300 mAh battery and supports wireless charging. Galaxy Z Flips bonus feature The Galaxy Z Flip is also the first foldable phone to offer dual-SIM support. Like iPhones, the second SIM is an e-SIM, which in India, is offered by Airtel and Reliance Jio. What can I say, this phone made quite an impression on me and Im certainly looking forward to trying it out. Actors Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday will be seen sharing screen space in director Puri Jagannadh's upcoming pan-India venture. Image Source: IANS News Actors Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday will be seen sharing screen space in director Puri Jagannadh's upcoming pan-India venture. Image Source: IANS News Actors Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday will be seen sharing screen space in director Puri Jagannadh's upcoming pan-India venture. Image Source: IANS News Actors Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday will be seen sharing screen space in director Puri Jagannadh's upcoming pan-India venture. Image Source: IANS News Mumbai, Feb 20 : Actors Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday will be seen sharing screen space in director Puri Jagannadh's upcoming pan-India venture. Filmmaker Karan Johar took to Twitter to announce the news of the upcoming yet untitled film. Welcoming the stunning @ananyapandayy for our Pan-India venture with @TheDeverakonda, directed by @purijagan! @Charmmeofficial @apoorvamehta18. It's going to be a thrilling ride! @PuriConnects #PCfilm #AnanyaPandayVijayDeverakonda," Karan, who is producing the film, tweeted. Ananya said she is "happy, blessed and excited to be associated for a Pan-India film." Jagannadh too took to the micro-blogging website to welcome Ananya on board. Jagannadh wrote: "Happy to Welcome on board Gorgeous @ananyapandayy for our Pan-India venture with my hero @TheDeverakonda produced by @karanjohar... Having fun directing this cool venture." Deverakonda welcomed Ananya to "the Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam industries." Details related to the film are still under wraps. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Dominguez Firm, a personal injury law firm based in California is happy to announce that Juan Quero has been selected as the winner of its Spring 2020 Legal Scholarship Award. He will receive a scholarship in the amount of $2,500 towards his law school tuition. Juan Quero When Founder, CEO and Managing Partner of The Dominguez Firm, J.J. Dominguez created the Legal Scholarship Award, his goal was to make sure deserving college students could accomplish the noble pursuit of a career in law, regardless of their financial situation. Realizing the considerable economic investment it takes to attend law school, he strives to encourage the next generation of attorneys by offering this scholarship. Juan's incredible personal story, stellar academic record and commitment to effecting change resonated with us. After suffering the loss of his father at a young age, he had to overcome multiple difficulties throughout his childhood. Yet his mother never wavered in her support of his academic dreams. This, in spite of having to raise Juan and his siblings on her own. While a student at U.C. Davis, Juan began volunteering at the Yolo County Neighborhood Court. This restorative justice program is designed to encourage low-level offenders to re-think their behavior instead of handing out severe punishments. This approach to justice is one of the reasons he has decided to become an attorney. It also instilled in him the belief that everyone, not a select few, should have access to the best legal resources available. As Juan decides on which law school to attend this fall, The Dominguez Firm is excited to assist him in fulfilling his professional ambitions. "Thanks to The Dominguez Firm's generous reward, I will enter my first year of law school empowered to achieve my life-long dream: to become the first lawyer in my family. Nothing has nor will stop me from reaching this goal and this scholarship has brought me one step closer to my legal future." The Dominguez Firm is a nationally recognized personal injury law firm that has been successfully meeting the needs of our clients for over 30 years. For a free and confidential case consultation, please call us at 1-800-818-1818. For more information please visit: dominguezfirm.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/DominguezFirm Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedominguezfirm/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TheDominguezFirm/ Media Contact: Rosalia Rodriguez [email protected] 800-818-1818 SOURCE The Dominguez Firm Related Links http://dominguezfirm.com Dowling recovering at home after long hospital stay State Rep. Matthew Dowling has returned home after suffering a one-vehicle crash in October. Dowling represents parts of Somerset County. People in China are using apps on mobile phones to follow and perhaps help slow the spread of the new coronavirus, COVID-19. Some of the apps provide the latest information about areas hit by the virus, while others collect data on infected persons. The Chinese government is working with two of the countrys largest technology companies to keep track of the disease. The two, Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, created color-based systems that record the health of individuals and identify carriers of the coronavirus. Last week, Alipay, a payment app operated by Alibaba, released a system that uses colored QR Codes to show the health of people in the city of Hangzhou. A QR code is a sign a smartphone can read with its camera. Once the sign is recognized, the phone takes the user directly to an internet link with information about a subject. Users in Hangzhou can then complete an online form that reports their official identification number and seeks additional information. Individuals are asked to enter details about recent travel outside the city, as well as anything suggesting they might be infected, such as a high body temperature or strong cough. After completing the questionnaire, users receive a mobile phone message. It includes a color-based QR Code that relates to the health situation they described. Users with a red code are told to quarantine themselves for 14 days and continue reporting their condition by using Alibabas DingTalk messaging app. Users with a yellow code are told to stay in quarantine for 7 days, while those with a green code can travel freely. Chinese state media said the Alibaba system would be deployed at train stations, along major roads and other travel checkpoints. They added that the system is also being used in some neighborhoods. Two people living in Hangzhou told Reuters they were asked to show QR Codes when entering their apartment buildings. Another individual told the news agency that she was asked to show her QR code before entering the local supermarket. Alipay said it was working with the government to expand the system nationwide. Tencent, which operates Chinas popular messaging app WeChat, reported the launch of a similar QR Code-based tracking system. Tencent developed the system with help from Chinas National Development and Reform Council. The company said on Saturday the system is currently in use in the southern city of Shenzhen. Officials said they expected it to be deployed to other parts of Guangdong province soon. Even before the latest systems were announced, many Chinese were already using mapping and travel apps in an effort to avoid areas with coronavirus infections. One of the apps, developed by WeChat, uses official reports to identify places in the cities of Shenzhen and Guangzhou where coronavirus cases have been confirmed. Data mapping company QuantUrban created a similar system to track nine additional cities in Guangdong province. One user of the apps told Reuters she finds the maps can provide psychological comfort. The woman, who did not want her full name reported, said: You cant guarantee there wont be fresh cases, but you can avoid an area thats already hit. The technology website Abacus reported that citizens can request location data from their mobile phone carrier to show they had not been in affected areas. The report said that if requested, Chinas state-owned telecommunication companies will send users a message listing all the areas they had visited within the past 14 days. Detailed tracking records for mobile users exist in China because the country requires users to register their real names and other personal information when signing up for telecom services. Im Bryan Lynn. Bryan Lynn wrote this story for VOA Learning English, based on reports from Reuters 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. Quiz - China Using Mobile Apps to Follow Spread of Coronavirus Start the Quiz to find out Start Quiz _____________________________________________________________ Words in This Story data n. facts and other information app n. a program for a smartphone or other electronic device that performs a special operation track v. follow the movements of a person or thing code n. a set of letters, numbers of signs that are used instead of words in order to keep a message hidden cough n. the act of expelling air from the lungs with a sudden, sharp sound quarantine n. to keep (a person or animal) away from others to prevent a disease from spreading apartment n. a set of rooms inside a building where people live comfort n. a feeling of pleasantness and being relaxed location n. a place or position An engineering student and a worker at a pan masala agency were killed in separate incidents here on Thursday, police said. In the first incident, Subhash who was entrusted with counting cash at a pan masala agency in Chowk area was shot at by four masked men, they said. The worker was rushed to the Trauma Centre of King George's Medical University where he died during treatment, they added. The bike-borne assailants fled the spot with a money bag, which Subhash had in possession, at the time he was shot at by them. However, the exact amount could not be ascertained immediately, police further said. In the other incident in Gomti Nagar, some persons stabbed BTech student Prashant Singh at Alaknanda apartment gate. The victims' bodies were sent for a post mortem. Lucknow Police Commissioner Sujit Pandey said separate teams have been constituted to crack the cases. "We are going through CCTV footage and hope that the accused will be arrested soon," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Ankara on Thursday said the United States could send Patriot missiles to Turkey after Turkish soldiers were killed in attacks in Syria's Idlib blamed on the Syrian regime. "There is the threat of air strikes, missiles against our country," Turkish Defence Minister Hulusi Akar told CNN Turk broadcaster, adding: "There could be Patriot support." But Akar ruled out any troop support from the US. Earlier on Thursday, two Turkish soldiers were killed in Idlib after an air strike blamed on Damascus. Search Keywords: Short link: IFCI had filed petition to initiate insolvency proceedings against ACCIL Hospitality, which had extended a corporate guaranty for Asian Colour Coated Ispat Limited. New Delhi: The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has dismissed the insolvency plea filed by IFCI against ACCIL Hospitality, a corporate guarantor of debt-ridden steel products maker Asian Colour Coated Ispat. The tribunal observed that creditors of a debt-ridden company cannot file fresh insolvency plea against its corporate guarantor after collating the claims from principal borrowers as it would amount to "duplicity of claims being pressed". Public sector financial institution IFCI had filed petition to initiate insolvency proceedings against ACCIL Hospitality, which had extended a corporate guaranty for Asian Colour Coated Ispat Limited (ACCL) - a company currently under insolvency proceedings. A two-member bench headed by Chairperson Justice SJ Mukhopadhaya also held that though the creditor may be faced with the prospect of taking a haircut, this could not be a ground to trigger a fresh resolution process against the Corporate Guarantor. "Once the financial creditor's claim has been collated and admitted by the IRP in its entirety, invoking of jurisdiction of the adjudicating authority at its instance for triggering a fresh Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process against the corporate guarantor would amount to duplicity of claims being pressed," said the NCLAT. ACCL was the principal borrower, which had defaulted in clearing its outstanding liability of loan facility of Rs 150 crore extended to it by the financial creditor and is going through insolvency process. The appellate tribunal upheld the orders of the New Delhi-based Principal Bench of the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), which had on 21 October, dismissed IFCI plea to initiate insolvency proceedings against ACCIL Hospitality. "This being a second application for same set of claim and arising out of the same default cannot be admitted against the Corporate Guarantor' while CIRP initiated against the Principal Borrower' is still subsisting," said NCLAT. According to NCLAT: "The fact that the Resolution Plan is yet to be approved by the NCLT and the Financial Creditor may be faced with the prospect of taking a haircut is no ground to trigger a fresh resolution process against the Corporate Guarantor". IFCI had contended that liability of ACCIL Hospitality was joint and coextensive with that of the principal borrower, ACCL and the mere filing of claim by the a financial creditor in the corporate insolvency resolution proceedings could not absolve the Corporate Guarantor of its contractual obligation of discharging the liability. Rejecting it NCLAT said:"There being no merit in the appeal same is dismissed." The lenders of ACCIL, a steel products manufacturing company, has approved Rs 1,500 crore bid by JSW Group, with 79.3 percent of voting and approval from NCLT is pending. In fashion, as in politics, extreme is the posture of the moment. This spring, a new group of young designers, mostly from the British Isles, who have come of age in destabilizing times, have built their collections around declarative, visionary shapes that jettison old ideas about symmetry and balance. Consider the voluminous dresses of Richard Malone, the Irish designer committed to sustainable sourcing and limited production; his red, blue and green confections, made of jersey regenerated from fishing nets and plastic bottles, billowed out from diagonal seams, spilling across the runway in an evocation of rising seas and melting glaciers. Then theres the work of the York, England-based Matty Bovan, whose Hope and Fear collection featured unnerving sculptural forms like oversize collars and inverted hoop skirts that alluded to dystopian courtiers swathed in nostalgic Liberty fabrics that didnt so much conform to the body as they did create a protective shield sitting loosely around it. On the other end of the spectrum were the second-skin cuts and military-inspired lingerie of Charlotte Knowless Venom collection, the very name suggesting a kind of biting feminist armor, at once defensive and defiant. Meanwhile, Richard Quinn imbued hyper-feminine tropes with gothic eeriness extravagant bows, exaggerated A-lines, giant puff sleeves as if issuing a warning about the perils of fantasy. And the New York-based line Puppets and Puppets presented several looks that were hyper-fitted above the waist and bulbous below it, playful parodies of Lacroix poufs from the gilded 80s and European royals from centuries prior. Three pilots who were found not to have defamed Ryanair in an email circular have urged the Court of Appeal (CoA) to uphold a High Court jury's decision in the case. Evert Van Zwol, John Goss and Ted Murphy, members of the Ryanair Pilots Group (RPG), emerged victorious after a seven-week trial in 2017 in which they contested Ryanair's action seeking damages against them. The airline said, in issuing an RPG email in 2013 entitled "Pilot update, what the markets are saying about Ryanair" to 2,289 Ryanair pilots, the three had defamed the airline. It was claimed the defendants were saying that, by innuendo or insinuation, Ryanair misled investors and knowingly facilitated insider dealing by management. It also wrongly meant the airline was guilty of market manipulation and conspired with management to abuse the markets, it claimed. The three denied it was defamatory or had the meaning attributed to it by the airline. They also argued qualified privilege which means a statement is protected once it is not motivated by malice and published to those with an interest in receiving it. Ryanair appealed the jury's decision and has urged the CoA to overturn the verdict on grounds including that the trial judge had irredeemably infected the jury's thinking in a ruling during the trial. That ruling related to an email that was not disclosed in advance of the trial as required by court rules. Ryanair claims it showed malice and the trial judge was wrong not to discharge the jury over it. On the second day of the appeal, Paul O'Higgins SC, for the three, urged the three-judge CoA to let the jury decision stand. Among his arguments, Mr O'Higgins said the trial judge was correct in expunging of certain evidence of a Ryanair witness and in refusing to discharge the jury over the undisclosed email. He also disputed Ryanair claims that qualified privilege did not apply because the identities of some 500 pilots to whom the email was sent had not been established. On Friday, he will continue his arguments including in relation to disputing the Ryanair claim that the appeal court could not uphold the jury finding because of irrationality. The appeal is expected to conclude tomorrow with judgment reserved. LAS VEGAS Terry Reece has long been skeptical that voters would back Bernie Sanders, a 78-year-old self-described democratic socialist who is just months removed from a heart attack. Then the Vermont senator essentially tied for first place in the Democratic Partys Iowa caucuses and won its New Hampshire primary. That forced Reece to rethink his assumptions about who can win the nomination. After months of leaning toward former Vice President Joe Biden, Reece filled out a preference card for Sanders during early voting this week in the Nevada caucuses. I think that people are kind of wanting to turn the pages and get more radical, or switch from the status quo, said Reece, a 62-year-old African American who owns a small media company in Las Vegas. Thats exactly the sentiment Sanders is counting on to carry him to victory in the battle to take on President Trump. Since the early days of Sanders second presidential campaign, he and his supporters have sought to allay concerns that hes a fringe candidate whose call for political revolution would doom the party to another humiliating defeat. The strong showing in Iowa and New Hampshire gives him fresh evidence to make that case. The reason that we are going to win here in Nevada, with your help, the reason that we are going to win the Democratic nomination, with your help, the reason we are going to beat Trump is we have an agenda that speaks to the needs of working families, not the billionaire class, Sanders told a crowd at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on Tuesday. Sanders faces high expectations in Nevada, which formally holds its Democratic presidential caucuses on Saturday. He has a strong organization and has generated enthusiasm among younger and Latino voters. But there are plenty of hurdles that could dent his confidence in the weeks ahead. Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg is expected to use his debate stage premiere on Wednesday to attack Sanders broad call for economic and political revolution as unworkable and too liberal for more mainstream voters who simply want to defeat Trump. Sanders hasnt fully united the partys liberal wing and was denied the most coveted union endorsement in Nevada. His trademark Medicare for All proposal could unnerve voters in both major political parties who worry about higher taxes and the loss of private health insurance. In another development Tuesday, Bloomberg said he would sell the financial data and media company he created in the 1980s which bears his name and made him a multibillionaire if he is elected U.S. president, a top adviser said. He would put Bloomberg LP into a blind trust, and the trustee would then sell the company, adviser Tim OBrien said. Nicholas Riccardi is an Associated Press writer. Phuket is one of the most popular destinations among travel lovers. With its sandy beaches and crystal clear water, it is a popular destination in Thailand. Many tourists across the world even agree about how Phuket is better than Pattaya. The island destination is situated far from the city hustle which is why it is a preferred escape option for tourists, especially couples. ALSO READ | Island Hopping In Thailand: From Phuket To Krabi, A List Of Best Isles To Explore What is the cost of a honeymoon trip to Phuket during April? The key to enjoying the perfect honeymoon is if you plan it well. Phuket is a popular honeymoon destination for newlyweds across the world. Hence, airfares go up very soon. It is best recommended to book your tickets well in advance. ALSO READ | Best Things To Do In Phuket For A Memorable Vacation In 2020 For an April honeymoon, if you plan on booking the tickets 2-3 months in advance then it will cost you around Rs 20,000 for a round trip per person. The ticket fares are generally higher for the summers and hence, one should plan their honeymoon in Phuket well in advance. Additionally, stay prices depend on the type of stay you choose. You can opt for hotels or even rent out a house for a couple of days using various online platforms available for the same. Many online travel websites also have specially curated honeymoon packages to Phuket that are starting at Rs 35,000. Things to do on your honeymoon in Phuket 1. Phuket is home to numerous beaches that offer you a relaxing honeymoon. However, Patong and Kata Beach are the most popular beaches on this island. If you wish to have a quiet, romantic time with your partner then skip the crowd and head to Kata Beach. ALSO READ | How To: Choose Between Two Travel Destinations - Phuket And Bali 2. With Phuket being one of the best beach destinations in the world, the island also has many cruise ships. Hop on one of them with your partner and enjoy the sunset while sipping on a glass of your favourite wine. These cruise ships give you a mesmerizing view of the picturesque landscape of Phuket. 3. If you are one of those couples who like to explore the local culture, then head to Old Phuket Town. The streets offer authentic street food and local sights complete with a cultural experience. In addition to these, Phuket also has many night markets that you can explore together. ALSO READ | Phuket Travel Tips: 4 Things To Remember Before A Phuket Getaway DISCLAIMER: The information in this article has been sourced through various online websites. The website does not guarantee a 100% accuracy of the figures. U.S. retail giant Costco on Wednesday confirmed a plan to open a second store on Chinese mainland, which will be in Shanghai. On Tuesday, the subsidiary of Costco, Pudong Warehouse Development Limited, together with a Chinese company, obtained a 47,319-square-meter lot in Shanghai's Pudong New Area for 898 million yuan (128 million U.S. dollars), which is not far from Shanghai Disney Resort. Costco opened its first store in Chinese mainland last August in Shanghai's Minhang district on the west side of Huangpu River, which has attracted huge crowds of shoppers since the opening. "With growing purchasing power, Chinese customers have adopted a more open and mature mindset toward consumption," said Richard Chang, senior vice president for Asia at Costco Wholesale, adding that Costco will further expand Chinese mainland market. The maiden store now welcomes some 11,000 customers per day on average, less than some 16,000 on average per day before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus pneumonia, also known as COVID-19. Since the epidemic outbreak, the store has strengthened preventive measures including asking customers to wear facial masks before entry and cooperate with body temperature checking. The store has also shortened its business time for better disinfection. "I found more health products and hygiene and preventive products inside the store. Daily necessities and groceries such as vegetables, fruits, meat and fast-cooked food are among the best sellers," said Liu Fang, a local customer. Then he asked something Ive heard many times in my research: How are we supposed to understand if no one will answer our questions? The #MeToo movement was a watershed moment, empowering girls and women to share their stories, and many boys and young men have told me in interviews that the greater awareness of and need to end sexual assault against females is long overdue. But some boys and young men have also told me that they are worried about what the movement means for them. They feel their voices have been silenced in conversations around gender and they struggle to navigate damaging perceptions about masculinity, particularly in the realm of dating. Many boys have told me of the confusing messages they are sent when it comes to expressing their romantic interest in a girl. On the one hand, boys are finally learning about the necessity of consent; on the other hand, they still face dated masculinity stereotypes that limit and confound them, including a culture that places pressure on men to initiate intimacy. I have friends, girls, who want the guy to be the sexual initiator, to be the man, like in movies, Jaden, a high school junior in Alexandria, Va., said. He said these are the same girls who, if a guy asks if he can kiss them, say: Thats so lame. Why would you ask that? Jaden said that he and his male friends want to be absolutely respectful of girls boundaries, but they also want to be taken seriously by the ones who expect them to behave in a stereotypically masculine way. In addition to deciphering this riddle, boys fear that one wrong move could ruin their present and future reputations in this age of swift, devastating social media justice, especially since many college admissions officers scan social media for black marks on candidates cyber-presence. Dating is just a huge scary maze, Jaden said, adding that many of his friends have sworn off romantic entanglements for now. Patna: More than 3 lakh youth have registered for Prashant Kishors ambitious Baat Bihar Ki programme which has been launched with an aim to include Bihar among the top 10 developed states of the country. The website www.baatbiharki.in and mobile number 6900869008 has also been launched for those who are willing to join the campaign. The move is being seen as a major setback for the JD(U) which has been trying to expand its voters base in Bihar ahead of assembly elections this year. Though Prashant Kis-hor ruled out any political motive behind his ambitious programme, analysts see this as his effort to create a credible alternative force in the state ahead of assembly elections slated to be held in November this year. While announcing the programme earlier this week in Patna, Mr Kishor had said that he intends to connect with more than 10 lakh youth within 100 days. He had also revealed his plans to travel across Bihar to meet the youth as part of his campaign in the coming days. There is no one to question Nitish Kumars good governance and development model. Bihar was in a poor state in 2005 and continues to remain like that even after Nitish Kumar became the Chief Minister. People want to know what he has done for the development of Bihar and what he would do in the next 10 years to place Bihar in Top developed states of the country, Poll strategist Prashant Kishor said on Tuesday while launching his campaign. He had also attacked Bihar CM Nitish Kumar for making ideological compromises to remain in the power. JD(U) President and Bihar CM Nitish Kumar is currently running the state government with BJPs support. I firmly believe that Gandhi and Godse cannot go together. One has to take a clear stand on the issue. Nitish Kumar keeps saying that his party can never leave the ideals the Gandhi but is now standing with those who are soft on Nathuram Godse, Poll strategist Prashant Kishor said on Tuesday in Patna. Mr. Kishor who had joined as JD(U)s national vice president was expelled on January 29 this year for raising questions over the partys stand on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, the National Population Register (NPR) and the proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC). Prashant Kishors comments against Bihar CM Nitish Kumar didnt go well with the ruling JD(U) and the BJP. Reacting sharply BJP state president Sanjay Jaiswal called him a political businessman and said, he is like musclemen of 1990s who used to capture booths for their political masters but later decided to become politicians themselves. But this political businessman must realize that voters have changed now and they no longer vote for goons (Photo : Photo by Kon Karampelas on Unsplash) Here's good news (and a not-so-good-one for teenage kids) to parents whose kids are so obsessed with TikTok. In an initiative to limit the time young people spend on the famous app, the latter introduced early today its new parental control feature, allowing adults to set the amount of time their kids can use the frequently-used short video sharing app. Called the Family Safety Mode, this additional feature will enable parents to be in control of their kids' screen time. It also lets them limit the incoming messages of their teenage sons and daughters and restricts the content which they may find inappropriate. Family Safety Mode, as described in the blog post the Digital Trends released, "links a parent's TikTok account with his child's account." This then requires an adult to create his own account to monitor his child's TikTok activities. Since this world-famous app's audience comprises mainly of teens, the parental controls are expected to impact its largest user-base directly. More so, the parental control feature is also meant to help the younger users to practice and apply in their everyday lives, better digital well-being. ALSO READ: TikTok Banned by US Navy due to Cyber-Security Reasons For the Users' Well-being In the said announcement, TikTok trust and safety head Cormac Keenan said, "As part of our commitment to safety, the well-being of users is incredibly important to us." The company head added, it is the company's objective to have fun on the app. However, he emphasized, it is essential for the firm to look after the app's users' well-being, and this means achieving a healthy relationship with online services and apps. In less than two years, TikTok has swiftly accumulated over a billion users and over 700 million downloads worldwide. This video-sharing app allows the users to record short videos of themselves then attach music or sounds to them. In addition, the app offers other customization choices, too, like stickers, special effects, and filters, making it quite popular among the younger audiences. Family Safety Mode As earlier mentioned, with the new Family Safety Mode, parents can manage and control how long their kids are allowed to use TikTok. In a statement, Keenan made its latest addition to TikTok's latest offerings, which is only one of the new efforts that the app's users may see popping on their timeline. And, to strengthen its presence in the social networking world, and promote Tiktok's functionality, the company has collaborated with some of its most-followed personalities to make videos reminding the users to get off TikTok. For those whose TikTok account doesn't have the Family Safety Mode yet, you can simply scroll past the videos. However, those using the app with parental controls cannot watch and enjoy videos any longer. Other than the said restrictions, this new TikTok feature allows the parents too, to limit and control who can send direct messages to their teenage child. More so, they can also completely turn off the option for the direct messaging function. Here's the best thing about the Family Safety Mode: Parents can limit the content type their kids see while using TikTok. The only drawback at present, though, is that this feature is currently available only in the United Kingdom. But fret not, if you are a user outside the U.K. This new feature is about to roll out to other markets a few weeks from now. READ ALSO: Coronavirus Misinformation: Misleading Map Went Viral: Help Stop It! 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. The Court of Appeal in Abuja, on Wednesday, ordered Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court in Abuja, to withdraw from the trial of a former governor of Benue State, Gabriel Suswam. The appellate court in a unanimous judgement on Wednesday ordered that the case file be returned to Justice Ahmed Mohammed, who had presided over the case from the beginning. Mr Suswam and the then Commissioner for Finance in his administration, Okolobia Okpanachi, are being prosecuted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) on N3.1 billion money laundering charges. They were accused by the anti-graft agency of diverting the money which was said to be part of the proceeds of the sale of some shares of Benue in a company. Mr Suswam, who is currently the senator representing Benue North-east Senatorial District in the National Assembly, and Mr Okpanachi were arraigned in 2015 before Mr Mohammed on a nine-count charge. But Mr Mohammed had recused himself twice from the case before a former Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, Adamu Kafarati, reassigned it to Mr Abang of the same court. He had withdrawn from the case due to allegations from a publication, that he was receiving bribe in order to give Mr Suswam a soft landing. Not satisfied with Mr Mohammeds action, Mr Suswams lawyer, Chinelo Ogbozor, challenged the reassigning of the case to Mr Abang at the appeal court. She argued that she was not aware of Mr Mohammed disqualifying himself from conducting the trial as no prior notice was issued. Appeal court ruling Delivering the lead judgement of the appellate court on Wednesday, Justice Emmanuel Agim commended Mr Abang for conducting the trial but held that Mr Mohammed was wrong to have withdrawn from handling the case. Mr Agim explained that the courts decision to return the case to Mr Mohammed was to correct the error made by the former chief judge of the court, Mr Kafarati. The court held that although the chief judge has the powers under section 19 of the Federal High Court Rules, to assign cases to any judge of the court, such discretion must be exercised properly and not recklessly so as to meet the justice of the case. Unfortunately, the chief judge did not exercise his discretion correctly. The re-assignment of the case to Justice Abang amounted to a transfer in a matter that was part heard. Four witnesses had already testified and an accused person is entitled to a trial within a reasonable period of time. The action of the chief judge is an administrative one and therefore, proceedings by justice Abang cannot amount to a nullity. The federal high court is one court and the Jjudges are the same. It is within the administrative powers of the chief judge to re-assign cases and any judge has the jurisdiction to hear to cases assigned to them by the Chief Judge of the court. Our decision is merely to correct the error by the chief judge. justice Abang was right to assume jurisdiction since he has the statutory duty to obey the chief judge. Justice Abang has no powers to challenge or question the chief judge. He has a duty to take a case assigned to him and deal with it. He did what the law allowed him. In fact, if the ruling of Justice Abang did not touch on the reasons given by justice Mohammed to rescue himself, this appeal would have no life. Abang has shown commendable diligence in the trial. But since Justice Abang went to determine the propriety of Justice Mohammeds recusal from the case, the appeal has live issues, the court ruled. MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez has extended his contract with Honda until the end of 2024, the Japanese team announced Thursday. "Honda Racing Corporation are delighted to announce six-time MotoGP world champion Marc Marquez has signed a four-year extension of his contract and will continue to race with the factory team until at least December 2024," the team said in a statement. Marquez, 27, said he was "proud" to remain with the team who gave him his start in the sport. "Honda gave me the opportunity to arrive in the MotoGP class with a factory bike in 2013," he saod. "Since the first year we have achieved success together and I am very happy to continue being part of the Honda family. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The United Kingdom has not forgotten Russias attempt to redraw Europes boundaries and will never recognize the illegal annexation of Crimea, which is a blatant violation of international law. British Ambassador to Ukraine Melinda Simmons said this in a statement posted on her Twitter account. Six years ago Russia began its illegal annexation of Crimea. The UK has not forgotten Russias attempt to redraw Europes boundaries and will never recognise this blatant violation of international law. We call on Russia to end its illegitimate control of Crimea," the ambassador wrote. She added the hashtag #CrimeaIsUkraine to her post. 6 years ago Russia began its illegal annexation of #Crimea. The UK has not forgotten Russias attempt to redraw Europes boundaries and will never recognise this blatant violation of international law. We call on Russia to end its illegitimate control of Crimea #crimeaisukraine pic.twitter.com/fCOvOEmUdc Melinda Simmons (@MelSimmonsFCO) February 20, 2020 February 20 is the official date of the beginning of the temporary occupation of Crimea, which was determined by the resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine "On the Statement of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine "On Countering the Armed Aggression of the Russian Federation and Overcoming its Consequences" of April 21, 2015. ish At Hotel Indigo on North St. Marys Street, the owner is giving the property a modern sheen refurbishing rooms, putting in a new restaurant and bar, and installing a flashy 3D wall in the lobby. The nearby El Tropicano hotel is also undergoing renovations to restore its midcentury luster. The creators of the 1962 hotel were inspired by trendy resorts in Acapulco, Mexico. Josie Norris /Staff Photographer The property is getting almost a total gut, with fresh rooms, a redone pool area, a restaurant and bar, a spa with a salt cave and other amenities, said Ian McClure, director of development at Phoenix Hospitality Group. At the hotels, both owned by Phoenix, the focus is on expanding food and drink options and opening up the buildings to the outdoors. The renovations will cost around $40 million, McClure said. Now Playing: Ed McClure | Texas Power Brokers Successful San Antonio hotelier says its all about the deal Video: San Antonio Express-News Id rather you want to stay here than go on the River Walk, he said. Near San Antonio International Airport, a shuttered Holiday Inn is undergoing a $36 million redevelopment to become a Marriott hotel after a joint venture led by the Bricton Group and the Gettys Group bought the property last year. San Antonios a dynamic, growing market, said Ed Doherty, Brictons president. Were very bullish on this city. The group is taking it down to the studs and starting over, Doherty said. When finished in November, the hotel will have refashioned rooms, meeting space and other amenities. This is probably about as expensive as you can get, he said. Aging buildings need to be updated periodically, but the renovations underway at a spate of San Antonio hotels also reflect travelers changing preferences, said Paul Vaughn, senior vice president at local hotel consulting firm Source Strategies. The hotel visitor of today has different expectations than the visitor of 20 years ago, he said. Customers want free Wi-Fi, better food options and surroundings that reflects the local area. They also want to be able to check in or unlock their room using their phone. Everybody has a smart phone now and wants to be able to leverage it, Vaughn said. With any renovation, design and technology are just your entry point, said Terry Dammeyer, president and CEO of investments and development at White Lodging. The Merrillville, Ind.-based company bought the Marriott Plaza hotel on South Alamo Street last year, and is planning an extensive renovation that will begin this summer. Its also proposed building a new hotel with a rooftop bar nearby. Courtesy of HKS Architects That may have differentiated you before, but guests expect and deserve that and so much more, Dammeyer said. They expect experiences, service and food that connect people and create stories they can tell while traveling, on social media and after they return home. A multimillion-dollar renovation of the Marriott Rivercenter hotel is nearly finished, a spokesperson said. The work includes redoing rooms and adding meeting space, a restaurant and cafe. At the Courtyard by Marriott on South Santa Rosa Avenue, guest rooms will be redone, the hotels entrance redesigned and a Jacuzzi room turned into exercise space. Linens, furniture and other room furnishings typically have a life span of five to seven years, said Trey Whiddon, the hotels general manager. Its very important to keep current and fresh, he said. We dont sell a tangible item, we sell an experience. The investments also signal companies confidence in the San Antonio market. Revenue per available room, or REVPAR a key measurement of hotels performance was $77.25 in the third quarter, up $2.44 from the previous year, according to Source Strategies. Local hotels generated about $363 million in revenue, up from $342 million, and occupancy stood at about 66 percent. While other metrics arent blowing doors off, the areas consistently high REVPAR is appealing to developers and owners, Vaughn said. Along with existing properties getting overhauls, a number of new hotels are in the works in the San Antonio area. William Luther, Staff Photographer / San Antonio Express-News Construction of The Arts Residences at the Thompson San Antonio, which will include luxury condominiums and hotel rooms, is expected to be complete in the second quarter. The high-rise, developed by Houston firm DC Partners, is between El Tropicano and Hotel Indigo. The Canopy by Hilton hotel on East Commerce Street is expected to open this year, and Winston Hotels is turning the Riverview Towers building at 111 Soledad Street into a dual-branded AC Hotel by Marriott and Element Hotel by Westin. Local developer GrayStreet Partners is planning a 20-story hotel and office tower on Broadway near the Pearl, and luxury chain W Hotels wants to open a location in the building. Most recently, New York-based Dream Hotel Group announced plans to open a boutique hotel along the River Walk, though the company wont reveal whos developing it or where it will be. Were seeing some nice higher-end products coming in, Vaughn said. You look at the success of Hotel Emma (at the Pearl), and it fires peoples imaginations. madison.iszler@express-news.net CAIRO Karim Hegazi spends his days in a Cairo clinic taking care of animals long considered a menace in Egypt. Stray dogs roam in almost every Cairo neighborhood lurking in construction sites, scavenging through trash and howling nightly atop parked cars. The government says there are around 15 million of them. They bite some 200,000 people a year, according to the World Health Organization, and spread rabies, one of the worlds most lethal diseases. And if that werent reason enough to feel revulsion toward dogs, a famous Islamic saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad warns that angels wont enter your home if theres a dog inside. Yet after centuries of stigma, the street dogs of Egypt are finding popular acceptance, and along with it, surging grassroots support. That includes adoption and medical care, as well as spaying and neutering to keep them from producing more puppies on the streets. Volunteers armed with giant fishing nets and tranquilizer darts embark on regular missions to catch, vaccinate and sterilize dogs before letting them loose. These efforts are making inroads against the prevailing government policy of extermination by poison. Ive seen a major shift people are seeing a value in strays, said Hegazi, 32, from his veterinary hospital in the upscale suburb of Maadi. He says hes no longer treating just foreign pooches, but also a growing number of adopted baladi dogs, the once-reviled Egyptian street breed. Even pious Muslim clients are taking in street dogs. Hegazi says they often reconcile their religious beliefs and love of dogs by keeping them in grassy yards or on rooftops. Egypts upper and middle classes have increasingly adopted Western-inspired ideas of dog ownership. Pet hotels, cafes and grooming emporiums are sprouting up in major Egyptian cities. Fueled by the rise of social media, enthusiasm for Cairos dogs is moving beyond snob culture, said local advocate Amina Abaza. A Facebook forum for vet recommendations exploded into a community of 13,000 pet lovers trading stray rescue stories. Dozens of new shelters coordinate adoptions online, flooding Instagram feeds with images of abandoned puppies. What has surfaced online is spilling into the streets. Some of Cairos more well-to-do districts are mobilizing spay-and-neuter teams to counter what advocates describe as gruesome government methods to control the dog population. The General Organization for Veterinary Services, an arm of the agricultural ministry, routinely sends authorities to kill strays by scattering poison in streets overnight, according to a dozen activists and residents. They say theyve woken up to find carcasses piled on curbs, or sick dogs wailing in distress. The government organization did not respond to questions about its policy. But in a recent report, it described street dogs as a time bomb that threatens our children, and defended the merciful killing of dogs that are harmful to people, citing Islamic law. Isabel Debre is an Associated Press writer. BATHINDA: BJP national president Jagat Prakash Nadda will be meeting former Punjab chief minister and ally Shiromani Akali Dal patriarch Parkash Singh Badal at his native Badal village in Muktsar district on Thursday afternoon. Nadda will head for Badal village after landing at Bathinda airport at 10.45am. The two leaders are scheduled to meet over lunch. Their meeting comes two days after Punjab BJP president Ashwani Sharma met Badal. He will also be present on the occasion. The state BJP leadership is terming the meeting a courtesy call by Nadda, who is visiting Punjab for the first time after taking charge as party president. However, the development assumes political significance as the top leadership of the old allies will meet amid tension between BJP and Akali Dal leaders over the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). At a recent Akali Dal rally in Amritsar after the BJPs electoral loss in the recent Delhi assembly elections, Badal had criticised the BJP-led government at the Centre, saying there is a need to take minorities along. A section of the state BJP leadership is also keen that the party assert itself as the major political partner in the SAD-BJP alliance in Punjab. On his way to Badal, Nadda will meet party activists from south Malwa districts, including Bathinda, Muktsar, Faridkot, Fazilka and Ferozepur. These are a traditional stronghold of the SAD. After meeting Badal, Nadda will leave for Amritsar by road to pay obeisance at Golden Temple. Chief of the Army Staff General Manoj Naravane on Thursday stated that the FATF pressure on Pakistan was a key factor responsible for the reduction of terrorism in the Kashmir valley. He added that China too had realized that it could not back Pakistan all the time. At the same time, General Naravane revealed that there were 15-20 terrorist camps containing 250-350 terrorists at any point in time in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. It is expected that the FATF will make a formal announcement about retaining Pakistan on the grey list on Friday. Army Chief General MM Naravane: If the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) comes down heavily on them, they may have to do a rethink on their rhetoric and activities. FATF is a factor (in the reduction of terror activities in Kashmir valley). https://t.co/wzZoZdk4E5 ANI (@ANI) February 20, 2020 Read: SC Order On Commissioning Of Women Enabling, Will Give Clarity Moving Forward: Army Chief Army chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane: There are 15-20 terrorist camps inside Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir where there are around 250-350 terrorists at any time and numbers may fluctuate. pic.twitter.com/1qALwakFZV ANI (@ANI) February 20, 2020 Read: 'Indian Army To Field At Least A Dozen Players': Army Chief Naravane On Tokyo Olympics 'Always in a high state of alertness' Speaking to ANI, the COAS mentioned that infiltration attempts were often brought to the attention of the Army. However, he stressed that these attempts by Pakistan were foiled before such actions were even attempted. General Naravane said that the troops were always in a high state of alertness. We do get news about attempts to such activities whether infiltration or BAT actions. But because our troops on the LC are very well trained and always in a high state of alertness, we have been able to foil any such actions even before they could be attempted, the COAS remarked. Read: 'With Creation Of CDS & DMA, Synergy Among Three Services Will Get Fillip': Army Chief Taking about his second visit to Nagrota, General Naravane said, This is my second visit to Nagrota in as many months. I had gone soon after taking the oath to review the situation. And the second visit was to further refine our operational plans in the wake of the prevailing situation. We are now in the process of formulating a new strategy for the summer which would be catering for all contingencies and which would also be people friendly and in sync with various government initiatives. Read: Army Chief Gen Naravane Reveals Spike In Ceasefire Violations, Says 'most Attempts Foiled' (With ANI inputs) YORK, Pa. The Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg, facing millions of dollars in past sexual abuse claims, filed for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, according to court documents. The move comes more than a year after the landmark grand jury report, identifying 301 priests accused of abuse in Pennsylvania and the Catholic Church's efforts to cover it up. "This plan will allow us to continue the church's work in our diocese while equitably compensating our creditors," said Bishop Ronald Gainer at a news conference. "This difficult decision was made after countless hours of prayers, consultation and deliberation." The diocese filed its petition for Chapter 11 reorganization in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Pennsylvania. The petition estimates the dioceses' assets at $1 million to $10 million and its financial liabilities as $50 million to $100 million. Bishop Ronald W. Gainer delivers a statement after it was announced the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburg filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020. At the one-year anniversary mark of the grand jury report, released on Aug. 14, 2018, the diocese said that more than 100 clergy sexual abuse victims had accepted compensation payouts totaling more $12 million. The bankruptcy filing halts all action on the civil suits that have been filed against the diocese and shifts the claims to the bankruptcy proceeding, as well as any claims waiting in limbo with the compensation fund. A Chapter 11 filing can allow the diocese to reorganize its finances, marshal funds to pay fair compensation to sex-abuse accusers and create a plan to continue operations much as they were before. Chapter 11: Boy Scouts file for bankruptcy protection in the face of child abuse allegations Accused of molestation: Catholic parishioners sue to get ousted priest back "You have an organization that financially is paying out more than it's taking in," said Matt Haverstick, attorney for the diocese. "Its an attempt and bankruptcy is used as dirty word, but it shouldn't be its a good-faith effort for an organization who doesnt want to skip out on their bills. This an attempt to put the diocese on good solid financial footing." Story continues Attorney Richard Serbin, who practices law in Altoona, represents survivors of sexual abuse against perpetrators and the institutions that enable them. He said at least five of his clients will be affected by Wednesday's news. "Bankruptcy changes how we can proceed with these cases," Serbin said. "And we don't want the survivors to be left out in the cold." Filing for bankruptcy could give the diocese an opportunity to manipulate how it presents and hides discovery, he said. "We know about how many priests have been accused, but what about seminarians or teachers?" Serbin said. "Going through bankruptcy court keeps that information from showing up in police reports or being released publicly. It's just a way to protect the abusers." Democratic state Rep. Mark Rozzi, himself abused by a priest when he was a child in the Allentown diocese, criticized the move, calling it another defense tactic by the church. "It's just another slap in the face for victims," Rozzi said. "Instead of doing right by the victims, they are concerned about themselves. This is all about self preservation." The diocese has not announced any plans for church or school closures amid the bankruptcy filing. "Each parish is a separate entity and should not be directly impacted," said diocese spokesman Mike Barley. "Ultimately, the plan for the diocese moving forward will be determined as we go through this process." The filing is intended to preserve the ability to carry out the church's ministries within the diocese, parishes and schools. "It's important to know that tomorrow is going to look like yesterday," Haverstick said. "No one in this process can tell you what the end of the process is going to look like no one in this room knows." This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Harrisburg Catholic diocese bankruptcy filing follows abuse claims MBABANE - The Royal Eswatini Police Service has identified the alleged South African hit man who was reportedly hired to end the life of Manzini businessman Jomo Khumalo. His name is Xolani Nkosi and he is now a fugitive of the law in the neighbouring country so that he could be extradited to the Kingdom of Eswatini. A video footage obtained by the police from Oshoek Border Gate showed the alleged hit man entering Eswatini on November 11, 2019. Nkosi was allegedly hired to end Khumalos life by Maxwell Nkambule and Senzo Sithole, who are both currently incarcerated. According to the police, Nkosi paid a bribe of E150 to someone who connected him to Customs officials at the Oshoek Border Gate to help him illegally enter the kingdom. Khumalo was gunned down in what could be termed as a broad daylight public assassination near the Manzini Traffic Circle last year. Disclosed The identity of the alleged hit man was disclosed in an affidavit by the principal investigator of the case, Constable Mthandi Mhlungu. Giving a background of the matter, Mhlungu informed the court that there was bad blood between the deceased (Khumalo) and Nkambule. The conflict, according to the investigator, started as a result of transport business-related issues since they both owned kombis that service hawkers between Eswatini and the Republic of South Africa. He alleged that due to this conflict, a motor vehicle belonging to Nkambule was burnt by unknown people at his homestead and he (Nkambule) suspected that the people were sent by Khumalo. Based on these suspicions, Nkambule went to the Republic of South Africa to look for a hit man to kill Khumalo. He was successful as he was able to get the services of one Xolani Nkosi, submitted the investigator. These are allegations whose veracity is yet to be tested in court. Detective Mhlungu narrated that on November 11, 2019, the alleged hit man entered the Kingdom of Eswatini, allegedly in the company of Nkambule. He told the court that according to a witness, Nkambule approached someone at Oshoek Border Gate and requested him (witness) to assisted in facilitating the illegal crossing of the alleged hit man into the country. The witness is said to have referred Nkambule to another person who assisted him. May I state that some of the witnesses were able to identify the motor vehicle that was used to transport the hit man, Nkambule and Sithole to the Oshoek Border Gate, being a navy blue VW Polo and was driven by Sithole, submitted the law enforcer. He averred that one of the witnesses became suspicious about Nkambules action of smuggling the alleged hit man into Eswatini. Mhlungu said since the witness was aware that Khumalo and Nkambule were at loggerheads, he (witness) called him (Khumalo) and alerted him about the move. Khumalo is said to have then called one of the police officers at the Ngwenya Border Gate to find out whether Nkambule had crossed to Eswatini. The police officer is reported to have made some enquiries from one of the witnesses who allegedly saw Nkambule smuggling the alleged hit man. The witnesses who assisted Nkambule to smuggle the hit man was paid E150. The evidence of the witness to the effect that Nkambule and Sithole were at Oshoek in the early hours of November 11, 2019 is supported by MTN records which show that at 08:24:51, Nkambules mobile phone number 7805 0118 was using Oshoek MTN Site and he moved from Oshoek to Matsapha (sic), submitted the investigator. He submitted that the records further showed that Nkambule was at his homestead at Mbikwakhe at around 6pm which time tallies with the time on the video footage when Sithole and the alleged hit man were seen leaving Nkambules homestead. Mhlungu highlighted that in the video footage recorded on November 26, 2019, the alleged hit man was seen at the homestead of Nkambule at Mbikwakhe in Matsapha. [February 20, 2020] TEGNA Names David Loving President and General Manager at WOI in Des Moines TEGNA Inc. (NYSE: TGNA) today announced David C. Loving has been appointed president and general manager at WOI and KCWI, TEGNA's ABC and CW affiliates in Des Moines, Iowa effective March 2, 2020. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005620/en/ David Loving Named President and General Manager at TEGNA's WOI in Des Moines (Photo: Business Wire) Prior to joining WOI, Loving spent 21 years at Univision, most recently as president and general manager of Univision's Houston, Texas operations from 2010-2019, which included oversight of television stations KXLN and KFTH, four radio stations and multiple digital properties. During his tenure at Univision, he also held senior management roles in the Austin, San Antonio and San Francisco markets. "David is a first-rate leader and innovator with a strong record of sccess, from launching new programs to providing outstanding service and solutions to clients," said Lynn Beall, executive vice president and COO for media operations, TEGNA. "His inclusive management style, proven ability to build and grow teams and commitment to the communities he's served make him a perfect match for Des Moines." Loving is a graduate of Texas A&M University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English. He has served on the boards of numerous industry and civic organizations, including the Texas Association of Broadcasters, the Houston Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and Children at Risk. He and his wife Patty will be relocating to Des Moines from their current home in the Houston area. About TEGNA TEGNA Inc. (NYSE: TGNA) is an innovative media company that serves the greater good of our communities. Across platforms, TEGNA tells empowering stories, conducts impactful investigations and delivers innovative marketing solutions. With 62 television stations in 51 markets, TEGNA is the largest owner of top 4 affiliates in the top 25 markets among independent station groups, reaching approximately 39 percent of all television households nationwide. TEGNA also owns leading multicast networks Justice Network and Quest. TEGNA Marketing Solutions (TMS) offers innovative solutions to help businesses reach consumers across television, email, social and over-the-top (OTT) platforms, including Premion, TEGNA's OTT advertising service. For more information, visit www.TEGNA.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005620/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Rapper Pop Smoke has been fatally shot in an early-morning home invasion hours after posting his home address to social media. The 20-year-old, born Bashar Barakah Jackson, was at a home in the Hollywood Hills, California, when invaders broke in Wednesday about 4.30am (local time) and killed him, police told TMZ. The men allegedly fired multiple shots and the rapper was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood where he was pronounced dead. We are devastated by the unexpected and tragic loss of Pop Smoke, a rep for the label he is signed with, Republic Records, said. Our prayers and thoughts go out to his family, friends and fans, as we mourn this loss together. Rapper Pop Smoke pictured in January attending a fashion show in France. Source: Getty Images Pop Smoke apparently revealed the address to the house in a recent social media post, although it appears to have since been taken down. Surveillance video of the home that night allegedly showed four masked people enter the property 10 minutes after occupants dead bolted the front doors, sources told the publication. They said the bandits may have snuck in more easily because there was no house alarm activated at the time. Police are understood to be searching for the people responsible and have yet to determine a motive. The rapper, best known for singles Welcome to the Party and Dior, released his first mixtape Welcome to the Woo last July, and has collaborated with artists including Nicki Minaj and Travis Scott. The rapper is shown being removed from the home on a stretcher. Source: RMG News via TMZ His second mixtape, Meet the Woo 2, was released this month and debuted at number seven on Billboard's Top 200 chart. Pop Smoke was scheduled to begin a month-long North American tour on March 2, and then perform in England in April. In January, Pop Smoke was arrested at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport -- hours before he was scheduled to perform at a concert -- on a charge of transporting a stolen vehicle over state lines. The vehicle was a black 2019 Rolls-Royce worth an estimated $375,000 that he had borrowed for a music video in California, according to an indictment and a law enforcement official; investigators told the New York Times the car was found parked outside Pop Smoke's mother's home in Brooklyn, with a different licence plate. Story continues The rapper, who had just arrived in New York from Paris Fashion Week, pleaded not guilty and was released on $250,000 bail the same day. Last week, he denied the charge in an interview with Power 105.1's Angie Martinez, calling the incident "foolishness." In October, he was one of five New York rappers that the NYPD blocked from performing at the Rolling Loud hip-hop festival in Queens. Officers claimed that the rappers had been "affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide", but did not specify any criminal behaviour. - with Reuters Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@yahoonews.com. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and download the Yahoo News app from the App Store or Google Play. The opioid crisis is far from over. It has merely morphed, and it may be getting worse in some areas. Without diminishing President Trump's exuberance that the death rate has peaked, caution is more in order. Ahead of a 2020 race already focused on health care, President Trump is boasting that his administration played a huge role in achieving the first annual drop in overdose deaths in three decades. The drop, he crowed recently, is "tremendous." The problem is that deaths from opioid overdoses may be a flawed metric to consider. The drop in deaths can be attributable to wider use of naloxone, an opioid antidote that has saved countless lives, rather than a decrease in usage. Prescriptions of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone are soaring, and experts say that could be a reason overdose deaths have stopped rising for the first time in nearly three decades. In some states, Naloxone is now sold over the counter. 41 states have legalized its sale without a prescription, according to CVS. The states not on the CVS list are Delaware, Hawaii, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Wyoming. Now everyone and his grandfather can be equipped to assist those who collapse from an overdose. None of this necessarily translates into a decrease in usage, nor a lessening of the problem. All that may have peaked are the immediate consequent deaths not that that isn't a good thing. But the problem is persisting. Even then, the data are inconclusive and not uniform. Connecticut has had a frightening increase in opioid deaths. A record high 1,200 fatalities in 2019 is an 18% jump[.] The number of people who died in Connecticut from drug overdoses in 2019 was the most the state has recorded in a single year, even after a dip in deaths in 2018. So has San Francisco. Deaths resulting from overdoses of Heroin, Fentanyl or combination of the two drugs more than doubled in 2019, the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Wednesday. According to preliminary statistics compiled by city authorities, deaths from overdoses of Fentanyl, a synthetic painkiller 100 times more powerful than morphine, alone reached 234 in 2019, up from 90 in 2018. The real crisis now is with fentanyl, a synthetic opiate, easy to produce and powerful enough to be effective in extraordinarily low doses so that only small volumes need to be smuggled. It is easy to get past the authorities. We all have an idea of how this started. Purdue Pharmaceuticals had made an earlier claim (1998) that opiates used for pain management are not that addictive. This claim was based on just one letter to the 1980 New England Journal of Medicine. Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction. That is not much to go on. It certainly did not constitute an adequate controlled study. Yet that is what Purdue Pharmaceuticals used to push the claim of opiate safety. And the marketing of its signature product, Oxycontin, certainly jump-started a great degree of this present opioid problem. Oxycontin created a generation of addicts who got started with legitimate medication. By the mid-aughts, the damage was clear. Oxycontin was forced to pay $600 million in fines. By 2010, Purdue Pharmaceuticals reformulated the drug to discourage abuse. Simultaneously, the government started cracking down on doctors who overprescribed opiates. Suddenly, those addicted to Oxycontin some were middle-class patients were cut off from a legitimate supply, and even if they could get Oxycontin, it could no longer be crushed and injected, or nasally inhaled, for a quick rush. The addicts then switched to street heroin. From there, it was a shot and a jump to fentanyl, a drug orders of magnitude more powerful than morphine. New York State set up the I-STOP program to require doctors prescribing opiates to check in a state-run database to make sure that patients are not doctor-shopping for duplicate prescriptions. Many states will now require doctors to foward prescriptions electronically to a pharmacy rather than have them written on script, which can be easily forged. The nation recently reached the halfway point in its effort to spur the replacement of easily stolen or forged paper prescriptions with electronic prescribing. With the recent signing of bills in both Florida and Texas, more than half of all states are on their way to requiring that prescribers use e-prescribing for opioids, controlled substances, or all prescriptions. These are all wonderful ideas albeit with some downsides and might have stopped the crisis had they been implemented around 2000, but they weren't. The government is fighting the last war. Big Pharma is being sued into bankruptcy. Oxycontin declared a pre-emptive bankruptcy a few months ago. Worst of all, patients who do need pain medication are having a hard time getting it. But the danger now is fentanyl cheap, easy to hide, and super-powerful. Naloxone is keeping these addicts alive but not unaddicting them. Obviously, what worked before will not work now. A lot of it is coming from China where nothing happens without government oversight. So smuggling in fentanyl seems to be a government policy. Maybe revenge for the Opium Wars. As the undercover journalist Ben Westhoff found out: "I actually went undercover into a pair of Chinese drug operations, including, I went into a fentanyl lab outside Shanghai. And I was pretending to be a drug dealer." He continued: "What I learned was that these companies making fentanyl and other dangerous drugs are subsidized by the government. And so when they work in these suburban office parks, for example, the building, the costs for research and development, they have these development zones, they get export tax breaks." Not only can fentanyl be mailed out from China in small letters, but it can be smuggled over the border from Mexico in drones. Or distributed by the difficult-to-trace dark web. They even sell it on Craigslist. At some point, society will have to admit that this cannot be controlled from the producer side of the equation. A) This opioid crisis is not peaking. It is merely changing. Given that these substances are so addictive, a get-tough policy may not work. These drugs change the brain and emasculate the willpower to get off the substances. Getting tougher on addicts may only create an over-incarcerated society. B) A hands-off policy may not work, either. San Francisco's disaster with the homeless shows that when all rules are removed, the situation does get worse. C) Portugal has had some success with the decriminalization of drug use and it is being suggested in Canada but the addicts are clearly monitored, similar to our methadone programs. Drugs are not legal, but the addicts are given health options. However, less us not be fooled. Portugal is a mono-ethnic, almost mono-racial culture, where almost everyone subscribes to a basic set of given social rules. Muslims are less than one-half of one percent of the population. Ninety-five of the population is ethnic Portuguese. Essentially, everyone is extended family. Such a generous attitude would not work in a society where diversity is everywhere and litigious lawyers abound. To that end, the USA, if it adopts a Portuguese course of decriminalization, may have to modify it considerably. Education should be stressed, but frankly, it already has been and hasn't worked that much, has it? Addicts are here to say, and given fentanyl's rise, they will be for a very long time. I do not like the idea of imprisonment, nor hampering them with criminal records, but a modification of their civil rights might in order. When caught with illegal drugs, the addicts might be given a choice: cold turkey withdrawal in jail or admittance into a drug control program, where they will get safer drugs, but...they lose the right to vote. Their movement is restricted and monitored by ankle bracelet. They cannot visit certain parts of town. They lose the right to drive. They lose custody of their children...to be permanent after a year. Not until they test clean for one year can these rights be restored to them and the loss of children may be permanent. Many will think I am too soft on drug addicts, but too many middle-class people have fallen into this trap. We can no longer ascribe addiction to a pure moral failure. One can get addicted, even from proper use of painkillers after surgery. Therefore, legal remedies may not always be proper. This has not peaked, nor will it go away. Naloxone is helping to prevent deaths but is not saving lives. Controlling the producers is impossible. A moral regeneration of the public might be the only solution. Dry up the market on the buyer's end. Until then, a modified version of civil rights restriction might be preferable to incarceration for many of these cases. Notice that I am not asking for legalization a policy that I think was wrong for marijuana. I am in favor of a modified decriminalization. The father arrested after his sons fatal accident with a gun earlier this month will be released from jail as his case continues. Andrew Mack, 31, was released from custody Thursday after a first appearance by video before Judge Mark Tarantino in Superior Court of Burlington County in Mount Holly. Mack was charged with endangering the welfare of a child and a disorderly persons offense Wednesday after his sons tragic death Feb. 7. The Burlington County Prosecutors Office said Lincoln Mack, 4, grabbed his fathers 9-millimeter handgun while the father was asleep. Lincoln took the gun into another room where he was playing with his sister and shot himself. Mack was arrested at his home in the Browns Mills section of Pemberton, defense attorney Richard Isolda of Riverside told reporters after the court appearance. In court, Isolda said authorities have seized Macks firearms under a temporary extreme risk protection order (TERPO) that allows authorities to temporarily seize someones firearms if there is good cause. Isolda said the family is complying with officials from the state Department of Child Protection and Permanency. Assistant Prosecutor Margaux Loures said Mack had a low score on a Public Safety Assessment, which provides a rating used to determine a defendants risk to the public upon release. The prosecutors office took a reasonable position here, Isolda said, noting they could have moved for detention, which would have seen Mack in jail for at least three more business days until a detention hearing. Isolda said Mack legally owned the guns in the home and that the firearm in question was a privately owned weapon and not related to Macks job, as a Navy petty officer stationed at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. He said the charges do not capture the full picture of Mack, who has previously lived in Missouri and Florida. "Hes a great family man, you should see some of the things hes done, which include volunteering at a soup kitchen in Camden, Isolda said. The prosecutors office has described the boys death as a tragedy, and Macks lawyer echoed that Thursday. "Its horrible, hes [Mack] still grieving, still mourning the loss of his son, Isolda said. Macks wife sat in the courtroom gallery for the hearing. Tarantino set Macks next court date, a pre-indictment conference, for April 8. Joe Brandt can be reached at jbrandt@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @JBrandt_NJ. 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. South Africa: President decries use of GBV to settle political scores President Cyril Ramaphosa says the exchange that unfolded in the National Assembly, where gender-based violence was used as a tool for political debate, was unfortunate and that the House should apologise. The President was responding to a debate on his State of the Nation Address (SONA), which took place over the past two days. The President, who has apologised for the manner in which the exchange unfolded, said gender-based violence was a serious societal challenge that should not be used for political point-scoring. We cannot reflect on this debate without acknowledging the shameful exchanges that took place in this House on the first day of the debate exchanges which served to politicise and trivialise the national crisis of gender-based violence. At a time when we are called upon as nation to intensify and deepen the struggle to end all forms of violence perpetrated by men against women, the statements made and the purposes they were intended to serve were disgraceful. They undermine the resolve that this House demonstrated in its Joint Sitting in September last year to respond to this crisis decisively and swiftly, he said on Thursday. The President was referring to an incident in which ANC MP Boy Mamabolo alleged that EFF leader Julius Malema abused his wife. Malema later made a similar allegation against the President in relation to his first wife. Honourable Malema as the allegation was made against you, I felt for your wife because it was uncalled for. I must say, it was improper. It was not correct for it to be raised and if I can offer an apology to you about this, I would like to because it was uncalled for and Mantwa responded. You have raised the issue of my late former wife Nomazizi. She is not here to respond for herself We should not resort to using issues such as these, as it was also used against you to politicise and to trivialise an important issue that affects so many women in our country, he said. Progress made in fight against GBV The President said government has made progress in improved access to justice for victims and survivors of gender-based violence. The South African Police Service has confirmed that all police stations have sexual assault evidence collection kits. They have prioritised backlog cases related to gender-based violence and established the Cold Case Task Team. They have analysed over 3 600 dockets on sexual offences, and more than 60% of these have been reopened for further investigation and referred to the Senior Public Prosecutor for decision, he said. The President said the Departments of Justice and Correctional Services have vetted more than 11 300 government personnel working directly with children and mentally disabled persons since the Emergency Response Action Plan was implemented. We are making progress in establishing a visible and sustained multimedia campaign to raise awareness around gender-based violence and change behaviour. We have appointed 200 social workers and are training health professionals and social service practitioners on post-violence care and trauma debriefing. The NPA [National Prosecuting Authority] has identified areas where more Thuthuzela Centres will be established, including Cradock, Kwa-Vuma, Ga-Rankuwa, Paarl and Tzaneen. He said government is making progress on the economic inclusion of women through programmes like the SheTrades initiative, the efforts of various departments to ensure that 40% of procurement goes to women, and the prioritisation of women as beneficiaries of land reform programmes. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2020-02-20. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. It may seem obvious, even uninteresting, to mount an exhibition about how words are attached to photographs. This happens all the time, so often that we dont think about it. In newspapers, every image is captioned. When we read biographies or history, we reflexively turn to the photographs in the middle of the book to attach images to the words we have absorbed. We are fast approaching the two-century mark in the history of photographs, and we have never been more suspicious and verbal in our relationship to them: What does this image show? Where was it made? Can I trust it? Reaffirming the government's commitment to protect the unique culture of the Northeast, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said on Thursday that misinformation was being spread after abrogation of Article 370 that identical fate awaited Article 371 in the region. Most of the states that have special provisions under Article 371 are in the Northeast. These provisions are aimed at preserving their cultural heritage and customary laws. Addressing a gathering to mark the 34th foundation day of Arunachal Pradesh, Shah said that the Northeast was only geographically united with the rest of India before 2014 when Narendra Modi assumed office of the Prime Minister. "The real emotional integration of the region with the rest of the country happened only under the Modi government," he said. Shah said,"Misinformation was spread after abrogation of Article 370, which gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir, that Article 371 will also be scrapped. It will never happen. Nobody has any such intention." Referring to the problems of militancy and inter-state boundary disputes in the region, the Union Home Minister said that the Modi government was committed to their resolution. "When we come to seek your votes in 2024, the Northeast will have been free from problems like militancy and inter-state strife," he said. Boris Johnson pledged 50,000 more NHS nurses in his manifesto ahead of the December general election (PA) Boris Johnsons much-maligned election pledge to boost NHS nursing numbers by 50,000 has run into more difficulties, a leaked email suggests. The promise of thousands more nurses was one of the Conservatives key manifesto pledges but came under fire after it emerged that 18,500 of the 50,000 would come by encouraging existing nurses to stay in the profession. The pledge was branded deceitful by Labour and called a mixed message by the Royal College of Nursing when it was unveiled in November. It now seems to have hit more bumps in the road after a leaked email from a senior official at the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) about the Nurse 50K target called on NHS England to develop a more robust plan. The message, from DHSC workforce director Gavin Larner to Prerana Issar, chief people officer at NHS England, was obtained by the Health Service Journal (HSJ). In it, Larner said ministers would expect a clearer model of change in the delivery plan on culture and how you see the publication of a staff offer translating into national work that changes employer behaviour. Read more: Dog given PSDA commendation for boosting morale of Second World War soldiers Read more: Two men stabbed in suspected robbery at cannabis factory He said the cause and effect is largely implied and unclear at the moment and this needs to be much clearer to give confidence to ministers that national action over the next three or four years will deliver improvements in culture and retention. Larner also said in the email, sent last week, that proposals on how related work such as pay, pensions and leadership would improve retention were weak. He added: The team would be happy to meet with you urgently, or provide direct support, to help ensure that we have a more robust delivery plan this week. When controversy first arose surrounding the pledge of 50,000 nurses, then culture secretary Nicky Morgan was forced to defend the claim on Good Morning Britain. Story continues Debating the suggestion that the nurses were new with hosts Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid, she said: There will be, overall and we are very, very clear on this 50,000 more nurses if you look in 10 years time than there are today. Labour has remained critical of the promise, saying only 19,000 posts would be filled by brand-new nurse trainees, with 18,500 of the 50,000 coming by encouraging existing nurses to stay in the profession and others to return and 12,500 recruited from abroad. Labour's Jon Ashworth said there was confusion at the heart of Johnson's plans for 50,000 nurses. (Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) Speaking following the latest controversy over the plan, shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: There is utter confusion at the heart of Johnsons pledge to recruit 50,000 more nurses. The plan had already unravelled when it became clear it included thousands of already existing nurses. It now turns out the government is planning to recruit the thousands from abroad just a day after it outlined restrictive immigration policies including a nurses tax for international nurses. Its no good the Department of Health trying to shift the blame on to NHS England, there is a nursing crisis from a decade of Tory cuts, and Johnson must come forward immediately with a credible plan to recruit the nurses we need. The DHSC would not comment on the leak but a spokesman said: We are working closely with the NHS to deliver on our commitment for 50,000 more nurses by 2025, including quality assuring plans. The upcoming NHS People Plan will set out further actions to boost recruitment and retention. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said attracting thousands of nurses was urgent. (Picture: Getty) Dame Donna Kinnair, RCN Chief Executive and General Secretary, said: This very public and vote winning ambition must be met and the RCN will play a constructive part, working with government and the NHS on the role each plays. High quality and safe patient care demands an end to the current shortages. Attracting thousands more and keeping high-skilled staff in the NHS has never been more urgent. Tomorrows nurses need support with the real cost of their degrees - including tuition - and todays dedicated professionals expect credible plans to support them in giving top quality care and value their vast experience with fair pay and respect. As part of our campaign, we will continue to campaign to secure legislation for England for accountability on workforce planning and safe staffing levels. Kobach says he discussed his Senate bid with Trump Former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach says he discussed his GOP Senate bid with during a visit to the White House in January. Kobach told The Wall Street Journal in an interview on Friday that he did not ask Trump to endorse him but that the president has not ruled out declaring his support for the Senate campaign. Reality check . . . If the Prezloved Mr. Kobach, he would have found a place for him inside the Beltway like he saidthe alt-right candidate suffered a humiliating and merciless election beating at the hands of a moderate old white lady . . . Which proved the politico isn't so tough or electable after all. Here's his side of the story: She's juggling her hosting career with her singing career as she prepares to reunite with the Pussycat Dolls in early April. And Ashley Roberts proved there's no rest for the wicked as she left Heart Radio station following her daily appearance on the channel's breakfast show in London on Thursday morning. The presenter, 38, displayed her effortlessly chic style as she wrapped up in a grey longline coat, teamed with a pale satin shirt and black, wide-leg trousers. Busy bee: Ashley Roberts proved there's no rest for the wicked as she left Heart Radio station following her daily appearance on the channel's breakfast show in London on Thursday Adding a hint of daytime glamour to her look, the Buttons hitmaker, who recently split from Strictly's Giovanni Pernice, strutted across the streets of the English capital in a pair of nude pointed heels. The American musician carried her belongings in a beige canvas bag, and rounded things off with skinny animal print shades for a touch of pazzazz to her work attire. With her tresses worn in loose waves, the professional dancer showcased her radiant complexion as she went make-up free. Looking good: The presenter, 38, displayed her effortlessly chic style as she wrapped up in a grey longline coat, teamed with a pale satin shirt and black, wide-leg trousers All in the details: The American musician carried her belongings in a beige canvas bag, and rounded things off with skinny animal print shades for a touch of pazzazz to her work attire Flying solo: The blonde recently spent Valentine's Day with her gal pals following her split from Strictly's Giovanni Pernice (pictured together in April last year) The Buttons hitmaker is preparing to reunite with the Pussycat Dolls in early April (pictured with (L-R) Jessica Sutta, Kimberly Wyatt, Nicole Scherzinger and Carmit Bachar Earlier in the week, Ashley paid a touching tribute to her late friend, Love Island presenter Caroline Flack. The host grew emotional as she discussed the tragic news that Caroline passed away on Saturday. Former X Factor star Caroline, 40, was found dead inside her home by her father Ian after taking her own life while the friend who was staying with her 'popped out to the shops'. Touching: Ashley's outing comes after she paid a touching tribute to her late friend Caroline Flack on Monday Ashley, who was a longtime friend of Caroline, began: 'This is a tough one to do. It's been a tough few days following the news of... sorry... Caroline Flack'. As she attempted to hold back tears, the blonde continued: 'For those of us who knew her this has been very surreal... 'It's hard to think anything good can come of this, but if anything it puts the spotlight back on how we treat each other.' Firm friends: The host grew emotional as she discussed the tragic news that Caroline passed away on Saturday before sharing a series of pictures together online The media personality went on to reference her own experience with suicide, as her father Pat took his own life in March 2018. She continued: 'Having survived this first hand with my family, I can't imagine what her family are going through at this time. 'Just be kind to each other, our hearts and prayers go out to her. We love you Caroline.' Caroline took her own life on Saturday after a worried friend who was staying with her went to the shops, leaving her alone at her London flat. The producer friend couldn't get back into the flat when she returned. Tribute: The media personality went on to share a tribute on social media, posting a selection of pictures as she urged her followers to be kind She called Caroline's father Ian who gained entry to the flat where he found the star's body. Her management team have since described her as 'vulnerable' and criticised the CPS for pushing ahead with a pending court case despite her boyfriend Lewis Burton saying he did not want to press charges. He had said she hit him with a lamp at her former home in Islington in December and as part of her bail conditions the pair were banned from contacting each other. Caroline and Ashley were longterm friends after meeting through mutual friends. The pair's bond was strengthened when Ashley appeared on Strictly Come Dancing in 2018, where she was partnered with Pasha Kovalev, who won the 2014 series with Caroline. Ashley went on to date professional dancer Giovanni Pernice, who was Caroline's dancing partner during a Christmas special of the BBC One show. In March 2018, Ashley's father Pat took his own life, with Ashley later admitting that she felt in a state of 'shock, confusion, questioning and pain' as she struggled to come to terms with the news. Pain: In March 2018, Ashley's father Pat took his own life, with Ashley later admitting that she felt in a state of 'shock, confusion, questioning and pain Speaking with You magazine last year, Ashley recalled: 'Nothing can really prepare you for the harsh reality of what I dealt with. It's tough, it's very challenging.' She continued: 'The passing of my dad made me see how many amazing friends I have over here, who tried to scoop me up'. If you have been affected by this story, please call the Samaritans on 116 123 or visit www.samaritans.org Melania Trump to visit Delhi school where Happiness Curriculum is taught India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 20: US First Lady Melania Trump will visit a Delhi government school to interact with students. The visit to the school who have been taught the happiness curriculum will take place on February 25. Meanwhile US President Donald Trump will have a packed schedule during his India visit next week. Trump would leave US on Sunday morning and arrive in Germany. Following a one and half hour stop, he would leave for India. At India, both Trump and Prime Minister, Narendra Modi would jointly address the Namaste Trump event at the Motera stadium in Gujarat. During the 22 kilometre drive between the airport and Motera stadium, the two leaders would pass through 28 stages representing the states of the country. This even is called as the India Road Show. Trump in India; Trade deal off, but chopper pact on the table Trump and First Lady, Melania Trump will arrive in Delhi at around 8 pm and they would stay at the Maurya hotel in Chanakyapuri. They would visit the Taj Mahal at Agra. The business end of the visit will be held at the Hyderabad House where delegation level talks will be held between the two leaders. Trump will also take part in private events at the US embassy. There would also be a roundtable with industry representatives. Trump and Melania would also call on President Ram Nath Kovind and take part in a state banquet. Vancouver Washington, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Adaptive Ad Systems Inc (AATV) announced today that it is greatly expanding its Dynamic Digital Ad Insertion services in Florida. Adaptive already provides services for multiple areas in Florida comprised of over 58,000 subscribers. The Company is in process of installing a Florida campus that serves over 11,000 Florida university residents. Addressing the elusive and sought-after viewer segment of university students, company CEO J. Michael Heil states: Our advertising reaches one of the most difficult groups of viewers to capture: young adults who are actively engaged in expanding their world view and understanding and making choices and preferences for their personal lives. With a hotly contested election year of 2020 approaching, almost every political campaign is poised to purchase advertising in many different states and National races. We specialize in college cable advertising, and our university networks can provide an advantageous opportunity for all candidates to reach and inform the nations most important voter segment with their campaigns serviced by us. Simply put, we are the best single outlet for political advertising to students attending institutions of higher learning. Addressing the Companys Florida expansion announced today, Mr. Heil continues: Florida is a political battle ground state that is critical to national and local races, with both parties aggressively campaigning to secure the most votes they can in Florida. The university system we recently acquired allows us to significantly increase the number of Florida students we can reach through our cable television advertising. With these new installations we have now increased our Florida cable customers to over 69,000, and we anticipate to further increase that number in the near future. The Company currently serves over 40 colleges and universities with over 300,000 enrollment. Adaptive ad services are streamed via additional television screens throughout all campus buildings, in nonresidential environments in hotels and hospitals, as well as common areas and classrooms. Our service extends advertising exposure to the broadest possible audience and will generate further increasing revenue and profits for the year ahead. Story continues ABOUT ADAPTIVE Adaptive Ad Systems Inc. is a digital media and video communications company that, together with its subsidiary, manufactures, develops and deploys Dynamic Digital Ad Insertion (DDAI) and video streaming media hardware and proprietary processing software for the Cable TV, Satellite and IPTV markets with its primary focus on the 2nd and 3 rd tier US markets. Its digital ad insertion technology and unique profit-sharing model overcomes the barriers that typically prevent the insertion of National and Local cable TV advertising on major cable TV Networks. Adaptive exclusively sells all available advertising space in each market it has contracted, while maintaining complete technology ownership. Adaptive has implemented a unique and advantageous profit-sharing model with its Cable TV Partners. The Companys technology and business model allows it to dynamically and economically serve currently over 75 designated marketing areas in approximately 34 states in the United States. Adaptive also provides broadband and cable TV services in some niche major markets. For additional information, please visit: www.adaptiveadsystems.com. FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS Any statements contained in this press release that do not describe historical facts constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements may include, without limitation, financial projections, statements regarding the plans and objectives of management for current and future operations, the development, regulatory approvals and commercialization of the Companys products, or any of the Companys proposed services, systems, services, partnerships or acquisitions. Such forward-looking statements are not meant to predict or guarantee actual results and performance and actual events or results may differ considerably. Factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from any projections may include, without limitation, the Companys delays in the development of its products, the inability to obtain additional financing, the impact of significant new or changing government regulation on the industry, existing or increased competition, results of arbitration and litigation, stock volatility and illiquidity, and the Companys general failure to implement the Companys business plans or strategies. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect any change in events or circumstances that may arise after the date of this release. A man wearing a protective face mask at Chinatown in Singapore on 19 February, 2020. (PHOTO: Barcroft Media via Getty Images) SINGAPORE The Ministry of Health (MOH) on Thursday (20 February) confirmed one new case of the novel coronavirus in Singapore, bringing the total to 85. The new case, a 36-year-old male Chinese national, did not travel to China recently. Contact tracing for the man is underway to establish any links to previous cases or travel history to China, said the ministry. In all, nine out of 63 locally transmitted cases currently have no established links to previous cases or travel history to mainland China. Separately, three more patients have been discharged from the hospital, including two Chinese nationals, 56 and 38, and a 28-year-old Singaporean man linked to the Grace Assembly of God cluster. This brings the total of those who have fully recovered from the infection and have been discharged from hospital to 37. Case 85: Chinese national with work pass The 36-year-old male Chinese national, a Singapore work pass holder, tested positive for the virus on Thursday morning. He is currently warded in an isolation room at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID). The ministry said that most of the 48 remaining patients in the hospital are stable or improving. Four remain in critical condition in the intensive care unit. As of Thursday noon, the MOH has identified 2,616 close contacts who have been quarantined. Of these, 1,147 are currently quarantined, and 1,469 have completed their quarantine. It also reiterated its advice for Singaporeans to defer all travel to Hubei province, home to Wuhan where the virus originated, and all non-essential travel to mainland China. More details on case 83 & 84: Locals linked to churches The ministry also provided more details on two locally transmitted cases, a 54-year-old Singaporean man and a 35-year-old Singaporean woman, who were announced on Wednesday. Both had not travelled to China recently. The man, the sixth case linked to The Life Church and Missions Singapore cluster, was said to travel frequently to Malaysia for work purposes. The ministry had not specified his occupation. Story continues The man reported developing symptoms on 28 January and had sought treatment at a general practitioner clinic on 1 February, 5 February, 6 February and 10 February. He went to the NCID on Tuesday. He had tested positive for the virus the next morning and is currently warded in an isolation room at the NCID. Prior to his hospital admission, the Rivervale Drive resident had gone to work at Philemon Singapore at 16 Kallang Place Previous cases linked to the church included a married couple from Wuhan and three other Singaporeans. (INFOGRAPHIC: Yahoo News Singapore) The woman, the 22nd patient linked to the Grace Assembly of God cluster, had gone to work at Lonza Biologics at 35 Tuas South Avenue 6 and visited Bugis Junction prior to her hospital admission. The Aljunied Road resident had reported developing symptoms on 4 February and had sought treatment at a general practitioner clinic on 4 and 5 February. She is linked to a 28-year-old Singaporean man, previously confirmed as a case also linked to the church, who was discharged on Thursday. As she was identified as his contact, the woman was referred to the NCID on Tuesday and tested positive for the virus the next morning. She is currently warded in an isolation room at the NCID. COVID-19s death toll surpasses SARS epidemic The novel strain belongs to the same family of coronaviruses as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed nearly 800 people globally during a 2002-2003 outbreak and also started in China. It likely originated from Wuhans Huanan Seafood Market, where live animals or products such as foxes, wolf puppies, giant salamanders, snakes, porcupines, and camel meat are sold. Declared a global emergency by the World Health Organisation (WHO), COVID-19 has spread to 29 territories beyond mainland China. The WHO also said that cases being transmitted by people who have never travelled to China could be the "tip of the iceberg". By territory, Singapore has the fourth-highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases after mainland China, South Korea, and Japan. The global tally includes cruise ship Diamond Princess, moored off Japan, which has 634 cases and two deaths so far. Five Singaporeans on board the ship have reported that they are physically well, said a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson last Wednesday, in response to Yahoo News Singapores queries. To date, the virus has left more than 2,000 people in China dead and sickened over 75,000 globally. Eleven deaths from the outbreak have been reported outside mainland China. Five territories Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, France, and South Korea have each reported the death of a patient infected with the virus. Hong Kong announced its second death on Wednesday. Two fatalities were confirmed in Iran a day after. On the same day, Japan announced that two of its nationals died in the hospital after leaving the Diamond Princess for treatment. Patients suffering from the new strain may exhibit fever and symptoms of lower respiratory illness such as coughing or difficulty in breathing as well as pneumonia-like symptoms like a runny nose, sore throat, and headache. However, some who have died from it have not displayed symptoms of fever, according to details released by Chinas National Health Commission, potentially complicating global efforts to check for infected travellers as they arrive at airports and other travel hubs. (INFOGRAPHIC: Yahoo News Singapore) Stay in the know on-the-go: Join Yahoo Singapore's Telegram channel at http://t.me/YahooSingapore Related stories: COVID-19: First patient in Singapore discharged after 28-day stay, counts himself lucky report COVID-19: Mother of children attending preschool at Trinity Paya Lebar church infected pastor COVID-19: Singapore confirms three more cases including two linked to churches, total at 84 Singapore Red Cross raises $6m for COVID-19 relief efforts in China COVID-19: Israel bans entry for foreign travellers from Singapore COVID-19: How it's spreading in Singapore and the world LAS VEGAS As six leading presidential candidates brawled onstage in a debate Wednesday night on the Las Vegas Strip, a handful of Nevadans supporting a man who didnt make the cut were around seven miles away, puzzling over their evening plans. Oh, hes not? asked an incredulous Cindy Yeargan, 71, when informed that the hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer was not going to be onstage. She was preparing to walk into a Steyer campaign office here. We were here for a debate watch! Mary Holmes, 65, arrived soon after, also under the impression that an event was scheduled at the campaign office. Hes a nice man, Ms. Holmes said of Mr. Steyer. I want to know exactly what he can do. As Ms. Yeargan, Ms. Holmes and a few others would discover, there was not, in fact, a debate watch party happening at the campaign office, even as a truck bearing stacks of folding chairs rolled up early in the evening. The Court of Appeal has set aside, 'as a matter of right', a 1.37m judgement entered by Bank of Ireland against a man just weeks before it concluded an alternative repayment agreement with him for some loans. The bank had not explained its inadvertent and unusual failure over some four years to serve the judgment on Patrick OBrien or even disclose its existence to him, the three judge court noted. Giving the COA judgment granting Mr O'Brien's appeal over the judgment order, Ms Justice Maire Whelan found the High Court had erred in concluding the judgment order was obtained "regularly". A totality of factors resulted in the circumstances in which the judgment was obtained being "closer to the irregular end of the spectrum" and the judgment should be set aside ex debito justitiae [as a matter of right], she said. The irregularity arose as a result of estoppel arising from conduct/representations of the bank which lead to Mr O'Brien reasonably understanding, if he engaged in a certain course of conduct, judgment would not be proceeded with and he had acted on those representations, she held. The judgment was entered by the bank, in default of appearance by Mr O'Brien, in the High Court central office on June 10 2013. Mr OBrien, with an address at 'Simla', Curragh Road, Kildare town, was then negotiating with the bank about a repayment agreement which was concluded in early July 2013 and complied with by him. Having been told by the bank in July 2017 of the judgment, he took proceedings in late 2017 to have it set aside, arguing it was irregularly obtained and amounted to "sharp practice". He appealed after the High Court dismissed his case and, on Wednesday, the COA allowed the appeal. The case arose from loans made by ICS Building Society to Mr OBrien between 2001 and 2008 and later transferred to BOI. Due to arrears on repayments, the bank issued letters on March 12 2013 demanding repayment in default of which proceedings would be issued for recovery of the full balance, plus interest. A summary summons seeking the then outstanding sum of 1.37m was served on Mr O'Brien on April 3 2013. He emailed the bank's then solicitor a week later asking it to refrain from any action until he had met his solicitor this coming Friday. Ms Justice Whelan said the bank solicitor ignored the email, there was no further correspondence between the sides and the bank solicitor entered judgment for 1.37m on June 10 2013. Mr O'Brien was not informed by the bank that judgment was procured and he proceeded with the negotiations and concluded a settlement with the bank "oblivious to the fact". He adhered to the alternative payment agreement until it expired in July 2018, leaving a residual debt owing to the bank, she said. The agreement impacted on five of six mortgages, provided for sale of a Dublin property and discharge of a receiver on agreed terms. The judge found the banks course of direct engagement with Mr OBrien was governed by terms agreed with him in March 2013. That precluded it from inconsistently instructing its solicitor to secure summary judgment in default of appearance when it had effectively agreed to stay the proceedings on certain terms which it had never suggested he had not complied with, she held. While a misunderstanding or misapprehension may have arisen between the bank and its solicitors, the consequences of that cannot be visited on Mr OBrien, she said. There was clear evidence that Mr O'Brien, who directly conducted negotiations with the bank himself, had also reasonably believed the summary summons served on him in April 2013, had something to do with the appointment of a receiver, she said. A bullet that seemed to come from the basement door sliced across his forehead. As blood poured down his face, Norwood said, he ran into the small ranch house to search for his family. The lights were on in the room belonging to his older son, Levi, but there was no sign of the 17-year-old. In the living room, there was what looked like a large pile of blankets on the floor. US Secretary meets Saudi King to discuss regional issues Mike Pompeo's visit was reported aiming to focus on human rights issues such as that of Saudi-American physician Walid Fitaihi. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday met Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz in the Saudi capital Riyadh to discuss the latest regional developments, according to the official Saudi Press Agency. The meeting tackled "the relations between the two countries, the overall regional and international events, the position of the two countries, and the efforts made towards them." TRIP COMES THREE WEEKS AFTER TRUMP UNVEILED HIS MIDDLE EAST PLAN "Pleased to be back in Riyadh to discuss the US governments strong commitment to Saudi Arabias security and the continued need to stand together to counter Irans malign behavior in the region," Pompeo wrote on Twitter. Pompeo's visit focuses on discussing regional security, economy, and most likely human rights issues such as that of Saudi-American physician Walid Fitaihi. Arrested in November 2017, Fitaihi was released pending trial last July. The Saudi government reportedly seized the American passports of the doctor's wife and six of his children. Fitaihi was detained as part of the famous Ritz-Carlton detention campaign in November 2017, which targeted princes and businessmen as well as former and current officials in the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia usually denies mistreating detainees and stresses its commitment to the law. Ride-hailing major Uber on Thursday said it has disbursed about Rs 75 crore in micro-credit and fuel credit to its driver-partners in India over the past one year under its Uber Care initiative. The US-based company said that over 90,000 driver-partners have benefitted from various programmes being run under Uber Care that was launched in 2018. "Over 90,000 drivers have benefitted from Uber Care, our driver welfare programme in the first year since rollout. While we run many programmes for our driver-partners across various countries of operation, Uber Care is an India-centric initiative," Uber India and South Asia Head of Central Operations Pavan Vaish told PTI. He added that the top-5 cities where the highest number of drivers were impacted are Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune. Vaish said that through Uber Care, the company is supporting its driver-partners by offering access to life and health insurance, financial support, children's education and medical consultations. "Till date, Uber through its partners has helped disburse micro-loans worth Rs 35.6 crore to drivers across cities. There are various use cases that we saw whether it was to meet medical emergencies or even payment of the children's school fee," he said. Vaish added that through its partnership with Indian Oil Corporation and Paytm, about Rs 38.7 crore worth of fuel credits has been facilitated in the past year. As part of Uber Kifayat, 34,000 car servicing packages have been facilitated resulting in overall savings worth Rs 95 lakhs for driver-partners. "We have also partnered with NGOs and experts to make the right to education more accessible to drivers' children. Till date, the programme has helped more than 600 children get admission into schools and we are working on ramping this more aggressively," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Scoop 2020 Hyundai Tucson bookings have been opened for a token amount of Rs 25,000. It will only be offered in automatic transmission option. No manual option on offer. Hyundai India dealers have started accepting bookings for the 2020 Tucson, for a token amount of Rs 25,000. The facelifted avatar of the second-gen Hyundai Tucson (third-gen globally) was showcased at Auto Expo 2020. The first-generation Hyundai Tucson was introduced in the country back in 2005 and the current model has been on the Indian market since 2016. Now, we bring you all the important details of the new 2020 Hyundai Tucson; the flagship ICE SUV from the South Korean brand (after the discontinuation of the Santa Fe). To start off, the premium SUV (technically, a compact crossover) will be available in three variants: GL 2WD, GLS 2WD and GLS 4WD. While the front-wheel-drive GL and GLS are available in both petrol and diesel formats, the top-end GLS all-wheel-drive comes only with a diesel powertrain. None of the variants come with a manual transmission. Being a facelift, the proportions are nearly the same as the previous model. At 4480x1850x1660mm, the 2020 Tucson is slightly longer by 5mm. Changes to the exteriors mainly come in the form of revised bumpers, Penta LED projector headlamps (in GLS), LED taillights, new 18-inch diamond-cut wheels, etc. On the inside, the SUV gets 10-way power-adjustable driver seat, 8-way powered co-passenger seat, dual-zone climate control, Blue Link connectivity, wireless charging, 8-inch touchscreen infotainment system (with Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, Hyundai iBlue and voice commands) and a panoramic sunroof. In terms of safety and assists, the 2020 Hyundai Tucson features three driving modes (Eco, Smart and Pro), front parking sensors, ESC, Hill Descent Control, Hill Assist, puddle lamps, etc. All the features mentioned above are standard. On the other hand, the GLS 2WD gets cornering lamps, powered tailgate and electric parking brake. The GLS 4WD variant with HTRAC all-wheel-drive system gets Dynamic Stability Control (DSC) as well. The Hyundai Tucson has achieved a five-star NCAP safety rating in 2015, 2016 and 2019. Below are the detailed variant-wise features of new Hyundai Tucson BS6 facelift. 2 WD AT GL (o) equipped with 18 inch Diamond Cut Alloy Wheels All black interiors leather touch dashboard led tail lamps shark fin antenna chrome door handle with pocket lights panoramic electric sunroof Driver seat 10 way electric adjustable co-driver seat 8 way electric adjustable Dual zone Fatc auto defogger in front and rear rear ac vent bluelink wireless charger 2nd row recline puddle lamps welcome function glovebox cooling 8inch infortainment system voice recognition 3 drive mode select ( eco, comfort, sport) front parking sensors rain sensing wipers rear fog lamp electronic stability control downhill break control hill control assist *above features are also standard features across the range. 2 WD AT GLS Penta Led Projector Headlamps Cornering lamps power tail gate electric parking brake 4 WD AT GLS H TRAC also called dynamic stability control Coming to the engine department, the 2.0-litre diesel motor makes 182bhp and 400Nm while mated to an 8-speed automatic. On the other hand, the 2.0-litre petrol unit is good for 150bhp (-3bhp) and 192Nm of torque. It is mated to a 6-speed automatic transmission. Hyundai India offers three warranty schemes for the 2020 Tucson: 3 years/unlimited kms, 4 years/60,000 kms and 5 years/50,000kms. Other options include 3 years/30,000 kms free maintenance, 3 years roadside assistance and 3 years Bluelink subscription. The ex-showroom prices for the outgoing BS4 Hyundai Tucson are currently in the range of Rs 19-27 lakh and expect the figures to be slightly higher for the new BS6 2020 model. The knives were out for Michael Bloomberg as he joined his fellow candidates on the Democratic debate stage Wednesday in Las Vegas. And no candidate held back. Id like to talk about who were running against, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians, and, no, Im not talking about Donald Trump, Im talking about Mayor Bloomberg, said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk, Warren added later. Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren face off at the debate on Wednesday night. (John Locher/AP) Sen. Bernie Sanders also hit Bloombergs record. Mr. Bloomberg had policies in New York City of stop-and-frisk which went after African-American and Latino people in an outrageous way. That is not a way youre going to grow voter turnout, said Sanders. Bloomberg and Sanders have also been in a running feud, playing out mostly on Twitter, as Sanders rises to the top of nearly every national polling average and Bloomberg eagerly attempts to knock Sanders off that perch. In the past few weeks, Bloomberg has disavowed parts of Sanderss fervent fan base often referred to as Bernie Bros as toxic while a Sanders aide incorrectly accused Bloomberg of having a heart attack. (Bloomberg did have stents placed in 2000.) Bloomberg hit back on Wednesday, saying there was no chance Sanders could win the nomination. I dont think theres any chance of the senator beating Donald Trump. You dont start out by saying I got 160 million people Im going to take the insurance plan that they love. If he is the candidate, we will have Donald Trump for another four years and we cannot stand that, said the former New York mayor who has poured millions of his personal fortune into promoting his candidacy since he entered the race in November. Former Vice President Joe Biden, whose polling numbers have declined since Bloomberg entered the race, also got in an early shot at the former mayor. Story continues The mayor makes an interesting point. The fact of the matter is he has not managed his city very, very well when he was there. He had stop-and-frisk throwing close to 5 million young black men against the wall, said Biden, who has been recently irate at ads from the Bloomberg campaign that suggest that the former mayor and former President Barack Obama had a close working relationship. Bidens onstage remarks followed up on a digital ad released by his campaign that attempted to dispel the notion that Obama supports his candidacy. Welcome to the debates, Mike. We have a lot to catch up on about Barack Obamas record. pic.twitter.com/bMYPLYwnfQ Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) February 19, 2020 Several Democratic candidates, including some who are no longer in the contest, accused Bloomberg of buying his way into the primary. I actually welcomed Mayor Bloomberg to the stage, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. I have been told many times to wait my turn and step aside and Im not going to do that now. I dont think you look at Donald Trump and say we need someone richer in the White House. On Twitter earlier in the week, Warren previewed her fight-line in comparing Bloomberg, quite starkly, to Trump. Its a shame Mike Bloomberg can buy his way into the debate, Warren wrote. But at least now primary voters curious about how each candidate will take on Donald Trump can get a live demonstration of how we each take on an egomaniac billionaire. Bloomberg is not on the ballot in any of the four early states and so hes yet to win a single delegate. Yet his unique campaign strategy and formidable war chest have equipped him to potentially amass a large number of delegates come Super Tuesday just three days after the South Carolina primary and could put him close to the lead come March 4. Bloomberg is currently polling in third place, according to RealClearPolitics, with a 16.1 average nationally, behind Sanders and Biden. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: Donald Trump said he is not ready to pardon longtime friend and political adviser Roger Stone, saying he wants the legal process to "play out." The president said the forewoman of the jury was biased, and said his former adviser is a good candidate for "exoneration." "I want to address today's sentencing of a man, Roger Stone. I'm following this very closely and I want to see it play out to its fullest because Roger has a very good chance of exoneration in my opinion," he said during a speech to former convicts in Las Vegas. Roger was never involved in the Trump campaign for president. Early on, before I announced, he may have done a little consulting work or something," Mr Trump said. "He's a person who knows a lot of people having to do with politics. It's my strong opinion that the forewoman of the jury ... is totally tainted." "Roger has a very good chance of exoneration, in my opinion," he added. During his speech, Mr Trump told the graduating class of a program to help former inmates transition to civilian life, "We believe in second chances" and slammed "bad juries." "I'm not going to do anything with the great powers bestowed upon the president of the United States," he said, adding he wants "to see the process play out." The president's remarks amounted to a partial rebuke of the justice system, describing it as too corrupt. "You wouldn't know about a bad jury. Anybody here?" he said, smiling as the group stirred and laughed and cheered. "You're my experts, OK," he said. "How can you have a jury pool tainted so badly?" His comments were his latest in which he appeared to be trying to influence Mr Stone's ultimate fate and, by definition, interfere in the justice system, something other presidents have avoided. Hagerstown Regional Airport in Washington County will receive $1 million, which will be used to pay for a terminal building and expansion. Tipton Airport, near Fort Meade in Anne Arundel County, will receive $300,000 to fund the expansion of an area to park aircraft. India and the US are discussing at least five MoUs (memoranda of understanding) on issues ranging from trade facilitation to homeland security that are expected to be finalised during President Donald Trumps visit to the country next week alongside some defence deals. Despite their inability to finalise a limited trade package before the stand-alone visit during February 24-25, the two sides are looking at the trip to strengthen the bilateral strategic partnership and ramp up cooperation in counter-terrorism, defence, security, trade and energy. External affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told a news briefing that the two sides are discussing at least five memoranda of understanding (MoUs) on matters such as intellectual property, trade facilitation and homeland security. He said some announcements are also expected on defence deals but declined to give details. The two sides are expected to ink a $2.6-billion deal for 24 MH-60R Seahawk helicopters for the Indian Navy and a smaller follow-on deal for six Apache helicopters, people familiar with developments said. They have made progress in consultations on a $1.8-billion deal for the National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System (NASAMS) to protect the national capital though it wasnt clear if the sale would be cleared during Trumps visit, added the people who declined to be identified. Indian officials have said the inability to finalise a limited trade package in time for the visit hasnt dampened enthusiasm to take forward the strategic partnership in diverse areas and to forge a free trade agreement (FTA) at some point in the future. India has engaged the US in trade talks for some time and hopes to reach an understanding with an outcome that strikes the right balance for both sides, Kumar said. We do not want to rush into a deal as the issues involved are complicated, with many decisions potentially having real impact on the lives of millions of people and long-term economic consequences. We do not want to create artificial deadlines, he said. Responding to Trumps remarks that India hasnt treated the US very well in trade, Kumar said trade had grown at more than 10% per annum for the past two years and the deficit had steadily declined. Our trade will become even more balanced with increasing imports of US oil and gas, and purchase of large numbers of civilian aircraft over the next few years, he added. He noted the unprecedented support provided to India by the US after the 2019 Pulwama terror attack by Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed and American help in the UN designation of terrorists operating out of Pakistan, and said India expects this cooperation to be further strengthened during Trumps visit. The visit will also allow the two sides to exchange views on regional issues such as the situation in Afghanistan and the Indo-Pacific. At the same time, contentious issues such as the H-1B visas and US concerns about data localisation are also expected to figure in the talks. Kumar said India had engaged the US administration and Congress on the movement of Indian professionals and their contributions to the growth of the US economy and in retaining a competitive edge in innovation. It is a matter which is very important to us and we expect that the movement of Indian professionals is part of the agenda which could come up for discussion, he said. On the civil nuclear front, Westinghouse and Indias NPCIL are in discussions to build six 1,100 MW reactors at Kovvada in Andhra Pradesh. Following the resolution of Westinghouses bankruptcy issues, the two sides have talked about the division of work and NPCIL officials have visited the US reference plant to understand Westinghouses modular construction methodology. Keagan Kermode portrays Sam Wheat and Karley Konegay portrays Molly Jensen in ECU School of Theatre and Dance's "Ghost: The Musical." | Photos: Cliff Hollis Oda Mae Brown, portrayed by Nazmokeem Harvey, and Clara Brown, portrayed by Rachel Jones, deal with Sam. Sam shares a moment with Molly. East Carolina students will take to the stage on Feb. 19 to perform "Ghost: The Musical," based on the 1990 hit film "Ghost" that stars Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopie Goldberg.The story takes place in New York City and revolves around soulmates Sam and Molly, who are attacked on their way home, resulting in Sam's death. Sam becomes trapped between the world of the living and the dead and tries to get back to Molly, who he believes is in danger. Oda Mae Brown, a psychic, helps Sam get back in touch with Molly.Michael Tahaney, ECU associate professor and director of the musical, said he chose "Ghost" because of its contemporary music and great story.Tahaney said.Tahaney said he believes the musical will not only pique the curiosity of the community, but also of ECU students.Tahaney said.He credits the students for practicing hard and learning new things for the musical.Tahaney said.ECU senior Karley Kornegay, who stars as Molly, said the musical shows the relationship between her character and Sam and hopes that the audience can see what the power of love can do.Kornegay said.Tahaney said that he thinks the musical will evoke some of the same emotions in the audience as it did with him.Tahaney said.He added that the performance stirs emotions for the people we have lost, but it will also give audience members an appreciation for the people we still have today. Special Aide of former President John Dramani Mahama, lawyer Godwin Edudzi Tamakloe, has described President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo as the new spokesperson of the Electoral Commission boss, Madam Jean Mensa. According to him, the quick response from the President after the NDC Flagbearer, John Mahama cautioned the Electoral Commissioner Chairperson, Jean Mensa to make sure nothing goes wrong with the 2020 general election is surprising to note. The flagbearer of the NDC, in an address to some Western Region Fisher folks who paid him a courtesy call, stated the EC Chairperson, Jean Mensa, and her outfit will be held responsible if the country is plunged into turmoil after the 2020 general elections. So if on December 7, 2020, we all go to our polling stations to vote and the machines fail or a lot of people dont find their names and the election doesnt go down well, then what are we going to do?" he asked. But in a sharp response, President Akufo-Addo during a lecture at the 20th Anniversary of the Tertiary Students Confederacy of the New Patriotic Party (TESCON) at the Ho Technical University said, I want to assure him that there will be no strife, there will be no conflict after the December 7 general elections. Reacting to this comment on Okay FMs 'Ade Akye Abia' Morning Show, lawyer Edudzi Tamakloe wondered why President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has assumed a position as the Spokesperson of Jean Mensa, jumping to her defense. Is Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo the Spokesperson for Electoral Commission? We are talking about the conduct of Madam Jean Mensa and then you Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, intervenes to talk for Madam Jean Mensa, he said. Source: Daniel Adu Darko/Peacefmonline.com/[email protected] Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority. Featured Video FREDERICTON - The CEOs of New Brunswick's two regional health authorities are defending a plan that would have seen a reform of the province's health-care system, including the overnight closure of emergency departments at six community hospitals. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/2/2020 (692 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs speaks with the media in Fredericton, New Brunswick on Monday February 17, 2020. The CEOs of New Brunswick's two regional health authorities are defending a plan that would have seen a reform of the province's health-care system, including the overnight closure of emergency departments at six community hospitals. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Stephen MacGillivray FREDERICTON - The CEOs of New Brunswick's two regional health authorities are defending a plan that would have seen a reform of the province's health-care system, including the overnight closure of emergency departments at six community hospitals. The two executives appeared before a committee of the New Brunswick legislature Wednesday to face questions about the plan that was halted Sunday night by Premier Blaine Higgs. Higgs said there were gaps in the plan that prompted him to reverse course and has since vowed to visit the six communities and hold a health summit in June. The backlash against the plan resulted in one government member saying he couldn't support it and the resignation of the deputy premier to sit as an Independent. It has left the minority Progressive Conservative government in the precarious position of facing a confidence vote on its March 10 budget or possibly calling an early election. Vitalite CEO Gilles Lanteigne said Wednesday health reforms are always difficult. "In Canada for as long as I can remember, in every province, I don't think there has been a reform that has been received with open arms," he said. "People are concerned. Health services are very emotional. They are very personal." He defended the aborted plan as "based on serious reflections on data and evidence .... I think there are going to be further changes in these hospitals, but I think the plan is solid." While the premier complained of gaps in the planning, Lanteigne said there was a rollout plan to implement the changes. Horizon CEO Karen McGrath said that implementation plan never got off the ground. "What we started was in fact notification of our staff impacted by workforce adjustment. This plan has been in the works since September of last year," McGrath told the committee. Under questioning, McGrath said she didn't believe the changes would put patients at risk. "If you're asking me if I would forward a plan to government when I believed that people would die as a result of my plan? That would never happen," she said. If the plan had gone ahead, effective March 11, emergency departments in Sussex, Sackville, Perth-Andover, Ste-Anne-de-Kent, Caraquet and Grand Falls would have closed from midnight to 8 a.m. The six communities would have received added mental health services, and 120 acute care beds would have been converted to long-term chronic care beds, mainly for seniors awaiting a nursing home bed. Officials said the changes would allow physicians and nurse practitioners to see more patients in the daytime. This report was first published by The Canadian Press Feb 19. 2020. A man in Fremont entered a 24 Hour Fitness gym, went into a workout class and sexually assaulted a woman who was doing push ups alongside other patrons, police said Wednesday. The man, Jonathan Anderson, 33, forcefully held the victim to the ground and pulled down her clothing, police said. A patron rushed to the womans aid, pushed the man off of her and followed the man to the front of the gym, where gym employees stopped Anderson and detained him until police arrived. The incident happened at the Paseo Padre Parkway location at 6:20 p.m. Monday. Fremont police arrested Anderson on suspicion of felony sexual battery and assault with intent to commit oral copulation. They described Anderson as a transient and said they are looking for other potential victims who may have encountered him. The Fremont Police Department wishes to thank the Good Samaritan for intervening in the attack, said Fremont police Lt. Michael Tegner. Their quick action stopped this horrendous assault and aided in the suspects quick arrest. It took bravery and courage to intervene. Police said Anderson confessed to the attack in detail during an interview with police. 24 Hour Fitness officials told The Chronicle in a statement Wednesday night that they are working with the Fremont Police Department and asked anyone with information about the suspect to call Fremont police investigators. We are grateful for the brave club and team members who were able to intervene and detain the individual accused of assaulting another individual in the club, 24 Hour Fitness officials said. Anderson is scheduled to be arraigned at 9 a.m. Thursday at the East County Hall of Justice in Dublin, police said. He has remained in custody since his arrest, police 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. At the time of his arrest, police said Anderson was on active probation for two separate prior convictions for driving under the influence and grand theft. Police are asking anyone who has had contact with Anderson to call investigators at 510-790-6954 or send an anonymous tip by texting TIP FREMONTPD followed by the text message to 888-777. Lauren Hernandez is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: lauren.hernandez@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LaurenPorFavor Former Labour leader Joan Burton, who lost her seat in the election, has said that Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin is most likely to be Taoiseach in a government supported by Fine Gael and the Green Party. Those numbers add up, she told RTE radios Today with Sean ORourke show. Whoever creates a government should try to make it last for the sake of the people, for at least four years. Ms Burton also said that it would be generous for Leo Varadkar, as head of the caretaker government to invite Micheal Martin and Green Party leader Eamon Ryan to accompany him to the White House on St Patricks Day. Sinn Feins Mary Lou McDonald will already be going as part of the peace talks, she said. Her best moment in government had been the day Ireland said goodbye to the Troika. Ms Burton added that women politicians are subjected to vile abuse on social media and that some of the worst critics as also women. The problem was that the country was used to 100 years of men in the Dail, but it was only in the last 30 years that women were familiar in the Dail. Ireland is still getting used to the idea of women being in politics. Ms Burton said that she had experienced 23 exhilarating years in politics and was very proud of the journey that she had made. When asked about the two current candidates for leadership of the Labour party she said that she thinks the world of both of them and that whoever is elected should reintroduce the position of deputy leader. She also said that Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald should address the controversial tweets from new TD Reada Cronin. Mary Lou needs to ensure she doesnt become Irelands Jeremy Corbyn. She has to make a statement. My advise to her is to find the time (to read the tweets). Any anti Semitism has to be addressed. NEW HAVEN A 41-year-old New Canaan man was sentented to 12 months in federal prison Wednesday for health care fraud, according to the U.S. attorneys office. Kwasi Gyambibi, formerly of Stamford, must also serve one year of supervised release after he was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey A. Meyer in New Haven. According to court documents, statements made in court and the evidence presented during his trial last year, Advantage Pharmacy was a compounding pharmacy located in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. As a compounding pharmacy, Advantage created compound prescription drugs specifically tailored for individual patients who had a medical need for a compound drug, by mixing together individual ingredients in the exact strength and dosage prescribed by the health care provider to meet the unique needs of a patient, according to the release. One tube of a compound drug cream prepared and dispensed by Advantage Pharmacy typically cost health care benefit programs thousands of dollars, and some individual tubes of cream cost more than $11,000 for a one-month supply. Gyambibis wife, Kakra Gyambibi, is a physician who worked as a hospitalist at Stamford Hospital, and Kwasi Gyambibi acted as, and eventually became, a sales representative for Advantage Pharmacy, according to the release. In 2014 and 2015, Kwasi and Kakra Gyambibi engaged in a scheme to defraud the State of Connecticut Pharmacy Benefit Plan, TRICARE and other health care programs by submitting prescriptions for compound pharmacy medications prepared and dispensed by Advantage Pharmacy, according to the release. Although the prescriptions sent to Advantage Pharmacy contained Kakra Gyambibis signature, Kakra Gyambibi did not treat, examine, or even meet with the patients for whom the prescriptions were written. Based on these false and misleading claims, the victim health care programs paid Advantage Pharmacy for the compound prescription drugs. Advantage Pharmacy, in turn, paid commissions of between 15 percent to 35 percent to sales representatives, including Kwasi Gyambibis close cousin, whom Kwasi Gyambibi considered his brother, according to the release. It is alleged that Kwasi and Kakra Gyambibi also induced the victim health care programs to pay Advantage Pharmacy more than $292,000 for their own compound prescription drugs. The investigation has revealed that this scheme resulted in more than $1.6 million in losses to the victim health care programs. Kwasi Gyambibi was arrested on an indictment on June 28, 2018. On Jan. 9, 2019, a grand jury in New Haven returned a 19-count superseding indictment. On Feb. 22, 2019, Kwasi Gyambibi was found guilty of two counts of health care fraud related to fraudulent prescriptions for compound drugs that were submitted to Advantage Pharmacy in March 2015, and found him not guilty of seven counts of health care fraud. The jury could not reach a verdict on the other 10 counts in the indictment. Kwasi Gyambibi, who is released on a $100,000 bond, is required to report to prison March 20. On Jan. 18, 2019, Kakra Gyambibi pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud. On June 12, 2019, she was sentenced to three months of imprisonment. Judge Meyer will issue a restitution order at a later date. The government is seeking $1,650,332.35 in restitution. This investigation was conducted by the New Haven Division of the FBI. U.S. Attorney Durham thanked the Office of the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut, the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Southern District of Mississippi, the U.S. Department of Justices Fraud Section, and the Jackson, Mississippi Division of the FBI for their assistance with the investigation. This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys David J. Sheldon and Christopher W. Schmeisser. Photo: The Canadian Press Democratic presidential candidate, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is intervened in the spin room after a Democratic presidential primary debate Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC. (AP Photo/Matt York) From the opening bell, Democrats savaged New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg and raised pointed questions about Bernie Sanders' take-no-prisoners politics during a contentious debate Wednesday night that threatened to further muddy the party's urgent quest to defeat President Donald Trump. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who was once a Republican, was forced to defend his record and past comments related to race, gender and his personal wealth in an occasionally rocky debate stage debut. Sanders, meanwhile, tried to beat back pointed questions about his embrace of democratic socialism and his health following a heart attack last year. The ninth debate of this cycle featured the most aggressive sustained period of infighting in the Democrats yearlong search for a presidential nominee. The tension reflected growing anxiety among candidates and party leaders that the nomination fight could yield a candidate who will struggle to build a winning coalition in November to beat Trump. The campaign is about to quickly intensify. Nevada votes on Saturday and South Carolina follows on February 29. More than a dozen states host Super Tuesday contests in less than two weeks with about one-third of the delegates needed to win the nomination at stake. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was in a fight for survival and stood out with repeated attacks on Bloomberg. She sought to undermine him with core Democratic voters who are uncomfortable with his vast wealth, his offensive remarks about policing of minorities and demeaning comments about women, including those who worked at his company. Warren labeled Bloomberg "a billionaire who calls people fat broads and horse-faced lesbians." She wasnt alone. Sanders lashed out at Bloomberg's policing policies as New York City mayor that he said targeted African-American and Latinos in an outrageous way." And former Vice-President Joe Biden charged that Bloombergs stop-and-frisk policy ended up throwing 5 million black men up against the wall. Watching from afar, Trump joined the Bloomberg pile on. I hear he's getting pounded tonight, you know he's in a debate, Trump said at a rally in Phoenix. After the debate, Warren told reporters: "I have no doubt that Michael Bloomberg is reaching in his pocket right now, and spending another hundred million dollars to try to erase every American's memory about what happened on the debate stage." On a night that threatened to tarnish the shine of his carefully constructed TV-ad image, Bloomberg faltered when attacked on issues related to race and gender. But he was firm and unapologetic about his wealth and how he has used it to effect change important to Democrats. He took particular aim at Sanders and his self-description as a democratic socialist. I dont think there's any chance of the senator beating Donald Trump," Bloomberg declared before noting Sanders' rising wealth. "The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses!" Sanders defended owning multiple houses, noting he has one in Washington, where he works, and two in Vermont, the state he represents in the Senate. While Bloomberg was the shiny new object Wednesday, the debate also marked a major test for Sanders, who is emerging as the front-runner in the Democrats nomination fight, whether his partys establishment likes it or not. A growing group of donors, elected officials and political operatives fear that Sanders uncompromising progressive politics could be a disaster in the general election against Trump, yet theyve struggled to coalesce behind a single moderate alternative. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, went after both Bloomberg and Sanders, warning that one threatened to burn down the Democratic Party and the other was trying to buy it. He called them the two most polarizing figures on this stage," with little chance of defeating Trump or helping congressional Democrats in contests with Republicans. Bloomberg and Sanders were prime targets, but the stakes were no less dire for the other four candidates on stage. Longtime establishment favourite Biden, a two-term vice-president, desperately needed to breathe new life into his flailing campaign, which entered the night at the bottom of a moderate muddle behind Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. And after a bad finish last week in New Hampshire, Warren was fighting to resurrect her stalled White House bid. A Warren campaign aide said on Twitter that her fiery first hour of debate was her best hour of fundraising "to date." The other leading progressive in the race, Sanders came under attack from Biden and Bloomberg for his embrace of democratic socialism. Sanders, as he has repeatedly over the last year, defended the cost of his signature Medicare for All healthcare plan, which would eliminate the private insurance industry in favour of a government-backed healthcare system that would cover all Americans. "When you asked Bernie how much it cost last time he said...'We'll find out, Biden quipped. It costs over $35 trillion, let's get real." And ongoing animosity flared between Buttigieg and Klobuchar when the former Indiana mayor slammed the three-term Minnesota senator for failing to answer questions in a recent interview about Mexican policy and forgetting the name of the Mexican president. Buttigieg noted that she's on a committee that oversees trade issues in Mexico and she was not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country. She shot back: "Are you trying to say I'm dumb? Are you mocking me here?" Later in the night she lashed out at Buttigieg again: I wish everyone else was as perfect as you, Pete. The debate closed with a question about the possibility that Democrats remain divided deep into the primary season with a final resolution coming during a contested national convention in July. Asked if the candidate with the most delegates should be the nominee -- even if he or she is short of a delegate majority, almost every candidate suggested that the convention process should "work its way out," as Biden put it. Sanders, who helped force changes to the nomination process this year and hopes to take a significant delegate lead in the coming weeks, was the only exception. The person who has the most votes should become the nominee, he said. Micrograph showing cortical pseudolaminar necrosis, a finding seen in strokes on medical imaging and at autopsy. H&E-LFB stain. Credit: Nephron/Wikipedia After 50 years of research and the testing of over 1,000 drugs, there is new hope for preserving brain cells for a time after stroke. Treating acute ischemic stroke patients with an experimental neuroprotective drug, combined with a surgical procedure to remove the clot improves outcomes as shown by clinical trial results published today in The Lancet. The multi-centre, double-blinded, randomized trial, led by a team at the Cumming School of Medicine's (CSM) Hotchkiss Brain Institute and Alberta Health Services, investigates the use of the neuroprotective drug nerinetide, developed by NoNO Inc, in two scenarios in the same trial. In one scenario, nerinetide is given to patients in addition to the clot-busting drug alteplase. In the second scenario, patients who were not suitable for alteplase received only nerinetide. Both groups of patients had concurrent endovascular treatment (EVT) to remove the clot. "Compared to placebo, almost 20 per cent more patients who received nerinetide along with endovascular treatment, but did not receive alteplase, recovered from a devastating strokea difference between paralysis and walking out of the hospital," says Dr. Michael Hill, MD, a neurologist at Foothills Medical Centre (FMC) and professor in the departments of Clinical Neurosciences and Radiology at the CSM. "In the patients who received both drugs, the alteplase negated the benefits of the nerinetide." Hill says the study provides evidence of a biological pathway that protects brain cells from dying when they are deprived of blood flow. Nerinetide targets the final stage of the brain cell's life by stopping the production of nitric oxide within the cell. "We really believe this is a new scientific observation," says Hill. "There is evidence nerinetide promotes brain cell survival, offering neuroprotection until we can extract the clot. It opens the door to a new way of treating stroke." Images of patients' brains from the study show the expected size of the damage from the stroke is sizeably reduced when nerinetide is administered and EVT is performed among patients not concurrently receiving alteplase. "After so many studies investigating neuroprotective drugs failed, we are extremely excited by these results," says Dr. Mayank Goyal, MD, Ph.D., a neuroradiologist at the FMC, and clinical professor in the Department of Radiology at the CSM. "While nerinetide is not approved for use yet, it shows the potential of a new tool to promote recovery from stroke." Worldwide, 15 million people suffer a stroke each yearthat's one every nine minutes in Canada and every 90 seconds in the United States. The results can be devastating. Ischemic stroke, the most common, is caused by a clot in a blood vessel in the brain. The sudden loss of blood flow causes brain cells to die, which can permanently affect speech, vision, balance and movement. The international trial enrolled 1,105 patients between March 2017 and August 2019 at centres in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asiaa global academic collaboration bringing together scientists, clinicians, funding agencies, and industry. Many of the team members of the Calgary Stroke Program. Credit: Roth & Ramberg "The collaboration between NoNO Inc., the University of Calgary and investigators at 48 leading stroke hospitals around the world has shown how effective such an academic-industry partnership can be in running high-quality, foundational stroke trials that can lead to positive changes in clinical practice," says Dr. Michael Tymianski, MD, Ph.D., CEO of NoNO Inc. and the inventor of nerinetide. The results in the current study, called the ESCAPE-NA1 Trial, build on the success of the ESCAPE trial, in which the Calgary Stroke Program proved that a clot retrieval procedure known as EVT can dramatically improve patient outcomes after an acute ischemic stroke. During the procedure, a catheter is inserted in the groin and guided through blood vessels into the brain. A tiny metal mesh device is used to grab the clot and pull it out. The current study investigates whether administering nerinetide in addition to clot retrieval improves the patient's ability to recover. Explore further Lower dose of newer clot-buster may be appropriate for some stroke patients Authorities on Thursday said they arrested a fugitive from Hudson County who was wanted for shooting his wife to death in the Dominican Republic eight years ago. Felix Peguero-Mendez, 62, of West New York, was arrested last week at a home where he was staying in Reading, Pennsylvania, according to the New Jersey State Police, which worked with the U.S. Marshals Service to track him down. Peguero-Mendez fled to the Dominican Republic after allegedly shooting his wife six to eight times Feb. 15, 2012, federal authorities said. Investigators learned he assumed a new identity in Massachusetts and previously lived in Newark, but was recently staying in Pennsylvania. He was taken into custody without incident in an early-morning raid involving state troopers and members of the U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force, according to officials. The wanted man was sent to federal custody ahead of extradition to the Dominican Republic. Officials at the Dominican Republics embassy and ministry of foreign affairs did not immediately respond to a message seeking more information. Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. 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. Former Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis appeared before a Nagpur court on Thursday in connection with a complaint seeking criminal proceedings against him for non-disclosure of criminal cases in his 2014 election affidavit. Chief Metropolitan Magistrate P S Ingle recorded the BJP leader's appearance before the court and granted him bail on a personal bond of Rs 15,000. The magistrate had given the last chance to Fadnavis to appear before the court on Thursday. "The presence of the accused (Fadnavis) is secured. The offences are bailable. There is no apprehension of him absconding. Hence, bail is granted," Magistrate Ingle said. The court was hearing an application filed by advocate Satish Uke, seeking criminal proceedings to be initiated against Fadnavis for alleged non-disclosure of criminal cases registered against him in his election affidavit in 2014. Fadnavis was granted exemption from appearance on four earlier occasions since November 2019. The court has now posted the matter for further hearing on March 30. Later, Fadnavis told reporters outside the court premises that his poll affidavit was filed by his advocate. "The two cases against me are for carrying out public protests and not any personal or private complaint against me," Fadnavis said, adding that the cases have already been settled. He also said there was no malafide intention behind not disclosing the two cases in the poll affidavit. Claiming that the complaint seeking criminal action against him is "politically motivated", Fadnavis said, "I know who is behind this." Uke alleged that Fadnavis, in his election affidavit filed in 2014, failed to disclose the pendency of two criminal cases against him. The Supreme Court earlier this week reserved its order on an appeal filed by Fadnavis, seeking it to reconsider its 2019 verdict asking him to face trial for allegedly failing to furnish details of the two pending criminal cases against him in his 2014 affidavit. Fadnavis in his appeal claimed that the law stipulates for disclosure of details about criminal cases only if charges are framed in those cases and on conviction. In its judgment on October 1, 2019, the apex court set aside the Bombay High Court order which gave a clean chit to Fadnavis and held that he did not deserve to be tried for the alleged offence under the Representation of the People (RP) Act. The verdict had come on an appeal by Uke, who had challenged the high court's order. The apex court in its October 2019 order directed that a magistrate's court in Nagpur district consider afresh the complaint filed by Uke, seeking criminal proceedings to be initiated against Fadnavis under section 125-A of the RP Act. Section 125-A of the RP Act deals with the penalty for "filing false affidavit", and says if a candidate or his proposer fails to furnish or gives false or conceals any information in his nomination paper on issues like pending criminal cases, then the person may be awarded six months jail term or fine or both. Uke had initially moved a magisterial court which dismissed his complaint against Fadnavis on September 7, 2015. He later moved a sessions court in Nagpur which remanded the matter to the magisterial court for a "de novo" (afresh) consideration. Aggrieved by the sessions court order, Fadnavis moved the Bombay High Court, which on May 3, 2018 set it aside. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police investigating the murder-suicide in Camp Hill have converged on Rowan Baxter's home, a day after he killed his estranged wife, Hannah Clarke, and their three children. Detectives hope his house at Carindale, in Brisbane's east, will give Ms Clarke's family some answers over an act that "beggars belief", according to senior police. Investigators are unsure exactly when or how Mr Baxter got into the car with Ms Clarke and the children. But they know the situation escalated in the car as the family drove along Raven Street, Camp Hill, in Brisbane's south-east. Ms Clarke, 31, and her three children Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey, aged between three and six were on the school run and had just left Ms Clarke's parents' house in the adjoining Durimbil Street. About 500 passengers left the Diamond Princess cruise ship Wednesday at the end of a much-criticized two-week quaratine that failed to stop the spread of the new virus among passengers and crew. Yokohama: About 500 passengers left the Diamond Princess cruise ship Wednesday at the end of a much-criticized two-week quarantine that failed to stop the spread of the new virus among passengers and crew. The quarantine's flop was underlined as Japanese authorities announced 79 more cases, bringing the total on the ship to 621. Results were still pending for some other passengers and crew among the original 3,711 people on board. Japan's government has been questioned over its decision to keep people on the ship, which some experts have called a perfect virus incubator. The Diamond Princess has the most infections outside of China, where the illness known as COVID-19 emerged late last year. Many foreign governments won't let passengers from the ship return unless they go through another quarantine period, so it was striking to see passengers disembark, get into taxis and disappear into Yokohama, where the ship is docked. Japanese soldiers helped escort some passengers, including an elderly man in a wheelchair who wore a mask and held a cane. Some got on buses to be transported to train stations. Some people still in their cabins waved farewell from their balconies to those who had already been processed. "I'm a bit concerned if I'm OK to get off the ship, but it was getting very difficult physically," a 77-year-old man from Saitama, near Tokyo, who got off with his wife, told Kyodo News. "For now, we just want to celebrate." Health Minister Katsunobu Kato initially said Wednesday that those with negative virus tests had fulfilled the Japanese quarantine requirement and were free to walk out and go home on public transportation. He said passengers were only asked to watch their health care for a few days and notify health authorities if they have any symptoms or worries. But after meeting with experts later in the day, he urged the former passengers to refrain from non-essential outings and try to stay home for about two weeks. "COVID-19 is not 100 percent known, and a lot of people got infected on the Diamond Princess. Taking those factors into consideration, we believe taking extra caution will contribute to preventing the risk of future infections," he said. Some passengers said on Twitter they received health forms in the morning asking if they had symptoms such as a headache, fever or coughing. Passengers who tested negative and had no symptoms still had to get their body temperature checked before leaving. Passengers were provided with a certificate stating their negative test results and completion of the quarantine. Still, Masao Sumida, an 84-year-old passenger from Chiba, near Tokyo, told NHK television he was worried people around him might have doubts. I know I tested negative, but I'm afraid people may try to stay away from me," he said. Mitsuo Kaku, a professor at Tohoku University's Laboratory of Infectious Disease, said on NHK that the risk of virus transmission by those who tested negative is low, but passengers who get off the ship should use ample precautions to protect themselves and people around them for about two more weeks. About 500 passengers had left the ship by Wednesday evening, and Japanese officials were to spend the next three days disembarking about 2,000 others. The Diamond Princess was quarantined after one passenger who left the ship earlier in Hong Kong was found to have the virus. Crew members, who couldn't be confined to their rooms because they were working, are expected to stay on the ship. The National Institute of Infectious Diseases said in a report Wednesday that the crew had not been fully isolated during the quarantine period. It said the quarantine was effective in reducing transmission among passengers, and that the increase in cases toward the end was mostly among crew or passengers in shared cabins. It should be noted that due to the nature of the ship, individual isolation of all those aboard was not possible, it said. Some medical experts who assisted with the quarantine have said anti-infection measures were often sloppy on the ship. Four health workers a quarantine official, a physician, a paramedic who took an infected passenger to a hospital and a health ministry official became infected. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said a more controlled health watch for the crew was starting immediately because they can be spread out and kept in isolation by using vacated passenger rooms. Before the quarantine on the ship had ended, the United States evacuated more than 300 Americans and put them in quarantine in the US for another 14 days. South Korea on Wednesday returned seven people from the cruise ship, placing the six South Koreans and one Japanese family member into quarantine. Australia evacuated about 180 people early Thursday who will be staying for two weeks at a facility near the northern city of Darwin. And a chartered Cathay Pacific flight carrying 106 passengers arrived back in Hong Kong, which will quarantine them at a suburban government housing block. Other foreign passengers were to be picked up by chartered flights sent from Canada and Italy. The US government said Americans who remained onboard instead of returning on the chartered flights would not be allowed to return for at least two weeks after they come ashore. Other governments picking up passengers have similar policies. WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Attorneys for Organic Consumers Association (OCA) filed a limited motion for summary judgment, with the D.C. Superior Court, in the nonprofit's false advertising lawsuit, filed in July 2018, against Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry's. The motion asks the court to find that Ben & Jerry's falsely claimed that its "Caring Dairy" animal husbandry standards were "required for all farmers" who supplied the dairy used in its products. The motion states that Ben & Jerry's admitted that it uses milk from "conventional dairy sources" that do not adhere to "Caring Dairy" standards. "Consumer protection laws are intended to protect consumers from advertising, marketing and packaging claims that are patently false," said Ronnie Cummins, OCA's international director. "This goal will be achieved only if companies like Unilever are challenged when they make false claims about their brands, and held accountable by the courts. OCA's mission includes working on behalf of consumers to make sure our legal system defends consumer rights." At the time OCA sued Unilever, Ben & Jerry's packaging directed consumers to "Learn more at benjerry.com." The "benjerry.com" website stated that the products are made with milk and cream produced by cows kept on farms that meet the requirements of a "Caring Dairy" program, which Unilever called "a unique program that's helping farmers move toward more sustainable practices on the farm." The website told consumers that "Basic standards for being a Caring Dairy farmer" were "required for all farmers." Unilever recently announced Ben & Jerry's packaging will no longer advertise its products as containing milk from "happy cows". The company said the move is unrelated to false advertising lawsuits against the company. However, a recent court filing in a separate lawsuit against the company suggests that the company has been quietly scrubbing its website to remove references to "happy cows" and added the word "voluntary" to a description of its Caring Dairy program. Richman Law Group represents OCA. Organic Consumers Association (OCA) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit grassroots organization advocating on behalf of millions of consumers for safe, healthful food and a clean environment. Visit: https://www.organicconsumers.org/ SOURCE Organic Consumers Association Related Links https://www.organicconsumers.org 20.02.2020 LISTEN PDP Diaspora Initiative, a US-based organization of diaspora members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has commended the Supreme Court of Nigeria for the recent establishment of a panel to review the courts January 14, 2020 judgment, which sacked the duly elected Governor Emeka Ihedioha and replaced him with the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who came fourth in that March 9, 2019, gubernatorial election in Imo State. In a statement issued to the media through the organizations National Publicity Secretary Chidi Igwe, PDP Diaspora Initiative thanked all lovers of democracy around the world who have joined their voices in absolute condemnation of the injustice done to the people of Imo State by the Supreme Court through that decision. When we issued our public call for the court to set up a panel to review that decision, we knew it was the right thing to do in order to restore the peoples confidence in the judicial system, PDP Diaspora Initiative Founder and National Chair Hon. Victoria Pamugo said. We want to commend the court for listening to the voice of the people especially in the face of the rising condemnation of this act of injustice in Imo, Hon. Pamugo said. But the whole world is watching. There is no democratic country in the world where almost one year after a gubernatorial election, all of a sudden, the winner of the election is removed and then replaced with the candidate who came fourth in the election, she said. This can never happen in a real democratic state, she said. The court should stand for justice and should not allow itself to be unduly influenced by the ruling party, APC, Hon. Pamugo said. But what we do not want is for the Supreme Court to set up a panel just for the purpose of setting up a panel a guise or camouflage to rubber-stamp a clear APC agenda to grab power by crooked means, even when the people of the state rejected them completely through the ballot box, she said. We are calling on the members of the panel to grow some backbones and stand up for justice and resist this obvious act of encroachment, power grab and over-reach by the ruling political party, APC. The court must restore its own public image and restore justice in Imo State by reinstating Governor Emeka Ihedioha, whom the people of Imo State selected to be their governor through their own vote, Hon. Pamugo said. PDP Diaspora Initiative is a registered non-profit organization based in the United States of America, with members from many countries, including Austria, Canada, Germany, Japan, Kenya, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom and United States of America. For more information, visit www.pdpdiasporainitiative.com. Signed: Chidi Igwe National Publicity Secretary PDP Diaspora Initiative SPRINGFIELD Two bills that would add the risks of e-cigarette use and sexting to public school curriculum will head to the full Illinois House of Representatives after unanimously passing a committee Wednesday. The House education curriculum committee heard testimony about House Bills 4007 and 3928, which would require public schools to teach the dangers of sexting and electronic cigarettes, respectively, in health education classes. Sexting curriculum HB 4007, sponsored by state Rep. Maurice West, D-Rockford, would require students in grades 6-12 to learn about the legal and personal consequences of sharing sexual images and videos. Our children know a lot more about smartphones than we do. And it's time for us to acknowledge that and have conversations with them so that they don't mess up their lives legally, socially and academically, West said before the committee voted 20-0 to advance his bill. Illinois would join New Jersey as the only states to require sexting be included in sex education classes. A 2018 study of 110,000 teenagers published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found 15 percent had sent sexually explicit text messages and 27 percent said they had received them. Twelve percent also admitted to sending an explicit text of someone else without their consent. Electronically sharing sexual images and videos between minors is illegal in Illinois and 24 other states, according to a 2018 analysis by the Cyberbullying Research Center. The penalty in Illinois is usually community service or counseling, but sexting can also place kids on the states sex offender registry. When a sext message is sent without consent, it is considered child pornography, West said. West said Rockford Lutheran High School invited him to speak to students about sexting, which the school currently does not discuss in its sex education. They knew that it could decrease their reputational value, but they didn't understand that they could get hit with a child pornography charge, West told the committee. They didn't understand how dramatic or how consequential it could be. I told them, You are the subject matter experts. Is this something that is good for our schools? And they said yes, we need to talk about this, West said. More than 900 people officially registered as supporters of the bill, while 49 filed in opposition. None spoke at the committee hearing. Ben Schwarm, deputy executive director of the Illinois Association of School Boards, said his organization feels HB 4007 is an unnecessary new mandate. Schwarm said the IASB asked West to place his mandate in internet safety and cyberbullying curricula instead of sex education, suggesting it would be less burdensome on school districts. West said he declined because not all school districts teach sex education and he wants his bill to apply to only those that do. This will be a requirement for the schools that offer at this time, West said. Wests bill also does not mandate a certain rigid curriculum for schools to follow, but only requires a classroom discussion. Im not trying to mandate what kind of curriculum (teachers) present. I'm just simply saying that this needs to be a topic of discussion, he said. HB 4007 has five co-sponsors, all Democrats. Vaping curriculum HB 3928, sponsored by state Rep. Joyce Mason, D-Gurnee, would add electronic cigarettes and other vaping devices as topics to be taught under Illinois Critical Health Problems and Comprehensive Health Education Program. That law lays out the major educational areas that are required to be discussed in all elementary and secondary education curricula. It already requires lessons on tobacco, alcohol and drug use. It's really just updating it to make sure that we are including what have very recently been learned to be very dangerous items, Mason told committee members before her bill passed 19-0. E-cigarettes, which contain nicotine and are marketed as a stylish way to wean smokers off tobacco cigarettes, have been a major topic of concern for legislators recently, especially regarding underage users. Twenty-one percent of U.S. high school students used e-cigarettes or vaping devices in 2018, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC says each cartridge of nicotine in a Juul e-cigarette, the most popular brand, contains the same amount of nicotine as one pack of tobacco cigarettes. Juul came under fire last year for marketing its nicotine pods with kid-friendly flavors like mango and fruit. E-cigarettes and vaping need to be included in that comprehensive health education, Mason said. Fellow committee members did not ask her questions before voting. Seven people registered as supporters of the bill, while none registered as opponents. Schwarm said the school boards association is not quite as worried or concerned about that bill because similar subjects are already taught in health education. I am sure by now districts have already included e-cigarettes and vaping in that, he said, so thats really not going to make a big change for school districts. HB 3928 has two co-sponsors, Democratic state Reps. Daniel Didech, of Buffalo Grove, and Camille Lilly, of Chicago. The two bills now go to the full 118-member House for discussion and another vote. If passed by majority vote of the full chamber, they will be sent to the Senate for consideration. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 When Bill Clinton visited Agra as the US President in 2000, the city was smothered by a blanket of security. The streets and the main Mall road were sealed and sanitised, shops were closed, and Clinton saw few locals on his way to the Taj Mahal from the airport. As a result, he referred to Agra as a ghost city, said officials who had accompanied Clinton then. Things will be different during US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trumps visit on February 24. On either side of the 14 km route that Trump will travel from the airport to the monument , there will be crowds, including around 26,000 students, holding flags of India and the US. Over 3,000 artistes from Agra, Mathura and Vrindavan will also be performing on road-side stages. We are not going to compromise on any aspect of security, but this will not be at the cost of a lively welcome to be extended to the Trumps. Agra will not be turned into a ghost city this time, said A Satish Ganesh, inspector-general of police (Agra range). None of these children will be younger than 12, and no one appearing in the board exams will be present. Teachers with them will coordinate the entire exercise, added Ganesh. About 3,500 artistes will present cultural programmes that portray Indian culture at 18 locations on the route, Ganesh said. . Meanwhile, the state irrigation department has released more than 900 cusecs of water into the Yamuna, and garbage piled on the bank of the river, behind the Taj Mahal is being removed. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has begun a vigorous clean up of the monument itself, using mud-pack therapy to remove dark spots on the monument. The canals within the precinct of the Taj Mahal complex are also being cleaned. All cleaning will be completed by Friday, the day when the Taj Mahal remains closed to the public, said officials familiar with the developments. The Taj Mahal will also be off limits to the public during the Trumps visit. Elsewhere, walls along the sides of the roads are being painted while trees along the route have been pruned. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON / -- Star Air, a regional commuter airline, which has recently completed one successful year of operations is all set to add another feather in its cap. The airline, on continuing its endeavour to connect the unconnected is ready to add one more destination to its travel chart. It is scheduled to start its flight services between Indore (Madhya Pradesh) and Kishangarh (Ajmer - Rajasthan) from 16th March 2020. Star Air has gained phenomenal success in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Delhi-NCR, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and Madhya Pradesh, will now connect Rajasthan, also called 'The Land of Colours'. Rajasthan will be the seventh Indian state where Star Air would provide its flight services under the RCS-UDAN scheme. Interestingly, Indore and Kishangarh, which are almost 550 kilometres apart, have not been blessed with direct flight connectivity till date. People have to spend more than 10 hours to cover this distance, that too with much hassle and discomfort. After the launch of this service, travel time would reduce to just 1 hour. "Star Air is the first airline, which is going to fulfill the aspirations of millions of people, by starting the first-ever direct flight services between Indore and Kishangarh," says Mr.Shrenik Ghodawat, MD -Star Air. "For many decades, people of Belagavi, Karnataka were also aspired to get benefitted with affordable and swift transportation services to Kishangarh (Ajmer). Considering people's demand, the management of Star Air has further decided to extend the benefits of its Kishangarh service to a larger number of people living across the geography of Belagavi by providing flight services between Belagavi and Kishangarh (Ajmer) with one stop (via Indore) from 16th March 2020." As of now, there is no direct flight serviceavailable between Belagavi and Kishangarh. And to cover the distance of almost 1550 kilometres between Belagavi and Kishangarh, travellers need to spend more than a day while traveling by bus or train. Once this route starts, people can travel between Belagavi and Kishangarh in just 3 hours, which would be the fastest means of travel for the said route till date. It is expected that millions of people from South & West Maharashtra, North & West Karnataka, and from many districts adjacent to Indore would get benefitted with this upcoming service. Especially, districts from Maharashtra state like Kolhapur, Sangli, Satara, and many districts from Karnataka state like Belagavi, Dharwad, Vijapur would get benefit from this connectivity. This service will help travellers to a great extent as Kishangarh, a place close to Ajmer, is one of the most famous tourist destinations in India. This route is expected to make travel easy for tourists, who love to explore palaces, forts and places of religious importance. With the commencement of this route, people can fly easily to Kishangarh and take a glimpse of the famous Ajmer Sharif Dargah, Pushkar Lake, Phool Mahal Palace, Roopangarh Fort etc., much comfortably than ever before. Also, businesspersons, who are in marble business, can immensely save their travel time once the Belagavi-Indore-Kishangarh air travel route opens. As this city, Kishangarh, known as Marble City of India, is very popular for its exquisite marbles globally. Star Air, on 18th February 2020 started sales for its upcoming Indore - Kishangarh, and Belagavi-Kishangarh (with 1 stop, via Indore) routes with introductory pricings of just INR 2799 and INR 5398 respectively. People can book the tickets from its website www.starair.in and even from various online platforms like MakeMyTrip, Goibibo, Via.com, and Riya.com. Star Air will provide its flight services for these routes thrice in a week (Monday / Tuesday / Thursday) to being with. Below is the schedule for Belagavi - Indore - Kishangarh sector: ORIGINDESTINATIONDEPARTUREARRIVALFREQUENCYBelagaviIndore13:1014:40MON, TUE, THUIndoreBelagavi17:5519:35MON, TUE, THUIndoreKishangarh15:0016:05MON, TUE, THUKishangarhIndore16:3017:35MON, TUE, THUAbout Star AirStar Air is a scheduled commercial airline with an aim to connect real India. It is promoted by Ghodawat Enterprises Pvt. Ltd., which is the Aviation arm of strategically diversified Sanjay Ghodawat Group. Over the past five years we have made a best-in-class helicopter operator in India with impeccable dedication to safety. Star Air is the latest offering of the group. An upcoming Airline with a firm proposal to connect the unconnected. The target routes are where passengers are currently suffering a lot of transit layover delays. The airline will provide a very reliable, safe and comfortable travel experience with direct connections. Truly the group's 'Star in the Air'. About the Group Sanjay Ghodawat Group is an influential Indian business conglomerate that has its presence across various high-value business verticals.It is headquarters in Kolhapur, Maharashtra. Agriculture, Aviation, Consumer Goods, Energy, Floriculture, Food Processing, Mining, Realty, Software, Textiles, and Education are some of its key business domains. The Group was incepted in 1993 and since then it has flourished exponentially in the last 25 years under the splendid stewardship of its Founder and Chairman - Mr. Sanjay Ghodawat. It employs over 10,000 people globally. For more details visit - www.ghodawat.com Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1059484/Star_Air_aircraft.jpg Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/942915/Star_Air_Bengaluru.jpg Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/955241/Star_Air_Aircraft_inside. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) According to crew and paramedics, everyone on board the aircraft is healthy and able to continue the trip. A chartered plane sent by Ukraine's government to evacuate Ukrainians from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak, has arrived in Boryspil International Airport, Kyiv region, for refueling before departing to Kharkiv. According to crew and paramedics, everyone on board the aircraft is healthy and able to continue the trip. As UNIAN reported, the flight was being carried out by SkyUp Airlines, the plane departed at 00:30 local time on February 20 and was scheduled to arrive in Ukraine at 07:45 Kyiv time on February 20. Read alsoPolice to cordon off quarantine site set to host Ukrainians evacuated from Wuhan Seventy-three people were allowed to board the aircraft. Three citizens of Ukraine and one female foreigner were banned from boarding during check-in. On board the plane are 29 foreigners, namely eight citizens of Argentina, five citizens of Dominican Republic and Ecuador each, four El Salvador nationals, two persons from Kazakhstan and Costa Rica each, and one from Israel, Montenegro, and Panama each. The two Kazakh citizens were expected to get off the plane during a stopover in Almaty. Amid protests against the CAA, a video of AIMIM leader Waris Pathan allegedly saying 15 crore Muslims can be heavy on 100 crore has gone viral, triggering a backlash from the BJP which said such threats do not work in new India. He purportedly made these comments while addressing an anti-Citizenship Amendment Act rally at Kalaburagi in North Karnataka on February 16. "We have to move together. We have to take Azadi (freedom), things that we don't get by asking, we have to take it by force, remember it," the All India Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul- Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader can be purportedly heard saying in Hindi. "Now time has come, we are told that we have sent our mothers and sisters in the front and were sitting covered in blanket...only our lionesses have come out and you are already sweating, understand what will happen if we come together. (We may be) 15 crore, but are heavy on 100 (crore), remember it," he is heard saying. Pathan is said to be referring to the criticism against women, who are protesting against the CAA at Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. Hitting out at Pathan, the BJP's Karnataka unit said such threats do not work in new India. "Hiding behind children and women, legends are seeking "Azadi." What more Azadi do they want? Aren't they enjoying every kind of Azadi since 1947? Waris Pathan and other leaders of AIMIM should come out of their Aurangzeb's World. These threats don't work in #NewIndia," it tweeted. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A three-month-old baby who had Covid-19 after being infected by the novel coronavirus was discharged from a Hanoi hospital on Thursday. A three-month-old baby is carried by her mother as she leaves Vietnam National Children's Hospital in Hanoi after being treated for the new coronavirus, February 20, 2020. Photo by VnExpress/Giang Huy. Le Thanh Hai, Director of the Vietnam National Childrens Hospital, said her blood tests had shown negative for the virus twice and she can suckle normally. "We are glad to inform that Vietnam has successfully cured the first child patient with Covid-19," Hai said. Her mother was with her during the nine days of treatment. She has been advised not to breastfeed directly, wear a face mask, disinfect hands, and strictly follow protective measures. She tested negative for the virus, but is being closely monitored since she was in close contact with her baby. The mother thanked doctors as they left the hospital. "Thank you doctors for helping us through this. When she grows up, she will study hard to become a doctor to help other children like you," she said. The girl child contracted the disease from her grandmother, who was infected by Nguyen Thi Du, 23, one of eight workers who went to Wuhan for training last November and returned on January 17. On January 28 the infant was taken to her grandmothers house in Binh Xuyen District of the northern Vinh Phuc Province. After the grandmother tested positive, the provincial center for disease control quarantined the baby and her mother. On February 6 the child developed a cough, and a blood test showed she had contracted the virus. Among 16 cases of infection across Vietnam, 15 patients have recovered and another is still being treated. Vinh Phuc Province, around 40 kilometers from Hanoi, reported the maximum number of cases in the country -- 11. WHO said on Saturday that Vietnam has responded well to the epidemic from the outset and prevented its spread. As of Thursday the global death toll had climbed to 2,120 and confirmed infections topped 75,000. Nearly 16,000 patients have recovered. NANJING, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Suzhou, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province, has announced a program to encourage universities, institutions and companies globally to develop rapid test kits, drugs and vaccines for the novel coronavirus. The program, launched by the Suzhou Industrial Technology Research Institute, will fund teams and researchers with a maximum of 1 million yuan (about 143,000 U.S. dollars) after an assessment. The testing products include rapid testing kits and other equipment that can detect the virus in half an hour based on nucleic acid detection and other methods. The development of the drugs focuses on filtering and testing antiviral drugs, traditional Chinese medicine and effective ingredients of natural medicine. Jiangsu's finance authority also announced to fund 30 million yuan in supporting companies and researchers in developing and producing rapid testing kits and vaccines for the novel coronavirus. Two teenagers pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to the murder of 18-year-old Tessa Majors who died in a fatal stabbing in a New York park. Luchiano Lewis, 14, who surrendered to police on Wednesday morning, is accused of stopping Majors from fleeing as she screamed for help while Rashaun Weaver, also 14, is accused of stabbing her to death on December 11 in 2019. A 13-year-old boy has been charged with second-degree murder in a family court over the killing during an alleged robbery in Upper Manhattan, but his name has not been released because he is being tried as a juvenile. Weaver and Lewis are being charged as adults. Luchiano Lewis, 14, being led into court after he surrendered to police on Wednesday over the murder of Tessa Majors Majors, a freshman student at Barnard College, was stabbed to death in Morningside Park in Upper Manhattan near her school campus on December 11 Lewis was charged and arrested on Wednesday with second-degree murder and robbery, appearing in court alongside Weaver in an arraignment in Manhattan. Majors, an aspiring journalist, was attacked as she walked Morningside Park near the Barnard campus in the early evening. Lewis handed himself in to police on Wednesday morning after previously being interviewed and let go in December. The middle school student kept the college freshman from escaping by putting her in 'some sort of headlock or bearhug,' Matthew Bogdanos, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office, said. The unnamed 13-year-old boy was the first suspect detained by police a day after the murder. Rashaun Weaver, the 14-year-old boy who was arrested on February 14, was charged with two counts of murder Katima Minton (center) Weaver's mother leaves court in New York after his court appearance Police say he quickly implicated himself in statements to detectives, as well as identifying the Lewis and Weaver, who was arrested on February 14. Investigators said they were not expecting to charge any further suspects in the killing. In a hearing in December investigators said that Majors, who played in a rock band, bit one of the suspect's fingers as she fought for her life. She was stabbed in her face and body in the struggle but managed to stagger up a flight of stairs before collapsing. Majors was pronounced dead in hospital. Lewis parents, Weavers mother and Majors father attended court for the arraignment. District Attorney Vance said: 'While a criminal process will never fully heal the unimaginable pain suffered by Tessa Majors family and friends, this indictment is a significant step forward on the path to justice. Inman Majors (center) the father of Majors, attended the arraignment of her two accused killers on Wednesday Prosecutors said the middle school fought for her life but was stopped from fleeing when she was put her in 'some sort of headlock or bearhug' The murder of student Tessa Majors last December sent shock waves through Manhattan, with many saying the violent incident was reminiscent of 1970s and 1980s crime in New York 'We are committed to holding these young people accountable, and equally committed to a fair process which safeguards their rights. This is how we will achieve true justice for Tessa and her loved ones.' He said the investigators had accumulated substantial evidence proving Weaver stabbed Majors. He stated that there was 'video evidence, blood evidence, smartphone evidence, iCloud evidence, witness identification, and the defendant's owned statements that were rigorously collected and examined'. TIMELINE December 11: Tessa is attacked in Morningside Park. Police originally said the call came in at 5.36pm. They later said it was closer to 6.50pm She is pronounced dead at the hospital December 12: Police question two underage boys and search for a third. Those two boys are later cleared and let go. The 13-year-old boy is arrested for murder. Bill de Blasio promises swift justice. December 13: A 14-year-old is taken into custody. The 13-year-old boy is charged with murder. December 14: The charges against the 14-year-old are dropped and he is let go. December 15: Ed Mullins, the President of the Sergeant's Benevolent Association, says Tessa was in the park buying marijuana. He is slammed by Bill de Blasio. At 4pm, a 14-year-old boy bolts from a car as he is driven - by a 'lawyer or relative' to speak to police December 16: Tessa's family slam Mullins' remarks December 17: 13-year-old's probable cause hearing The 14-year-old remains on the run. The third alleged suspect remains free. December 26: The missing 14-year-old is detained but released after a few hours February 14: Rashaun Weaver, 14, is arrested and charged with murder. He is identified as the teen released on December 26 February 19: Luchiano Lewis, 14, surrenders to police. He is identified as the boy taken into custody but released on December 14 Advertisement Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said: 'Detectives, investigators and prosecutors, as well as a grand jury, worked deliberately to ensure that the evidence amassed supported the charges brought, and that now those who allegedly murdered Tessa Majors will be held to account. 'Nothing can bring her back. That is the tragedy we all must live with.' Weaver and Lewis were ordered to be held without bail at a juvenile detention facility. They will be kept separate in jail. Weaver has also been charged with robbing another person. According to the complaint provided to DailyMail.com, Weaver is accused of conducting the separate mugging in Morningside Park four days prior to Majors' murder. According to that mugging victim, Weaver and two other boys confronted him on the night of December 7 and stole his iPhone. Just hours later, the iPhone was connected to an iCloud account in Weaver's name. The mugging victim later identified Weaver from a photo line up. Additionally, the 14-year-old was seen on surveillance camera wearing the exact same outfit during both his alleged December 7 mugging and his alleged December 11 stabbing of Majors. The complaint declares that, on December 11, the three suspects initially followed a man through the park, before they turned their attention to Majors. At 6.47 pm, a witness 'heard a male voice from the area [believed to be Weaver] say [to Majors]: 'Run your s**t. Gimme your phone. You got some weed, gimme that too.' The witness then heard a female scream, 'Help me! I'm being robbed!' Surveillance footage shows Majors later stagger up the Morningside Park steps to reach a security gate. She lay conscious and bleeding before she was rushed to a nearby hospital. She was pronounced dead at 7.23 pm - meaning there was more than half an hour between the time of the attack and her death. The murder sent shock waves through Manhattan, with many saying the violent incident was reminiscent of 1970s and 1980s crime in New York. Police union chiefs blamed Bill de Blasio for it, saying he is making it difficult for regular cops to crack down on street crime. The NYPD also faced accusations of 'victim blaming', after the police union chief claimed Majors may have been in the park seeking to buy marijuana. India on Thursday dismissed Chinas objection to Union home minister Amit Shahs visit to Arunachal Pradesh, saying the northeastern state is an integral part of the country that is routinely visited by Indian leaders. China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of South Tibet and routinely criticises visits to the region by Indian officials. External affairs ministry spokesperson, Raveesh Kumar, told a media briefing in New Delhi that Indias clear and consistent position on Arunachal Pradesh is that the state is an integral and inalienable part of the country. The response came hours after Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson, Geng Shuang, contended the visit violated Chinas territorial sovereignty and sabotaged mutual trust with India. Chinas position on the eastern sector of the China-India boundary, or the southern part of Chinas Tibet region, is consistent and clear, Geng said in response to a question from the Chinese state media. The Chinese government has never recognised the so-called Arunachal Pradesh and is firmly opposed to the Indian politicians visit to the southern part of Chinas Tibet region as it violated Chinas territorial sovereignty, undermined stability of the border area, sabotaged political mutual trust, and violated relevant bilateral agreement, he told a regular news briefing. Shah was in Arunachal Pradesh to attend events related to the Statehood Day of the northeastern state, which shares a long border with China. He was scheduled to launch several projects related to industry and roads. Indian leaders routinely travel to Arunachal Pradesh as they do to any other states of India. Objecting to the visit of Indian leaders to a state of India does not stand to reason and understanding of the Indian people, Kumar said. In November, Chinas foreign ministry criticised defence minister Rajnath Singhs visit to Arunachal Pradesh to review the security situation. Geng also said China urges the Indian side to stop taking any action that may further complicate the border issue and take concrete actions to uphold peace and tranquillity of the border area. India and China have differences over the border stretching from Ladakh to Arunachal Pradesh that are yet to be resolved after dozens of rounds of talks. In 2019, customs authorities in a northeastern Chinese city destroyed nearly 30,000 world maps that depicted Arunachal Pradesh as part of India. (With inputs from HTC in New Delhi) Putting aside the unpleasant personalities and pointless squabbles that the Democrat presidential candidates showed America on Wednesday night in Nevada, what is important is that they shared with us their vision for an American future. They see America as a dark, hate-filled dystopian country that can be saved only if a government under their care collects as much money as possible from its citizens and spreads it around to people whose votes they want. If you cast your mind back to 2016, Trump did not speak to different racial or economic constituencies. He spoke to all Americans. His vision for America included secure borders, lower taxes, fewer regulations, strong national security, and a withdrawal from the Wilsonian ideal of America as the world's policemen. To the extent Democrats claimed that tTrump was a racist, it was because they interpolated racism into his words where none existed. Trump continues to govern for all Americans. Sure, he boasts about low black unemployment, but his point is always that a rising tide lives all boats and that he is the tide, and all Americans, regardless of race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, etc., are the boats. His Keep America Great rallies continue to speak to everyone. He sees America as a shining jewel that can become even bigger and brighter in his next term. The Democrat candidates see America differently. It's an impoverished wreck. Its air and water are filthy as wicked industrialists pump oil out of the ground with no benefit to anything but their bank accounts. Medical care in America is so awful that one has visions of bodies in the street, a la the scenes in Wuhan, China (a place in which socialized medicine isn't doing very well). Pharmacy companies make wicked profits, not for the benefit of shareholders or to provide funds for research and development, but simply to exploit Americans. College students are begging on the streets thanks to the unbearable version of the debt they voluntarily assumed for their advanced queer/feminist puppetry degrees. And minorities and women suffer in all ways possible from every policy. All of the candidates, no matter the topic, insisted that they would take money from the rich and, under their aegis, spend it in ways that would save the economy, save the environment, save medical care, and fund endless wonderful programs, from pre-kindergarten childcare to free college to free drugs. Only Bloomberg pulled back from this socialist dream (a dream common to all the others, whether they want Bernie's instant socialism or Buttigieg's and Klobuchar's slower, Fabian-style socialism). Only once did the subject of what socialism really is creep out, and that's when Bloomberg, having listened to Bernie's economic ideas, shot back, "We're not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism, and it just didn't work." Bernie called the remark a cheap shot and insisted that he was just trying to turn America into Denmark. That, in its turn, was a cheap trick. Throughout his career, when Bernie got the chance to travel, he didn't travel to Denmark, Sweden, or England, countries that have small populations, were once culturally homogeneous, and had low defense costs because America footed the bill during the Cold War. Instead, given the chance, Bernie rushed off to the Soviet Union (which he raved about), Cuba, and Nicaragua (to celebrate the Sandinistas' sixth anniversary) all communist police states. Aside from a shared belief that government is the best repository for wealth earned by hard work and innovation, after which government should decide how to spend it, the candidates all had one other thing in common: they loathe Trump. To them, he is the embodiment of everything that is evil. It's imperative that one of them make it to the White House in order to end the Trump presidency. Despite all the hate, one thing was missing from the debate: Trump's actual policies. Except for complaining about Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Accord, none of the candidates justified their hatred. Trump is no longer a president with policies. He is a bogeyman who lives in their heads, a monstrous creature whose mere existence despoils the world. They claim that he's a fraud, as if he hasn't already proven himself to the American people over the past three years. In that time, Trump has fended off every partisan political attack leveled against him while simultaneously presiding over an extraordinary economy, making beneficial trade deals, bringing China to heel, defeating ISIS on the battlefield, securing our southern border, and generally proving that there's nothing fake about his leadership and managerial abilities. You may not like the way in which he's used those abilities, but they are very real. If the Democrat debate had to be summed up in one sentence, it would be, "America's a disaster and Trump is really evil, so we need to take all your money and spend it in ways that we super-duper promise you will make things better." courtesy nmlegis.gov Thirty days sure passes quickly. By the time you read this, the second session of New Mexicos 54th Legislature will either have ended or will be just about to finish things up (the states bicameral governing body adjourns at noon on Feb. 20). Public safety, education and finances were the big themes at this 30-day session. And although the Lujan Grisham administration had several successes during this years short-lived session, the Dems in charge also faced a couple of notable letdowns. Up and Down A bill to make recreational cannabis legal in The Land of Enchantment, The Cannabis Regulation Act, was tabled after brief but intensive debate about the time it would take to fully vet such a bill before it becomes the law. You can almost see next years entrada forming in the tall grass with a streamlined cannabis bill ready to do battle against the powerful windmills where folks like state Senators Cervantes of Las Cruces and Smith of Deming do their business. The bill will eventually become law; Weekly Alibi cannabis correspondent Joshua Lee offers his thesis for getting it done sooner rather than later in this weeks cannabis section. Read all about it on page 28 of this issue. In the meantime, other disappointments include a stalled free college plan and the failure of the social security tax repeal act. The good news for the governor and her allies was great in comparison, however. SB 5, the Extreme Risk Firearm Protection Order Act, passed through multiple committees and was passed by both chambers of the legislature. The governor said shed sign it when it arrives on her desk. Likewise, legislation aimed at earmarking money from the general fund to support a childhood education trust fund is on its way to becoming law. The measure, HB 83, passed in the senate by a vote of 37 to 1. Here are some more details about some of those bills and the business of our citizen legislatureas it winds down until next years January 2021 meet-up. SB5 Despite formidable outcry from some of New Mexicos duly elected county sheriffsLea County Sheriff Corey Helton met with constituents at the Eunice, New Mexico City Hall last week to tell those gathered that he would rather go to jail than enforce the soon-to-be lawwho claim that the law violates the Second and Fourth Amendments of the US Constitution. The bill has been notably favored and heavily promoted as a solution to gun violence by the governor this year. Next door to Burque, in Torrance County, former Bernalillo County Commissioner, onetime Albuquerque mayoral candidate and current Torrance County Manager Wayne Johnson complained that the law puts the state in an untenable situation. Johnson made his concerns known after the Torrance County Commission passed a unanimous resolution to oppose the bill. Commenting on this right-wing dissent from a group of elected law enforcement officers, Lujan Grisham said at a press conference on Friday that she will not abide any lack of enforcement by government officials opposed to confiscating guns from citizens who are a known danger to themselves and the community. The law, as it is written, gives law enforcement agents in New Mexico the power to petition to have firearms temporarily removed from the possession of individuals who have been deemed a threat through their demonstrated actions. HB 83 Oil and gas revenues are at an all-time high for this state and were now rated third in the nation for oil and gas extraction. The good news about all that non-renewable fossil fuel is that it can be used as a funding source for one of the governors premier initiatives. That project would entail creating a trust fund to finance, support and grow early childhood education in this state. According to the plan, when revenue from oil and gas outpaces spending by 25 percent, money would be contributed to the trust fund via the states general fund. The result would be the ability to plan and implement crucial education programs that are essential to raising productive, literate and active citizens. The bill, as mentioned earlier in this article, passed the Senate on a near-unanimous vote. The only dissenting voice came from longtime progressive Senatorand former Weekly Alibi columnistGerald Ortiz y Pino, who questioned the funds priorities and financing. HB6 There is still some question as to whether HB 6, a wide ranging anti-crime bill that passed effortlessly through the house on a 59 to 9 vote, will make it out of committee in the state Senate. The original version of this legislation called for stiffer penalties for non-murderous gun-related crimes as well as providing for broadening of funding for community police projects across the stateand calling for better treatment of PTSD in law enforcement officers who have been exposed to violence and its aftermath. The bill made it through one senate committee, but not before being substantially rewritten to disinclude the parts that propose better PTSD treatmentthat would be handled in a separate bill, said members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Senate Finance Committee will hear the legislation mid-week, just before the session ends on Thursday at noon. A Delhi court will pronounce judgement on February 29 in a case of alleged murder of the father of a woman who was raped by expelled BJP MLA Kuldeep Singh Sengar in Unnao in 2017. The rape survivor's had father died on April 9, 2018 in judicial custody. During in-chamber proceedings, District Judge Dharmesh Sharma has reserved the judgement after conclusion of final arguments by the prosecution and the defence, said a lawyer privy to the matter. The counsel for the CBI examined 55 witnesses in support of the case and the defence examined nine witnesses, said advocate Dharmendra Mishra, counsel for the rape survivor and her family. The court recorded the statements of the rape survivor's uncle, mother, sister and one of her father's colleague who claimed to be the eye witnesses to the incident. It had on December 20 last year sent Sengar to jail for "remainder of his natural biological life" in for raping the woman in 2017 when she was a minor. According to the CBI, on April 3, 2018 there was an altercation between the survivor's father and Shashi Pratap Singh. The charge sheet filed on July 13, 2018 said the survivor's father and his co-worker were returning to their village, Makhi, when they asked Singh for lift. Singh denied them the lift, triggering an altercation among them. Singh called his associates, following which MLA's brother Atul Singh Sengar reached the spot along with others and beat up the survivor's father and his co-worker. The survivor's father was subsequently taken to the police station by them and an FIR was lodged against him. He was arrested. The charge sheet said that all this while Kuldeep Sengar was in touch with the district police superintendent, police station's in-charge Bhadauria. Later he also talked to the doctor who examined the survivor's father. The court had earlier framed charges against Sengar, his brother Atul, Makhi police station's in-charge Ashok Singh Bhadauria, Sub Inspector Kamta Prasad, Constable Amir Khan and six others in the case. The case was transferred to Delhi from a trial court in Uttar Pradesh on the directions of the Supreme Court on August 1 last year. In July last year, a truck rammed into the car the rape survivor was travelling in with some family members and her lawyer. Two of her aunts died in the road accident. She was airlifted from a hospital in Lucknow and brought to the AIIMS for better care as she continued to be critical. She has been given accommodation in the national capital and is under CRPF protection. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) (L-R): Jessie Mueller, Jeff Still, Austin Pendleton, Blair Brown, Ian Barford, Tracy Letts, Armie Hammer, Cliff Chamberlain, Danny McCarthy, K. Todd Freeman, Sally Murphy Photo: Frank Ishman We were looking for really good actors, Tracy Letts says about assembling a cast for the Broadway run of his play The Minutes. And they settled with us! Armie Hammer interjects. No, we found them, Letts says, We found them all. The show in question is a one-act dark comedy set during a small-town city council meeting. In a way that fits the pace of municipal politics, its taken a suitably long time to make it to Broadway, where it starts performances at the Cort Theatre on February 25. The Minutes, a Steppenwolf Theatre production, first ran in Chicago in 2017, and become a Pulitzer finalist in 2018, before arriving in New York smack in the middle of primary season. Anna D. Shapiro, who directed The Minutes in Chicago and also directed Lettss Pulitzer-winning August: Osage County, is back with the show on Broadway, with a cast thats half-old and half-new. Among the new: Hammer, making his second trip to Broadway after working with Shapiro on Straight White Men, who promises that he loved the idea of feeling out of my depth in The Minutes. I wanted to come back, he says, and put myself in an uncomfortable position again. Among the returning Steppenwolf cast, theres Ian Barford (recently seen in Lettss other Broadway play this season, Linda Vista), Danny McCarthy (To Kill a Mockingbird), Sally Murphy (Steppenwolfs version of Linda Vista), Cliff Chamberlain (Homeland), and Jeff Still (To Kill a Mockingbird). Plus, there are the new additions of Austin Pendleton (Choir Boy), K. Todd Freeman (Airline Highway), Blair Brown (a Tony winner for Copenhagen), Jessie Mueller (a Tony winner best known for her chameleonic voice), and Letts himself, whos stepped into the Broadway production as The Minutes Mayor Superba, his first time appearing in one of his own plays. Its a good part for me, its not like I can look at the other parts Ive written and say, well, thats a part I should have played, Letts says, adding that the production did go out to other actors, but at a certain point, he knew he would fit best into the ensemble. There comes a point where you go, well, Ill do it before we put ourselves in a situation where were working with somebody whos thinking about how they can best show themselves off rather than telling our story. Though Letts wrote this political play in 2016, hes repeatedly insisted that the show is not directly about Trump or Trumpism, and rather about how we conduct our politics, and why we do it, especially in America. He was particularly interested in the minutiae of small-town council meetings, and watched hours of absurd and mundane footage from them on YouTube (if youre having trouble sleeping, I recommend it) while writing. I dont understand the desire to eliminate government or to shrink government to such a size as is completely ineffectual, he says. At one point, one of the characters says, this is the way we conduct our politics. Its absurd, but its necessary. To that end, even if The Minutes is, again, not about Trump, Letts felt it was important to get the show to Broadway before the 2020 election. Im not on social media, he says, This for me felt like what I have to contribute to this moment. Beyond my vote, this is my contribution to this political moment. The Kardashian ladies met up for a family dinner at one of their favorite restaurants that serves up authentic Armenian fare on Wednesday. Khloe and and older sisters Kourtney and Kim arrived at Carousel Restaurant in the Glendale section of Los Angeles not long after shooting an appearance on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. Momager Kris Jenner also had photographers buzzing after she parked her car and took the walk inside the establishment. Shining star: Khloe Kardashian, 35, left a taping with David Letterman to attend a family dinner at an Armenian restaurant in the Glendale neighborhood of Los Angeles on Wednesday Looking to leave a lasting impression, Khloe, 35, showed off her curves in a nude leather pantsuit. The pants fit snug on her long legs while the matching blazer was worn over a tight top. The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star rounded out her ensemble with a pair of nude strapped heels, a pink purse and her dyed blonde tresses pulled into a top ponytail. Nude color theme: The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star also wore a nude top and heels along with dark sunglasses at night Glowing: Khloe also looked to be sporting a golden tan In keeping with her younger sister, Kourtney, 40, also rocked an all leather ensemble. Only she opted for snug black pants that showcased her derriere and a matching leather shirt that was unbuttoned just enough to flaunt her ample cleavage. She also wore heeled-boots, carried a tiny black purse and wore her raven tresses long, straight and flowing well past her shoulders and with a center part. Leaning more towards elegance, Kim, 39, wore a skin-tight gold dress that showed off nearly every angle of her body. She rounded her outfit off with strapped heels , black purse and her long dark locks pulled back into one braid. Black leather: Kourtney Kardashian, 40, also wore leather, only she opted for black pants and a matching shirt that had several buttons left undone to showcase her ample cleavage The golden touch: Leaning more towards elegance, Kim, 39, went with a skin-tight gold dress that showed off nearly every angle of her body Lady in black: Momager Kris Jenner, 64, met up with three of her daughters in all black that consisted of pants, fitted top, blazer and pointed leather boots Jenner, 64, met up with three of her daughters in black fitted pants, black top and a black blazer. The matriarch of the family also donned pointed black leather boots and her trademark short hair that was pushed back off her face with a part on the left. Just moments before, both Khloe and Kourtney were spotted leaving a studio in Los Angeles where they filmed a spot on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. Dialed on: Khloe was seen checking her phone after leaving her family dinner On the go: Kourtney was also seen leaving Glendale following the family dinner and the taping of an appearance on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman More than three in four Americans say they are very confident or somewhat confident in the US federal government's ability to handle a coronavirus outbreak, a Gallup poll has found, a higher level of confidence than in previous health scares. Gallup said the results were from a February 3 to February 16 poll that began just days after the Trump administration announced it would suspend entry of foreign nationals who had been to China in the previous two weeks. About 31 percent of respondents said they were very confident and 46 percent said they were somewhat confident in the federal government's ability to handle an outbreak. Only 22 percent said they were not too confident or not confident at all. The combined positive rating of 77 percent compares with 64 percent during the 2017 Zika virus outbreak, 58 percent during the 2014 Ebola virus outbreak and 67 percent during the 2009 H1N1/Swine Flu outbreak, Gallup said. Coronavirus has only struck 16 people in the US, and the vast majority of Americans feel somewhat or very confident in the US government's ability to contain the outbreak More 2,000 people have died worldwide and 75,766 have been infected - but so far only 16 of those cases have been in the US China reported on Thursday a dramatic drop in coronavirus cases, but scientists said the virus could be spread more easily than previously thought by patients who are not showing any symptoms. Meanwhile, the US government's swift and aggressive actions to limit the influx of people potentially exposed to the virus in China has instilled confidence in many Americans. Yet some have balked at the decision to repatriate Americans who were trapped on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan, where nearly 600 people have been infected with coronavirus, making it the most dense concentration of cases outside China. Fuel was added to the fire of their concerns when 14 of the 300-some evacuated Americans tested positive for coronavirus after disembarking the ship. Despite previous statements that no one diagnosed with or showing symptoms of the virus that's sickened 75,766 people around the world, the infected passengers were allowed to continue on back to the US, aboard the same two cargo planes with un-infected Americans. After their arrival - and the transport of 13 'high risk' people to containment facilities in Nebraska - the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced it would not evacuate any more of the 100 or so Americans left on the ship and in Japanese hospitals until those individuals completed another 14-day quarantine there. Nonetheless, the CDC has only confirmed 15 US coronavirus cases. Officials in Napa Valley, California said this week that a sixteenth person, a Diamond Princess evacuee, had tested positive for the virus. Some balked at the US's decision to evacuate Americans from the Diamond Princess cruise in Japan, especially after 13 were deemed 'high risk,' including Carl Goldman (pictured) whose wife says he is positive for coronavirus and was rushed into a biocontainment unit upon arrival The Trump administration and CDC were quick to take aggressive measures like putting Americans returning from high risk areas into quarantines like this one in Nebraska This week, Iran became the first new country to report cases of coronavirus in at least a week, and in most places with infections, the spread of the disease seems to have leveled off. World Health Organization (WHO) officials have warned to take these early but encouraging signs cautiously, but international attention has begun to turn away from the disease itself and toward its economic ramifications. China is also struggling to restart factories and other businesses as workers stay home, taking a toll on its growth. Two-thirds of Americans anticipate the global outbreak will hit the world economy. About 16 percent of respondents believe it will have a 'very negative' impact, while 49 percent expect a 'somewhat negative impact, with 34 percent anticipating none. Americans' level of worry about being exposed to coronavirus is at about the same level as for two of three other health risks Gallup has measured previously. More than one in three Americans reported being very worried or somewhat worried that they or a family member will be exposed to the virus. This combined 36 percent is on par with Americans' worries about severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003 (37 percent) and exposure to anthrax in 2001-2002 (32 percent). The mosquito-borne West Nile virus outbreak in 2002, which topped 4,000 cases in the United States, sparked more concern, with 53 percent (53 prcent) worried about being exposed to it, Gallup said. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 03:21:01|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close BERLIN, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- The German government passed a law on Wednesday to combat serious cases of right-wing extremism and hate crime on the internet. Social networks in Germany now have to report certain postings to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), according to the Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection (BMJV). Under the new law, social networks should report postings that disseminate propaganda material of unconstitutional organizations. They are also required to report postings that prepare a severe act of violence or incite hatred that endangers the state. In order to identify offenders quickly, German authorities can ask social networks to provide the IP address and port number last assigned to the user profile, according to the BMJV. Authorities can also request user passwords on a court order in cases of suspected serious crimes such as terrorism or homicide. Previously, digital platform operators had only been required to delete hate postings once they were aware of them. The maximum punishment for posting threats was increased from one year to three years' imprisonment. "Those who rush and threaten on the internet will be prosecuted more harshly and effectively in the future. Hate crimes should finally end up in court where they belong," said Christine Lambrecht, Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection. The new law was presented as a response to the right-wing terrorist attack on the Jewish community in October 2019, when a heavily armed man shot two people dead, one of them outside a synagogue, in the eastern German city of Halle. "We must dry up the breeding ground on which this extremism flourishes. The flood of inhuman incitements and threats on the internet is lowering inhibition thresholds," said Lambrecht. [February 20, 2020] CherryRoad Technologies Inc. Awarded NASPO ValuePoint Cloud Solutions contract with the State of Washington MORRIS PLAINS, N.J., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CherryRoad Technologies Inc. today announced it has signed a NASPO ValuePoint Participating Addendum with the State of Washington, allowing the State to simplify its entire cloud procurement process. CherryRoad markets its cloud solutions and managed services to state and local governments through NASPO ValuePoint's Master Agreement awarded by the State of Utah. The State of Washington is the fifteenth state government to contract with CherryRoad to address its unique cloud-solution needs. Other states that currently have Participating Addendum's in place to leverage CherryRoad's services include: Commonwealth of Virginia; Florida; Hawaii; Illinois; Mississippi; Missouri; Nebraska; Nevada; New Jersey; New Mexico; Oklahoma; South Dakota; Utah; and Vermont. Cloud solutions provided by CherryRoad include Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which were developed specifically for state and local governments. NASPO ValuePoint is regarded as the nation's most significant public contract cooperative due to its unparalleled value for members as well as contractors, competitive pricing, and superior terms and conditions. NASPO ValuePoint Cloud Solutions Master Agreements are only awarded through a competitive RFP to a limited number of clou solution providers whose offerings meet stringent security and data protection requirements. "The signing of a Participating Addendum with CherryRoad ensures that the State of Washington will receive best-in-class IT solutions that offer flexibility and significant cost-savings," said Chris Tilden, Director - Strategic Alliances, of CherryRoad Technologies. "As a leading technology provider for the public sector, we deliver scalable cloud services that the state and its entities can leverage to achieve increased efficiencies and innovations." About CherryRoad Technologies Inc. At CherryRoad, our clients entrust us with the success of their IT solutions, whether we're delivering on-premise ERP, cloud-based application management, business intelligence, process optimization, hosting, or change management consulting. Throughout our 30-year history we've successfully partnered with hundreds of public sector and commercial clients to modernize, optimize and manage their back-office functions. Headquartered in Morris Plains, N.J. with offices across the U.S., we've earned a solid reputation for combining technology, organizational, functional, and vertical market expertise into practical solutions that deliver results on-time and on-budget. For more information, visit www.cherryroad.com About NASPO ValuePoint NASPO ValuePoint is a unified, nationally focused cooperative aggregating the demand of all 50 states, the District of Columbia and the organized US territories, their political subdivisions and other eligible entities spurring best value, innovation and competition in the marketplace. The NASPO ValuePoint Cooperative Purchasing Organization (formerly WSCA-NASPO) provides the highest standard of excellence in public cooperative contracting. By leveraging the leadership and expertise of all states with the purchasing power of their public entities, NASPO ValuePoint delivers best value, reliable, competitively sourced contracts. Since 1993 NASPO ValuePoint has been the cooperative purchasing arm of NASPO (the National Association of State Procurement Officials) encouraging, fostering and guiding the nation's most significant public contract cooperative. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cherryroad-technologies-inc-awarded-naspo-valuepoint-cloud-solutions-contract-with-the-state-of-washington-301008598.html SOURCE CherryRoad Technologies Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] She failed to find love with Nick Cummins on The Bachelor, after he infamously dumped both women in the tense finale episode. And on Friday, Brittany Hockley revealed why she's still very much single after eight years on the market, in a candid interview with Sydney Confidential. 'It's Sydney men!' the 30-year-old, who hails from Port Macquarie, claimed. 'They're all Peter Pans - young forever and don't want to settle down.' 'It's Sydney men!' Brittany Hockley (pictured) has revealed the reason why she thinks she's still on the market after eight years of being single, in a candid interview with Sydney Confidential She also revealed she's joined dating apps to look for romance - but so far, none have been a success. 'I haven't dated anyone seriously since Nick,' she added. However, romance isn't the top of the list of Brittany's priorities, as she's set to make her feature film debut later this year as a cast member in Malibu Crush. Shocker: Brittany failed to find love with Nick Cummins (right) on The Bachelor in 2018, after he infamously dumped both women in the tense finale episode In December, Brittany spoke exclusively to Daily Mail Australia about her exciting venture, and why she didn't reveal her love of acting while starring on The Bachelor. 'Ive been studying acting as a hobby and passion for years, but Ive never properly pursued it... until now,' Brittany said. She describes her new independent movie as a romantic comedy with plenty of laughs. 'Ive been studying acting as a hobby and passion for years': Brittany describes her new independent movie, Malibu Crush, as a romantic comedy with plenty of laughs The radiographer said: 'I've always been in the medical industry so that is what Ive focused on. Acting was just a side passion.' Brittany was contacted directly by the director/producer of Malibu Crush about the role, and after recording a self-taped audition and meeting in person, was offered the gig. 'It's a really great bunch of people and Im excited to be given the opportunity, and to learn from it,' Brittany said of being cast in Malibu Crush. Production is under way on Matt Damon and Adam Driver's new movie The Last Duel, with both actors rocking unique period costumes. Damon, 49, and Driver, 36, were both spotted on the set in Sarlat, France on Tuesday, with director Ridley Scott. The film also marks Damon's return to writing, co-writing the script with his childhood friend Ben Affleck and Nicole Holofcener (Enough Said). On set: Production is under way on Matt Damon and Adam Driver's new movie The Last Duel, with both actors rocking unique period costumes and long beards on set on Tuesday Damon was sporting a mullet look with a chinstrap beard along with a thick brown leather tunic and a brown cloak over it. The Boston native was seen walking through the set and chatting with other crew members. Driver was seen leaning into an Audi on set, wearing a navy blue shirt with his hair nearly shoulder-length and sporting a mustache and goatee. Damon's co-writer and co-star Ben Affleck was not spotted on the set, and it remains unclear when he will start filming. Adam's look: Driver was seen leaning into an Audi on set, wearing a navy blue shirt with his hair nearly shoulder-length and sporting a mustache and goatee The film is based on the true story of the last sanctioned duel in France, which took place in the 14th Century and adapted from the book The Last Duel: A True Story of Trial by Combat in Medieval France by Eric Jager. The story follows Norman knight Jean de Carrouges (Damon), who, after returning home from war, accuses his best friend and squire Jacques Le Gris (Driver) of raping his wife (Jodie Comer). After no one believed the wife's accusations, and a court ruling favored LeGris, de Carrouges appeals to the King of France, who sentences them to both fight in a duel to the death. Costume: Damon was sporting a mullet look with a chinstrap beard along with a thick brown leather tunic and a brown cloak over it. The winner, according to the King's decree, would prevail as a sign of God's will, and if de Carrouges loses, his wife would also be burned at the stake for making the false accusation. While talking about the film during an appearance on Conan in November, Matt said: 'It's about the last sanctioned duel in Medieval France between these two knights, one of whom claimed the other raped his wife. 'They could not resolve what had happened, and so they fought to the death to let God decide who was telling the truth. 'We thought that it was this interesting story of perspectives, so Ben and I wrote the male perspectives and Nicole wrote the female perspectives, and Ridley Scott's going to direct it.' Co-star: Matt co-wrote the screenplay alongside Nicole Holofcener and longstanding writing partner Ben Affleck (pictured after their 1998 Oscar win for Good Will Hunting's screenplay) Originally, Matt and Ben were set to play the two leading roles in the film, but they ran into scheduling conflicts due to Ben's role in Adrian Lyne's Deep Water. As such, Adam was cast to take over the role, following his incredible year of film in 2019 with releases such as Marriage Story, for which he was Oscar-nominated, Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker, and The Report. Damon is coming off his hit movie Ford vs. Ferrari, which he starred in alongside Christian Bale, which was nominated for Best Picture. Damon will next be seen in Stillwater, alongside Abigail Breslin, which is slated for release on November 6. He is also producing Witness For the Prosecution, an Agatha Christie adaptation that Affleck is slated to direct. The Last Duel is currently scheduled to hit theaters in limited release on Christmas Day, before expanding nationwide January 8, 2021. It's all getting a bit silly - and you're paying for it. For instance, the General Election cost you around 40m. That's a fair few quid towards your rent, mortgage, childcare fees or add any various life costs where appropriate. And it's not bad enough that they made you pay for that, they are threatening to make you pay for another one because they can't get it together to form a government. For all intents and purposes, it's your fault you don't have a government for not voting the way they expected you to. So now if they can't form a government from the votes you democratically gave them, they will spend another 40m asking you to give them the votes they hoped you'd give them in the first instance. Meanwhile, they'll sit back, stroke their beards and wonder why people are disillusioned with politics. Imagine? Why aren't people on the streets cheering on whatever party they decided won this spirograph election? No one won in reality. Fianna Fail got the most votes, followed by Sinn Fein and Fine Gael. But there's not a party in Leinster House that wants to be in government at the moment. Sinn Fein is giving the best impression possible of seeking to run the country. It would have been more convincing if one of its negotiating team, Eoin O Broin, had not admitted its chances of forming a left-leaning government were all but dead. O Broin is a key figure on the negotiating team and his disillusionment with the process spoke volumes. Yesterday, after defending a fellow party member who wrote anti-Semitic tweets, Pearse Doherty sought to convince the assorted press he could still assemble a socialist government. In fact, while batting away questioning about Kildare TD Reada Cronin's comparison between Israel and the Nazis, Doherty claimed Sinn Fein was the only party trying to form a government. The electorate called for change. And that change insists Sinn Fein be in power - according to Sinn Fein. The Sinn Fein they voted into power includes TDs who believe it's OK to compare Jewish people to Nazis, use derogatory comments about women, make libellous claims about the judiciary and dismiss the benefits of vaccines. That's not to say that every other party includes the best and the brightest in society. Fine Gael candidate Catherine Noone certainly proved that making stupid comments was not confined to Sinn Feiners. Noone, of course, suggested Taoiseach Leo Varadkar may have autism during the election campaign. So we can't pretend Sinn Fein is the only party that has questionable representatives. However, it does have TDs who have some very strange views of the world and the party's response to the latest revelations about Cronin's views were hands-off to say the least. Sinn Fein Senator Maire Devine was suspended for three months for retweeting a post about the murdered prison guard Brian Stack. Cronin seems to be escaping any punishment for what she wrote - including when she was a Sinn Fein councillor. Meanwhile, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael shirk responsibility for government by pretending it's not up to them to provide stability. Gone is Brexit, gone is stability and all we have left is parties worrying about their own backyard. While insisting Sinn Fein, along with TDs who have made anti-vax and anti-Semitic views, should be in power. Insurgents are ready for peace in Afghanistan, but are finding it hard to trust, the head of the feared Haqqani network said Thursday in a controversial and much-discussed New York Times op-ed. "Everyone is tired of war. I am convinced that the killing and the maiming must stop," Sirajuddin Haqqani, the Taliban's No. 2 leader wrote under the heading, "What We, the Taliban, Want." The Taliban did not choose to fight U.S. and NATO forces, but rather "were forced to defend ourselves. The withdrawal of foreign forces has been our first and foremost demand," said Haqqani, who is on the FBI's most wanted list and has been designated by the State Department as head of a global terror network. Despite the "flip-flopping and ever-moving goal posts of the American side," negotiations with the U.S. have now put both sides on the verge of a seven-day "reduction of violence" that could eventually lead to talks with the Kabul government on peace deal, Haqqani wrote. "That we stuck with such turbulent talks with the enemy we have fought bitterly for two decades, even as death rained from the sky, testifies to our commitment to ending the hostilities and bringing peace to our country," Haqqani said. The statement glossed over the relentless Taliban attacks and suicide bombings that have left the insurgents in control of about half the country. "We are aware of the concerns and questions in and outside Afghanistan about the kind of government we would have after the foreign troops withdraw," he said. "My response to such concerns is that it will depend on a consensus among Afghans." Related: Esper Says Taliban Deal Is Promising But Not Without Risk There was no immediate response from the Trump administration or the Pentagon, but the op-ed drew fierce criticism, even from inside the Times. Rep. Liz Cheney, D-Wyoming, the No. 3 Republican leader in the House, ripped the Times on Twitter for giving "the Taliban a forum to spew garbage. The author is a designated global terrorist." Also on Twitter, Mujib Mashal, the Times' senior correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that the Haqqani op-ed "omits the most fundamental fact -- that Siraj is no Taliban peace-maker as he paints himself, that he's behind some of most ruthless attacks of this war with many civilian lives lost." In an emailed statement to The Hill, Ellen Murphy, senior vice president for communications at the Times, defended the decision to publish the piece. "We know firsthand how dangerous and destructive the Taliban is," Murphy said. "But, our mission at Times Opinion is to tackle big ideas from a range of newsworthy viewpoints. We've actively solicited voices from all sides of the Afghanistan conflict, the government, the Taliban and from citizens." Haqqani rose to power as the son of the late Jalaluddin Haqqani, once a Cold War ally of the U.S. He was funded by the CIA in the fight by Afghanistan's mujahideen against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. Jalaluddin Haqqani later became a protector and adviser to al-Qaida leader Osama Bin Laden. According to the counterterrorism guide published by the office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Haqqanis are mainly based in North Waziristan, Pakistan, from which they conduct cross-border operations into eastern Afghanistan and Kabul. The Haqqanis "are considered the most lethal and sophisticated insurgent group targeting U.S., coalition, and Afghan forces in Afghanistan; they typically conduct coordinated small-arms assaults coupled with rocket attacks, IEDs, suicide attacks, and attacks using bomb-laden vehicles," the guide states. Haqqani became deputy to Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in 2015, "cementing the alliance between the Haqqanis and the Taliban," according to the document. In the op-ed, Haqqani said "I am confident that, liberated from foreign domination and interference, we together will find a way to build an Islamic system in which all Afghans have equal rights, where the rights of women that are granted by Islam -- from the right to education to the right to work -- are protected, and where merit is the basis for equal opportunity." "We are also aware of concerns about the potential of Afghanistan being used by disruptive groups to threaten regional and world security," he said, "but these concerns are inflated." -- Richard Sisk can be reached at Richard.Sisk@Military.com. Read More: Secret Drone Crash, B-1 Malfunction Among Major 2019 Air Force Mishaps Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 20) Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana confirmed that Chinese ships have been present near Pag-asa Island, one of the biggest islands occupied by the Philippines in the disputed Spratlys in the South China Sea. There were presence there intermittently but varying in numbers, Lorenzana said in a text message shared Thursday to Defense reporters. Lorenzana was asked to confirm the presence of ships from Chinas coast guard and its maritime militia around the island, which is the seat of the Kalayaan municipal government under the province of Palawan. Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative director Greg Poling said Tuesday that China has maintained a constant maritime militia and [coast guard] deployment around Thitu Island (Pag-asa Island) for 424 days and counting. Reacting to Poling, Lorenzana said, We will not allow anybody, especially outsiders to dictate how we manage our affairs. The Defense chief also said they will not act just based on Polings tweet. The Armed Forces of the Philippines Western Command said in April last year that they have monitored 275 Chinese ships swarming Pag-asa since the beginning of 2019. The Philippines heavily protested the presence of the Chinese vessels, with the Department of Foreign Affairs even calling it illegal. The DFA again protested in July that same year when hundreds of Chinese vessels swarmed Pag-asa Island once more. President Rodrigo Dutertes special envoy to China, Ramon Tulfo, said the following month the ships which were unarmed and owned by Chinas militia have left the area as an initial gesture on the part of China to win the trust and confidence of the Philippine government. The Philippines calls the areas in the South China Sea that it claims and occupies as the West Philippine Sea. China has built artificial islands, prohibited Filipino fishermen from fishing and interfered in petroleum exploration in some of these areas. The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague recognized the Philippines' sovereign rights in some sea features within its 200-nautical mile exclusive economic zone that are being claimed by China, and called out Beijing's violations. China rejects the tribunal's decision and insists on its claim to practically the entire South China Sea, supposedly based on historic rights. CNN Philippines Senior Correspondent David Santos contributed to this report. South Africa: Counterfeit money fraudster jailed for six years A 28-year-old Johannesburg woman, Temwa Lisa Masoka, will spend six years in prison after a Mpumalanga regional court found her guilty of peddling counterfeit money in Mpumalanga and Gauteng. Her accomplice, Andrew Hopkins Mzaliwa, 56, escaped with a suspended sentence after the Evander Regional Court found both of them guilty on 21 counts of fraud, theft and other statutory laws related to the selling of fake bank notes on Monday. The couple, said Mpumalanga Hawks spokesperson Captain Dineo Lucy Sekgotodi, was arrested in July last year after the authorities received information on a counterfeit money operation in Secunda. The operation entailed the selling and distribution of fake South African and other foreign currencies to a prospective buyer. The currencies, which were good enough to beat the counterfeit pen, were meant to scam tourists, said Sekgotodi. The whole scam was nipped in the bud after the Hawks, in collaboration with the South African Police Service (SAPS), caught the suspects in Secunda. The culprits were found with counterfeit Euros and US Dollars. Sekgotodi said further investigations revealed that Mzaliwa and Masoka committed the same offences in Roodepoort in April 2013, in Tarlton in June 2014, and again in Muldersdrift in March 2017. The combined value of the money involved in the three areas amounted to about R300 000. Masoka was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, wholly suspended for five years on condition that she is not found guilty of committing the same offence during the period of suspension. She was also sentenced to four years for peddling fake bank notes. As if that was not enough, she was sentenced to five years in jail for dealing in foreign currency, a further six years for theft and 12 months imprisonment for incitement to commit an offence, wholly suspended for three years on condition she is not found guilty of committing the same offence during the period of suspension. Her sentences will run concurrently, while serving her six years prison term, said Sekgotodi. Meanwhile, Mzaliwa was sentenced to four years imprisonment for fraud, which was suspended for five years on condition that he is not found guilty of committing the same offence. In addition, he was sentenced to 12 months imprisonment for conspiracy, suspended for three years on condition that he is not found guilty of committing the same offence. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2020-02-20. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. Mothers of four of the infants, and one father, spoke at Thursdays hearing. Some said they were each already dealing with the guilt of leaving their babies behind every night at Meriter while they went home, feelings only compounded after later learning their babies were being injured at the hospital. It was extremely unsettling to be surrounded by medical professionals who could not determine what happened to my son while he was in their care, said one of the mothers, who discovered her son suddenly had bruises on his hands, fingers and palms while in the hospital after his premature birth. The boys mother said she brought the strange marks to the attention of staff, but nobody could tell her what was wrong. I felt powerless. I felt worried for my son, she said. His injuries healed, she said, but her family has not. My son was injured when I wasnt there, she said. I struggle with this guilt daily. I should have stayed. I could have protected my son. This could-have, should-have, would-have battle plays itself over and over in my mind even to this day 2 years later. TORONTO, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- YAMANA GOLD INC. (TSX:YRI; NYSE:AUY) (Yamana or the Company) today provided an update on its generative exploration program whose primary objective is to advance the Companys pipeline of highly prospective exploration projects. The Company has built large land positions in all countries where it has producing assets, and it is pursuing exploration projects in these countries that are at different stages of advancement. Investing prudently and responsibly in these projects today will ensure Yamana maintains its status as a dominant gold company while continuing to grow and meet its corporate objective to maximize free cash flow. The Company will also continue to invest in near-mine exploration to extend the lives of its current operations, including the Canadian Malartic underground project, and advance the Agua Rica project to feasibility study. The generative exploration program will allow the Company to target a number of other advanced and advancing opportunities in its portfolio and help lay the foundation for the next generation of Yamana mines in the coming decade. Yamana has always taken a long-term strategic perspective, said Henry Marsden, Senior Vice President of Exploration at Yamana. We believe that investing in a generative exploration program today will secure our future tomorrow. We have strong prospects in mine-friendly jurisdictions that we know well, and we are confident that they will become a cornerstone of Yamanas next generation of mines. The following are key elements and objectives of the generative exploration program: Target the Companys most advanced exploration projects while retaining the flexibility to prioritize other projects in the portfolio as and when merited by drill results. Add new inferred mineral resources of at least 1.5 million ounces of gold equivalent within the next three years to move at least one project towards a preliminary economic assessment. On a longer term basis, advance at least one project to a mineral inventory that is large enough to support a mine plan demonstrating positive economics with annual gold production of approximately 150,000 ounces for at least eight years. Advance both gold-only and copper-gold projects and, in the latter case, consider joint venture agreements aimed at increasing mineral resource and advancing the project to development while Yamana maintains an economic interest in the project. The Company expects to invest approximately $53 million in the program over the next three years, with $14 million budgeted for 2020, $18 million budgeted for 2021, and $21 million for 2022. Funding will be derived primarily from proceeds from monetizations of non-cash producing assets and, where applicable, flow-through funding agreements. The Company also expects to derive funding from expected joint venture opportunities, particularly for copper-gold projects. For information on exploration budgeting related to the Companys core assets, please refer to the press release issued February 13, 2020, titled: Yamana Gold Provides 2020-2022 Outlook. The generative exploration program will at first focus on the most advanced projects in Yamanas portfolio while continuing drilling activity at a number of the Companys highly prospective earlier stage projects. These projects are categorized as Tier One, Tier Two, or Tier Three projects, which are defined as follows: Tier One Projects with well-defined gold mineral resources and opportunities to grow to a potentially economic threshold in the next three years Tier Two Projects that have achieved significant drill intercepts and whose geology along with other factors support rapid resource growth Tier Three Highly prospective projects with known mineralization defined with rock and soil geochemistry that warrant future drill testing The Company is confident that its exploration pipeline includes projects that can meet its shorter-term objective of at least one project achieving 1.5 million ounces of gold in the inferred mineral resource category within three years as well as its longer-term objective of building at least one gold mineral resource that can support a mine with annual production of approximately 150,000 ounces per year for at least eight years. Further, the Company is very confident that the allocated exploration budget will be sufficient to achieve these goals. While the Company is prioritizing its most advanced exploration projects, a key element of the generative exploration program is to build in the flexibility and agility to shift focus quickly if a Tier Two or Tier Three project shows the greatest potential to meet the Companys objectives. The Company is currently prioritizing projects in Brazil and Canada, but it also holds large land packages in Chile and Argentina that it continues to explore and evaluate. SOURCES OF FUNDING The Company does not intend to fund the program from its free cash flow. Yamana holds a number of assets in its portfolio that do not currently generate cash. The Company is currently evaluating the monetization of some of these assets, and it anticipates using the proceeds to fund the $53 million investment in the generative exploration program. Where applicable, the Company will also consider flow-through funding as an alternative source of capital, and it will also consider joint venture or similar arrangements to advance projects with large prospective copper mineral resources. By funding the generative exploration program in this manner, the Company is aiming to ensure the programs long-term viability regardless of fluctuations in metal prices. In addition, monetizing assets that are not generating free cash is consistent with the Companys primary objectives of turning non-cash flow generating assets into assets that generate cash flow, maximizing free cash flow, and returning cash to shareholders. The following is an overview of Yamanas Tier One projects along with select Tier Two and Tier Three projects. Figure 1: Tiered exploration projects in Brazil https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/67cedd2c-7e6d-44a5-8e15-845352ee92e3 Figure 2: Tiered exploration projects in Canada https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/26b0e56c-494f-4e9f-ace9-fa5cab7b1efb TIER ONE PROJECTS Lavra Velha Lavra Velha is a near surface advanced exploration project located in the Lavra Velha district in Brazils Bahia state. Surface work and drilling has defined significant gold mineralization, building on the 2013 inferred mineral resource of 3.93 million tonnes at 4.29 grams per tonne (g/t) for 543,000 ounces of gold. The defined Lavra Velha deposit consists of shallowly dipping near surface mineralization that may be amenable to low capital intensity open pit mining and heap leaching. Metallurgical studies are ongoing. Drilling to date has generated a number of significant gold intercepts not currently included in the historical mineral resource estimates. Notable results reported as estimated true width include: 10.70 metres at 20.03 g/t of gold (starting at 23 metres down hole); 9.56 metres at 9.49 g/t of gold (starting at 105 metres down hole); 19.70 metres at 4.00 g/t of gold (starting at 112 metres down hole); and 27.93 metres at 2.82 g/t of gold (starting at 115 metres down hole). Exploration has defined numerous additional gold anomalies in soil and rock which will be drill tested as part of the program. There are significant drill targets on the 55,000-hectare property, and Lavra Velha represents one of the most immediate, shorter term opportunities to achieve the Companys stated exploration goals given the mineral resource to date and drilling following the initial mineral resource estimate. Further, Lavra Velha is highly prospective to meet the Companys long-term objectives, as it is a shallow, flat-dipping orebody, making it ideal for open pit mining with a low strip ratio, and oxide mineralization, with potential to be processed as a heap leach operation. Therefore, the project has potential as a low capital cost, low operating cost operation. See Figure 3 for a property map of Lavra Velha and Figure 4 for an outline of a mineral resource along with adjacent exploration targets and select drilling results. Download a PDF of detailed drill hole results at Lavra Velha. Figure 3: Lavra Velha property map showing geological setting, gold rock geochemistry, and location of the Lavra Velha target. https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/58c7f36e-8f0a-40b1-aba6-e09ed70c3853 Figure 4: Lavra Velha map showing outline of inferred mineral resource, adjacent exploration targets, and select drilling results (reported as estimated true width, with depth of interval in parenthesis for intervals greater than 1 g/t of gold). https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/f939d12a-5182-4f0f-9258-5ecd2ec53cd1 Monument Bay Yamana is actively exploring its 31,000-hectare Monument Bay project, which is located in northeast Manitoba. The project covers the Twin Lakes shear zone, a strongly developed regional structure that hosts gold mineralization along a three-kilometre strike length. The Company has previously completed an exploration agreement with Red Sucker Lake First Nation in 2018. Mineral resources for Monument Bay demonstrate a large mineralized envelope with higher grade plunging mineralized shoots that could be accessed via open pit mining or, as mineralization continues at depth, could be mined underground. In part, the exploration program will focus on those higher grade extensions at depth. The exploration program will also focus on areas surrounding the Twin Lakes shear zone where the Company believes considerable opportunity exists to increase resources. As such, while drilling on the core Twin Lakes shear zone will continue, including down plunge, exploration has recently expanded to other targets within the existing exploration permit using reverse circulation drilling to collect basal till and top-of-bedrock samples. Property-wide exploration and follow-up diamond drilling will also continue in 2020 to build on the substantial Twin Lakes mineralization with the goal of establishing a new mineral resource and conceptual mine plan over the next year. Both open pit and underground options are being considered. Monument Bay, although in a remote location, has certain advantages as a Canadian project, as Canada is one of the worlds highest ranked mining jurisdictions, has low power costs, and predictable mining regulations. Figure 5: Monument Bay property geology map showing footprint of the Twin Lakes deposit, distribution of drill holes, and potential mineralization hosting structures and targets. https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0440b4aa-cced-4295-b1f1-3e64332268ba TIER TWO PROJECTS Jacobina Norte The Jacobina Norte project, located in Brazils Bahia state just a few kilometres away from the Jacobina mine, is one of Yamanas most promising advancing exploration projects. The Company controls 78,000 hectares that cover over 150 kilometres of strike extent of the Serra do Corrego Formation, which hosts paleoplacer gold mineralization at the Jacobina mine. Surface exploration along strike has defined mineralization at Jacobina Norte where surface sampling and historic shallow drilling of mineralized reefs along a 15-kilometre trend have defined significant gold grades. Select historic drill results reported as core lengths from this zone include: 5.38 metres at 3.97 g/t of gold; 2.50 metres at 2.58 g/t of gold; 4.13 metres at 2.34 g/t of gold; and 2.78 metres at 2.32 g/t of gold. True widths are not interpreted at this time. Exploratory drilling and further surface exploration in 2020 will advance this prospect. Once a mineral resource is identified for Jacobina Norte, the Company will evaluate if the area is best developed as a standalone mine or as a source of additional mine feed to the existing Jacobina plant. The southernmost section of Jacobina Norte (the Serra Branca target) is located just nine kilometres north of Canavieiras Norte within the existing Jacobina mine infrastructure. See Figure 6 for details of the Jacobina Norte property. The experience at the Jacobina mine leads the Company to conclude that there is a strong possibility over the next decade of a second Jacobina-type mine along the concession owned by Yamana near the current Jacobina mine. Further, the concessions extend well beyond the Jacobina mine and Jacobina Norte, which creates excellent opportunities for further prospects. Figure 6: Jacobina Norte plan map showing Yamana mineral claims, simplified geology, surface rock sample gold geochemistry and 2009 Yamana drilling results as well as historic drilling results (reported as g/t of gold over core length in metres) where values are greater than 2.0 g/t of gold over greater than 2.0 metres core length. https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a1d073de-1cc9-4827-89aa-2d36f65bf04c Borborema The Borborema project is a 25,000-hectare land package in the Borborema district in Brazils Pernambuco state. The project is located in a Proterozoic magmatic arc environment that is similar to the belt hosting the Chapada mine, a large copper-gold mine developed by Yamana and put into production in 2007. Originally explored for narrow high grade veins, exploration also identified strong coppergold anomalies in both rocks and soils. Initial drill testing of the Sao Francisco target in 2019 generated near to surface, very high grade copper intercepts from massive sulphide mineralization. Notable drill intercepts with greater than 5% copper include: 3.66 metres at 0.58 g/t of gold and 7.14% copper (12.33 g/t gold equivalent)1 (starting at 90 metres down hole); 2.97 metres at 0.40 g/t of gold and 7.20% copper (12.25 g/t gold equivalent) (starting at 44.18 metres down hole); and 7.5 metres at 0.35 g/t of gold and 6.41% copper (10.90 g/t gold equivalent) (starting at 70.37 metres down hole). True widths are not interpreted at this time. Exploration will expand on the known intercepts and drill test other copper-gold soil anomalies to better define the size and nature of the asset. While the Company will continue to advance Borborema, the project is primarily a high grade copper deposit with some gold. As such, Borborema represents an excellent opportunity for a joint venture pursuant to which Yamana would continue to benefit and create value while it maintains its focus on its precious metals opportunities. See Figure 7 for a property map of Borborema and Figure 8 for drilling highlights at Sao Francisco. Download a PDF of detailed drill hole results for the Sao Francisco target. Figure 7: Borborema property map showing claims, geological setting, surface rock copper and gold geochemistry, and copper and gold targets. https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/b9e47440-12e6-4633-90d2-35a0fdf0c436 Figure 8: Sao Francisco target geological setting with select surface rock sample gold and copper geochemistry and drilling highlights (drilling results reported as core length, with depth of interval indicated in parenthesis for intercepts with greater than 5% copper). https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/bc855f59-0674-486f-83e0-6995abf886aa Ivolandia The Ivolandia project is located in Brazils Goias state, south of the Chapada mine. Gold-in-soil anomalies and surface gold mineralization were drill tested in wide-spaced exploration holes in 2011-12 and more recently in 2019. Results to date suggest lower grade although very near to surface oxide mineralization with large tonnage potential. Select drilling results greater than 50 metres core length with over 0.5 g/t of gold include: IVO-08 with 146.44 metres at 0.56 g/t of gold (from surface), including 12.77 metres at 1.30 g/t of gold; and IVO-03 with 54.0 metres at 0.55 g/t of gold starting at a hole depth of six metres. True widths are not interpreted at this time. Exploration will continue in 2020 on this 67,500-hectare land package to drill test known targets, and expand the mineralization footprint. As Ivolandia is very near to surface and mineralization is oxide, there is a possible opportunity for a very shallow open pit heap leach operation. See Figure 9 for a property map of Ivolandia and Figure 10 for a target zone map. Download a PDF of detailed drill hole results at Ivolandia. Figure 9: Ivolandia property map showing claims, geology, surface rock gold geochemistry and stream sediment sample results (gold grain counts). https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/9e13eb83-93df-43c1-b0e6-8493bbbe73f2 Figure 10: Ivolandia main zone target map showing geology and select drilling results (reported as g/t of gold over core length, with starting point of interval indicated in parenthesis) for drill holes with greater than 0.5 g/t gold over greater than 20 metres core length. https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/5b16088b-e1cf-4b4f-b756-d77bed2efbd1 Domain The Domain project is located near Oxford Lake in northeast Manitoba. The land position consists of a 20,000-hectare property 100%-controlled by Yamana that is largely unexplored. Interpretation of regional airborne magnetics together with government geological survey till geochemistry support a highly prospective environment for folded iron formation hosted gold. The Yamana property surrounds three claims totaling 576 hectares that are under a joint venture agreement with New Dimension Resources, which holds a 29.6% interest. The joint venture claims cover an area of historic drilling with significant gold intercepts hosted by iron formation that includes intervals reported by Rolling Rock Resources in 2008 and New Dimension Resources in 2017. Notable drill intercepts include: RR-08-23, 2.65 metres at 17.44 g/t of gold and 2.67 metres at 10.43 g/t of gold; RR-08-21, 2.70 metres at 15.16 g/t of gold; and RR-08-20, 9.0 metres at 7.29 g/t of gold. True widths are estimated to be 80-100% of core length based on limited drilling. Yamana will continue to engage with the Bunibonibee Cree Nation in 2020 in an effort to reach a mutually beneficial agreement supporting the advancement of exploration within this large, prospective land package. See Figure 11 for a Domain property map. Download a PDF of detailed drill hole results at Domain. Figure 11: Domain Property map showing claim outlines, geological setting, location of drill collars, and geophysical HLEM (horizontal loop electromagnetics) conductors and high magnetic responses. Historic drilling highlights reported for holes with gold in g/t multiplied by core length in metres (g/t*m) greater than 25. True widths are estimated to be 80-100% of core length based on limited drilling. https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/a8760ff0-227f-455f-b00e-18c124b2c77c TIER THREE PROJECTS Yamana controls a number of prospective land packages with mineralization defined by surface exploration but with little or no drilling completed to date. Notable Tier Three projects include the Mara Rosa and Colider projects in Brazil along with the Red Lake project in Canada. Mara Rosa, located north of the Chapada mine in Goias state, consists of 120,000 hectares of prospective mineral concessions. This land package is marked by the same alteration footprint as Chapada with widespread kyanite schist. Extensive soil geochemistry has established the presence of a number of significant copper, copper-gold, and gold only targets, several of which are drill ready. Exploration in 2020 will systematically test the stronger anomalies while continuing to build surface targets with geochemical, geological, and geophysical data. Colider is an early stage project located in Mato Grosso state in the newly developing Alta Floresta district, which is being explored for porphyry copper deposits by Anglo American and Aura Minerals. Yamana has completed soil and rock geochemistry on parts of the 9,700-hectare property with several drill-ready gold targets defined. Surface work will continue and initial exploratory drilling is expected in 2020. The Red Lake project, located in northwestern Ontario, consists of 543 hectares of land in two property positions: North Madsen and Headway. North Madsen covers a significant mineral envelope defined by 280 drill holes immediately west of the Hasaga gold deposit owned by Premier Gold Mines. Headway consists of 127 hectares south and adjacent to Newmonts Red Lake Gold Mines operation. Exploration targets at Headway include potential down-dip projections of gold-bearing structures occurring in the hanging wall of the high grade zone at the Red Lake complex. Qualified Persons and Data Verification Scientific and technical information contained in this press release has been reviewed and approved by Henry Marsden (P. Geo. and Senior Vice President, Exploration). Mr. Marsden is an employee of Yamana Gold Inc. and a Qualified Person as defined by Canadian Securities Administrators' National Instrument 43-101 - Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects. About Yamana Yamana Gold Inc. is a Canadian-based precious metals producer with significant gold and silver production, development stage properties, exploration properties, and land positions throughout the Americas, including Canada, Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Yamana plans to continue to build on this base through expansion and optimization initiatives at existing operating mines, development of new mines, the advancement of its exploration properties and, at times, by targeting other consolidation opportunities with a primary focus in the Americas. FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT: Investor Relations 416-815-0220 1-888-809-0925 Email: investor@yamana.com CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: This news release contains or incorporates by reference forward-looking statements and forward-looking information under applicable Canadian securities legislation and within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to information with respect to the Companys proposed generative exploration program and prospective and highly prospective targets and projects, the Companys short-term and longer-term goals and objectives of the program; the Companys expectation that it will continue to generate cash flow and execute on monetization initiatives, possible flow-through funding agreements and joint venture funding opportunities, some of which will support the generative exploration program. . Forward-looking statements are characterized by words such as plan", expect, budget, target, project, intend, believe, anticipate, estimate and other similar words, or statements that certain events or conditions may or will occur. Forward-looking statements are based on the opinions, assumptions and estimates of management considered reasonable at the date the statements are made, and are inherently subject to a variety of risks and uncertainties and other known and unknown factors that could cause actual events or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements. These factors include unforeseen impacts on cash flow, monetization initiatives, available residual cash, and other funding opportunities; unforeseen exploration and test results, and other risk factors discussed in the Company's Annual Information Form filed with the securities regulatory authorities in all provinces of Canada and available at www.sedar.com , and the Companys Annual Report on Form 40-F filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those described in forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements if circumstances or managements estimates, assumptions or opinions should change, except as required by applicable law. The reader is cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The forward-looking information contained herein is presented for the purpose of assisting investors in understanding the Companys proposed generative exploration program and the short-term and longer-term goals and objectives thereof, as well as the Companys expected sources of funding for the program and may not be appropriate for other purposes. (All amounts are expressed in United States dollars unless otherwise indicated) 1 Gold equivalent grade calculated using a gold value of US$1,250 per ounce and a copper value of US$3 per pound. On Wednesday, Meghan McCain confronted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over "deeply misogynistic" and "violent" supporters of Bernie Sanders on "The View." "The one thing that connects women on the left and women on the right, at least a lot of guest co-hosts, guests that come on, is the abuse that we have all been subjected to by the Bernie bros. It is by far the most violent, most misogynistic, the most sexist, the most harmful," McCain told AOC, adding that "its disgusting and vitriolic." When asked about Sen. Bernie Sanders reaction to the online attacks made by so-called Bernie Bros, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, We have to always reject hate, reject vitriol, and denounce that kind of behavior. https://t.co/cVclFZQmjApic.twitter.com/SN6GUjC9AV The View (@TheView) February 19, 2020 "How do you feel that hes attached to this deeply misogynistic and I would go so far as to say violent sector of people?" she asked. Ocasio-Cortez responded that internet culture can be very toxic and the activity online is "difficult to control." "I think that to a certain extent we have to always reject hate, reject vitriol, and denounce that kind of behavior," she continued. The top campaign surrogate for Sanders defended the Vermont senator's efforts to stop the online attacks, adding that Sanders "works very hard ... we send out messaging emails." Democratic presidential candidates have also called his supporters into question. On Monday, Mike Bloombergs campaign on launched a new ad ripping "Bernie Bros" for using online bullying tactics. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Sanders has "a lot of questions to answer here" in regards to his supporter's behavior after they attacked members of a union online after they criticized his "Medicare for All" health care plan, NBC News reported. When confronted about the issue at a CNN town hall this week, Sanders made it clear that he is "totally against online bullying and harassment." "I condemn anybody who claims you know, I have a hard time understanding, given my views, which everybody knows, how anybody who thinks they are supporting me would do some ugly and terrible things," he said. A mother who led police on a 230km/hr chase with her daughter sitting unrestrained in the back seat of her car has been released from jail. Margarita Tomovska wasted no time swapping her prison clothes for a new designer outfit after being released from Emu Plains Correctional Centre in western Sydney this week. Tomovska, dubbed 'Mercedes Mum', took to Instagram to announce her return to public life, posing in a $1,725 Balenciaga blouse with matching $2,300 handbag and $1,000 Gucci shoes. Mercedes Mum Margarita Tomovska posing in a new designer outfit including a $1,725 Balenciaga blouse with matching $2,300 handbag and $1,000 Gucci shoes after her release from jail this week Tomovska led police on a 10km chase in a $450,000 dark silver Mercedes AMG where she reached a speed of 232km/h with wanted passenger Christopher King and an unrestrained three-year-old girl in the car in November 2018. The mother-of-one was sentenced to 18 months jail in October 2019, with nine months to serve before being eligible for parole. She lost a bid to serve her sentence from home in November 2019, but had her none parole period slashed by five months. Judge Andrew Haesler reduced her nine month none parole period to four months, despite saying it was 'not deserved'. Ms Tomovska led police on a 10km chase in a $450,000 dark silver Mercedes AMG in November 2018 where she reached a top speed of 232km/h with an unrestrained three-year-old girl in the car The 28-year-old posted a selfie with her daughter on Wednesday and captioned the post 'reunited with the love of my life' with the hashtags 'baby girl' and 'my one and only'. Comments on her post were glad to see her out of jail and back on social media. 'Welcome back sweetie. Take care of yourself and you beautiful baby girl,' one comment reads. 'She is what matters not the doubters. To better times ahead.' A 49-year-old employee at Brigham and Womens Hospital who was shot earlier this month outside the Boston hospital has been discharged from the facility, according to a spokesperson from the hospital. The man, who works at the hospital as a valet, was critically injured in the shooting on Feb. 7. He was later reported to be in serious but stable condition. His family expressed gratitude for the communitys care of the employee, the hospital tweeted earlier this month. A GoFundMe page, which was set up for the employee, identified him by his first name, Justin. Justin appreciates the support very much, the GoFundMe page says. Thank you for honoring our friend and colleague, who has requested privacy while he recovers. The Feb. 7 incident led to the death of the shooter. The Mattapan resident pulled out his gun and pointed it directly at police after officers responded to a report of a man with a firearm around 9:20 a.m., authorities said. He physically attacked an officer, fled the scene and then led police on a car chase from Brigham and Womens to Route 9 in Brookline. He was later shot and killed by police. Related Content: Around 20 Vietnamese police swarmed the home on Thursday of an elderly community leader killed last month during land protests in Hanois Dong Tam commune, frightening the mans elderly widow and causing her to faint and collapse, a local activist told RFAs Vietnamese Service. Du Thi Thanh, widow of Le Dinh Kinh, at first refused to allow police to search her home despite their demands that she agree to let them in, land rights activist Trinh Ba Phuong told RFAs Vietnamese Service on Feb. 20. They then forced her to sign a paper acknowledging that she had refused to cooperate, said Trinh, who had met a few days earlier with a U.S. embassy representative in Hanoi to report on the clash at Dong Tam. She was so shocked by their angry shouts and demands that her blood pressure shot up, and she fainted, Trinh said, adding that moments after Du collapsed, a nurse gave her an injection. Police were then forced to leave her house when a crowd began to gather, Trinh said. Attempts to reach Dus niece and a neighbor by phone for comment were unsuccessful on Thursday. Dus husband Le Dinh Kinh, 84, was shot and killed on Jan. 9 by police who attacked his home in Dong Tams Hoanh village in a 4:00 a.m. assault that involved about 3,000 security officers from the police and armed forces. Though official reports said that villagers had assaulted police with grenades and petrol bombs, a report drawn from witness accounts and released seven days later by journalists and activists said that police had attacked first during the deadly clash that also claimed the lives of three police officers. Police blocked off pathways and alleys during the attack and beat villagers indiscriminately, including women and old people, the report says, calling the assault possibly the bloodiest land dispute in Vietnam in the last ten years. Long-running dispute The Dong Tam tragedy was the latest flare-up of a long-running dispute over a military airport construction site about 25 miles south of Vietnams capital Hanoi. In April 2017, police arrested several farmers for allegedly causing social unrest during a clash between authorities and Dong Tam residents over the 47 hectares of commune land taken by the government for military use. Other farmers then responded to the arrests by detaining 38 police officers and local officials, threatening to kill them if police moved against them. While all land in Vietnam is ultimately held by the state, land confiscations have become a flashpoint as residents accuse the government of pushing small landholders aside in favor of lucrative real estate projects, and of paying too little in compensation. Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Huynh Le. Written in English by Richard Finney. The other traditional avenue of influence was fundraising: Big donors could make one or two candidates viable, and starve others of resources. But thats changed, too. Sanders has raised more than $121 million almost entirely from small-dollar donors. Bloomberg isnt asking anyone for money at all. Besides, party leaders are reluctant to intervene in a way that would alienate Sanders supporters, since their votes will be crucial in November even if hes not the nominee. They seem to know they dont want Sanders, but they cant do much about it, said Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown University who studies the role of parties in the nominating process. Still, theres one last, unusual scenario under which party leaders could exert some influence: delegate-swapping. If no one amasses a majority of delegates during the primaries, several candidates could try to cut bargains before the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in mid-July. For example, a candidate in third or fourth place could drop out and release his or her delegates, which would free them to vote for anyone else. Leoch International Technology Limited (HKG:842), which is in the electrical business, and is based in China, saw significant share price movement during recent months on the SEHK, rising to highs of HK$0.65 and falling to the lows of HK$0.57. 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 Leoch International Technology's current trading price of HK$0.60 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 Leoch International Technologys 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 Leoch International Technology What's the opportunity in Leoch International Technology? The stock seems fairly valued at the moment according to my relative valuation model. Ive used the price-to-earnings ratio in this instance because theres not enough visibility to forecast its cash flows. The stocks ratio of 5.91x is currently trading slightly below its industry peers ratio of 8.99x, which means if you buy Leoch International Technology today, youd be paying a fair price for it. And if you believe that Leoch International Technology should be trading at this level in the long run, then theres not much of an upside to gain from mispricing. Is there another opportunity to buy low in the future? Since Leoch International Technologys share price is quite volatile, we could potentially see it sink lower (or rise higher) in the future, giving us another chance to buy. 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 does the future of Leoch International Technology look like? SEHK:842 Past and Future Earnings, February 20th 2020 Future outlook is an important aspect when youre looking at buying a stock, especially if you are an investor looking for growth in your portfolio. 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. Leoch International Technologys earnings over the next few years are expected to increase by 97%, indicating a highly optimistic future ahead. This should lead to more robust cash flows, feeding into a higher share value. Story continues What this means for you: Are you a shareholder? It seems like the market has already priced in 842s positive outlook, with shares trading around its fair value. However, there are also other important factors which we havent considered today, such as the track record of its management team. Have these factors changed since the last time you looked at 842? Will you have enough confidence to invest in the company should the price drop below its fair value? Are you a potential investor? If youve been keeping tabs on 842, now may not be the most advantageous time to buy, given it is trading around its fair value. However, the optimistic forecast is encouraging for 842, which means its worth further examining other factors such as the strength of its balance sheet, 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 Leoch International Technology. You can find everything you need to know about Leoch International Technology in the latest infographic research report. If you are no longer interested in Leoch International Technology, you can use our free platform to see my list of over 50 other stocks with a high growth potential. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. Scott M. Prochazka, the chief executive officer of CenterPoint Energy, was replaced Wednesday, just days after the Public Utility Commission approved a drastically reduced rate increase for the Houston utility. The company said its board of directors named one of its members, John W. Somerhalder II, as interim CEO, and will launch a search for a permanent chief executive. In a statement, Milton Carroll, the executive chairman, said, "The board has determined that now is the right time for a new leader with a fresh strategic perspective to lead the company though its next phase of growth and value creation. Montreal on Wednesday called a halt to its electric scooter scheme, saying that riders broke rules and almost always parked illegally. The Canadian city launched a pilot project in June with 680 scooters and electric bikes, but authorities judged that the test period had been a "failure." Eric Alan Caldwell, head of city transport, lambasted "an 80 percent delinquency rate" in complying with traffic and safety regulations. "Only 20 percent of scooters were parked" in dedicated spaces, the city said in a press release, adding that the scooters created "disorder" and problems for pedestrians. "Montreal does not want to become a scooter police force," Caldwell said. "The operators have failed to meet their responsibility for compliance with the regulations. "In 2020 there will be no more scooters on the streets." Although no serious accidents occurred, a total of 110 parking offenses were recorded and 333 tickets were issued for breaking regulations -- mainly for not wearing a helmet. Caldwell added that the permits for electric bikes would be renewed, but under tighter regulations. The Canadian offices for electric scooter brands Bird and Lime both expressed disappointment in the city's decision to stop the scooter program. "Ultimately, this decision will negatively impact the mobility and micromobility of Montrealers," said Bird Canada in a statement, though it added the company "looks forward to continuing working and collaborating with the City of Montreal" to eventually bring the scooters back. Lime echoed Bird's sentiments, with the general manager for Canada calling the scooter scheme's end "a major step backwards for the people of a city committed to reducing congestion and carbon emissions." "It's clear there was a real demand for greener, more convenient transportation options," said Michael Markevich. Shared scooters have become part of life in cities around the world, but they have often been criticized for littering sidewalks and posing a danger to pedestrians. In November, Singapore banned electric scooters on sidewalks, followed by Germany and France. Vietnamese soldiers perform a welcome ceremony for the HMS Enterprise in Hai Phong, northern Vietnam, February 19, 2020. Photo courtesy of the British Embassy in Vietnam. A British Royal Navy ship docked at Hai Phong City's Tan Vu Port on Wednesday on a one-week friendly visit to Vietnam. HMS Enterprise, an ECHO class survey vessel with a crew of 72, arrived in Vietnam for the 10th anniversary of the U.K.-Vietnam strategic partnership, of which security and defense are key, the British Embassy in Vietnam stated. The ship's presence would provide an opportunity to exploit the Memorandum of Understanding on hydrographic cooperation between the U.K. and Vietnam as well as strengthen the link between both countries' Navies, it added. "[The visit] demonstrates our commitment to the security of the Asia-Pacific, visiting many countries in the region and sharing views and expertise with other navies, including Vietnam's People Navy," said British Ambassador to Vietnam Gareth Ward ahead of the visit. While in Hai Phong, the ships captain and crew would meet with Hai Phong Peoples Committee and High Command of Vietnam Peoples Navy. It is expected to depart from Hai Phong on February 25, according to the Vietnam Ministry of Defense. PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 15:00:27 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 1011 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 / PowerBand Solutions Inc. (TSXV:PBX) (OTCQB:PWWBF) (Frankfurt:1ZVA) ("PowerBand", "PBX" or the "Company") is pleased to announce its Driveaway consumer app for iOS devices has been approved for publication by Apple and is now available for download in the US App Store.The Driveaway app introduces a new way for consumers to easily sell vehicles from their smart phone, tablet, or computer. Simply by uploading their vehicle information directly to the app, consumers instantly access a network of potential buyers. It is the latest advancement in the PowerBand consumer platform to revolutionize how vehicles are bought, sold, leased and traded around the globe.The Driveaway app will initially be available to residents of Northwest Arkansas and, after feedback, will be expanded across Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas. It will later be available in all of the United States and Canada. Consumers can also visit us at www.driveawaypro.com . An android version will also soon be available.Built by PowerBand, the launch of the Driveaway app in the United States is being piloted by D2D Auto Auctions LLC ("D2D"). D2D is co-owned by PowerBand and Arkansas-based financier Bryan Hunt, Director of J.B Hunt Transport."This is a revolutionary advance that empowers people to easily sell and trade cars in the used car market," said PowerBand CEO Kelly Jennings. "People now have at their fingertips - whether it's on their smart phone, tablet or computer - a way to sell vehicles to a wide network of buyers. Our mission is to make selling a car as easy as using Amazon or ordering an Uber." The Driveaway app is supported by D2D Auto Auctions, a network facilitating live vehicle auctions between dealers nationwide. D2D Auto Auctions' direct link to the new Driveaway app provides consumers the ability to secure live bids on their vehicle sale via 20-minute auctions, with participation from a network of dealer buyers."People deserve a fast, trustworthy, simple way to sell their cars and trucks," said Bryan Hunt. "A few swipes and clicks in the Driveaway app will instantly provide this opportunity to millions of Americans." PowerBand, with its partners, is building a highly disruptive global transaction platform to transform the experience of buying, selling and leasing cars and trucks for millions of vehicle owners and automotive dealers. PowerBand is also in the process of securing multi-billion-dollar credit facilities to allow the purchase and leasing of vehicles on the PowerBand platform.Recent company milestones include:An agreement with RouteOne to put the PowerBand cloud-based platform in the hands of up to 18,000 automotive dealerships in the United States and Canada.An agreement with Phoenix Capital to raise up to CDN250-million for its Canadian operations.An agreement with Citation Capital, based in London, England, to assist in the raising of further credit facilities. Citation will use its proven, international network of financial channels to raise credit facilities for PowerBand operations in the U.S., European, Australian and Asian Markets.PowerBand has strategically positioned itself in the U.S. automotive market, by acquiring a majority share of MUSA Auto Finance, LLC ("MUSA") in July, 2019. Founded in 2016, MUSA's innovative transaction platform modernized the new and pre-owned vehicle leasing experience, providing dealers and consumers with the most advanced leasing options in the industry. The technology takes applications, calculates leases, auto-decisions applications, provides approvals back to dealer partners and prefills lease contracts accurately. Approvals can occur in less than eight seconds. As a result of its proprietary technology, MUSA was awarded a contract by Tesla Motors to become a national leasing partner in 2018.About PowerBand Solutions Inc.PowerBand Solutions Inc. is a technology provider listed on the TSX Venture Exchange. The Company's cloud-based platform is revolutionizing how we buy, sell, lease, and auction vehicles. With the receipt of its exporter license and its acquisition of MUSA Auto Finance, the Company is well positioned to become a leader in the cross-border used vehicle export market, the used vehicle auction market, and the vehicle leasing market in the U.S. and Canada.For further information, please contact:Richard Goldman, VP Corporate DevelopmentP: 1-866-768-7653rgoldman@ powerbandsolutions.com FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTSThis news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the Company 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, including, without limitation, statements regarding future plans and objectives of the Company, 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.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. As a result, we cannot guarantee that any forward-looking statement will materialize and 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 at the date of this news release, and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or to revise any of the included forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as expressly required by Canadian securities law.Neither the TSXV nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is d One Indian fisherman was injured in the firing by Sri Lankan navy near Kachchatheevu Island near Sri Lanka. The fishermen were fishing with 585 boats on Wednesday when the Sri Lankan Navy fired gunshots to chase the fishermen away. The injured was identified as Jesu. He was immediately rushed to the Madurai Hospital for treatment. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Phobia can make even the strongest person weak. Have you ever felt anxious about being in confined spaces like inside a trial room or public toilet where it has restricted means of entry and exit? Then you may be suffering from Claustrophobia i.e., extreme fear of confined spaces. Claustrophobia is an anxiety disorder and affects 15% to 37% of people around the world. The word claustrophobia comes from the Latin word claustrum which means a shut in place and Greek word phobos meaning fear. A person with claustrophobia may experience mild to severe anxiety when in confined spaces such as an elevator or a crowded room. Even if you avoid confined spaces and limit your entry into such places, you may have claustrophobia. Claustrophobia particularly develops during childhood or teenage. There are some particular situations, which may put a person to experience claustrophobia like: Elevators or Lifts Trial room in shops Public toilets Subways Tunnels Aeroplanes Parking spaces Hotel rooms Car with auto-lock systems Crowded malls Automatic car washes Imaging devices like MRI scan A person may feel afraid to stay or enter into such places and may also experience severe panic when entered. They may fear losing oxygen and think that there will be some danger in such spaces. Panic attacks are the first thing a person may experience at a particular place. It has two key symptoms: fear of restriction and fear of suffocation. Fear of restriction refers to the fear of being trapped in a confined space and fear of suffocation refers to the fear of losing oxygen in the confined space. Panic attack increases the anxiety levels and in turn triggers many symptoms such as: Excessive sweating Increased heart beat Breathing faster High blood pressure Difficulty in breathing Nausea Confusion Anxiety Fear of death Urge to visit the toilet Dizziness If you experience some symptoms like panic attacks or fear of being trapped inside a particular place, then you should consult your general physician regarding this. The doctor may ask you to describe the symptoms, which you experienced and also will analyse whether you have any other type of anxiety disorders. There are certain methods to diagnose claustrophobia such as: Claustrophobia Questionnaire: It was developed in 1993 and was modified in 2001. It consists of 12 items assessing three mood dimensions such as valence: good mood, bad mood; alertness: awake, tired; calmness: calm, nervous). It determines whether the patient''s anxiety is driven by a fear of suffocation or restriction. It was developed in 1993 and was modified in 2001. It consists of 12 items assessing three mood dimensions such as valence: good mood, bad mood; alertness: awake, tired; calmness: calm, nervous). It determines whether the patient''s anxiety is driven by a fear of suffocation or restriction. Claustrophobia Scale: It was developed in 1979 and consists of 20 questions that help in assessing the anxiety levels. It tends to be an effective method of diagnosing claustrophobia. For many people thinking that their phobia is irrational and needs treatment will increase their anxiety levels even further. But phobia can only be treated by overcoming their fear by dealing with it. Psychologists suggest one or more of the following methods to treat claustrophobia: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: It is a recognized therapy for most anxiety disorders. It proves to be effective for treating disorders that occur due to misconceptions. A person with claustrophobia generally fears more by imagining that lifts are dangerous but instead through this therapy the usefulness of it will be explained and this will in turn help in combating claustrophobia. In vivo Exposure: It treats people by exposing them to the fear itself, such as making them be in confined spaces. It helps in overcoming their fear by exposing them to the same fear. It is usually done in progression from lower levels to higher levels of exposure. It treats people by exposing them to the fear itself, such as making them be in confined spaces. It helps in overcoming their fear by exposing them to the same fear. It is usually done in progression from lower levels to higher levels of exposure. Interoceptive Exposure: In this method internal sensations within a patient are recreated in a controlled environment. It is a less intense form of in vivo exposure. In this method internal sensations within a patient are recreated in a controlled environment. It is a less intense form of in vivo exposure. Medications: Beta-blockers and anti-depressants are prescribed to treat claustrophobia. They relieve symptoms of accelerated heart beats during panic attacks. Alternative medicines like homeopathic medicines are also prescribed to manage panic and anxiety. Beta-blockers and anti-depressants are prescribed to treat claustrophobia. They relieve symptoms of accelerated heart beats during panic attacks. Alternative medicines like homeopathic medicines are also prescribed to manage panic and anxiety. Breathing Exercises: Taking deep breaths, meditating and doing muscle-relaxing exercises are found to be effective in dealing with negative thoughts and anxiety. Taking deep breaths, meditating and doing muscle-relaxing exercises are found to be effective in dealing with negative thoughts and anxiety. Counter-Conditioning: In this method, specific relaxation and visualization techniques are taught to a person when experiencing phobia-related anxiety. This is also known as systematic desensitization. There are no specific methods to prevent claustrophobia. People with claustrophobia need to cope with panic attacks, which they experience in an uncomfortable situation. The panic attack usually lasts for half an hour. Therefore, one should not panic and if driving they should park the car immediately. One should not allow negative thoughts to enter their mind such as Im going to die and also should not feel that they are in danger. Instead, they have to relax and take a look at the surroundings. One must browse through the decor, look at items and talk to other people. Support from family and friends is crucial for people suffering from claustrophobia. A person getting treated to overcome a phobia may find it challenging and will need the support and care from people. Psychotherapists may ask the family members or friends to attend certain sessions to support the person seeking treatment. Health Tips These are some tips to follow if you find yourself in an uncomfortable situation: Relax yourself Focus on the surroundings Avoid deep breathing Be positive Chat with people Dont overthink Listen to music The impeachment is over, the U.S. Senate did not remove President Donald Trump from office, and all that remains for us to do is to glean something of value from an otherwise sordid charade. We can do this best by looking at the role the people play in both the drafting and interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. During the impeachment of Trump, Americans got a good view not only of the legal, moral and political relationship between the president and Congress but, more important, what the Constitution says about the role each branch must play in such a transcendental event. Impeachment, we heard, is solely the responsibility of the House of Representatives, and the president should have no role in determining who gets impeached or subpoenaed, just as it is the role of the Senate to call for witnesses and determine whether the president should be removed from office. It was all about the powers of these branches of government, but less discussion was given to the role the people play in enforcing the mandates of the Constitution, thus giving the impression this is solely the responsibility of the president and Congress. While most Americans today believe the power of government lies in the three branches, such is not the case. In fact, the Constitution not only serves as a guide for the people to keep officials honest and diligent, it gives them extraordinary powers to do so. We see this in the preamble itself it was We the people who ordained and established this Constitution so that we could form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. Yet we seem to forget the biggest responsibility we gave the president was to preserve, protect and defend those values the people sought to ordain and establish. And what happens if he does not and government becomes unresponsive to these ends? The Declaration of Independence tells us it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. But the Constitution offers a more benign answer the president can be impeached, a process that assumes the ultimate power of this government lies with the people through their representatives in Congress. But the Constitution gives all of us much more power than merely the chance to throw the rascals out of office in elections. As the people of the United States, we have the power to keep officeholders honest, and we can do this in our own communities. Every time we serve on grand juries, ordinary people can decline to indict when they feel the criminal statute is unconstitutional or there has been official malfeasance. When we serve in trial juries, for which people are selected at random from the community, citizens not only have the power but the duty and the responsibility to acquit if they feel authorities have not acted within the bounds of constitutional authority. This is regardless of whether the prosecutor and the judge determine there is no constitutional violation. In doing so, ordinary people are, in fact, determining the boundaries allowed by the Constitution. There is much talk about our government being in crisis, and on the verge of losing its democratic ideals during the Trump presidency. Yet no one seems to single out the role the people play in our system of government. As the ones who established and ordained this Constitution, we are the sovereign, and ultimately it is the people who determine what type of government we want to create. In this regard, we have to remember what Benjamin Franklin told a woman who had asked what type of government the Constitution had created: A republic, madam, if you can keep it, he said. And to do this, we have to remember what type of people James Madison envisioned Americans to be an enlightened citizenry with the ability to rise above the ill-informed popular prejudices of the day. Fernando Pinon is a retired professor of political science at San Antonio College and an adjunct professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Dissecting and ranking the largest players in organized real estate helps everyone better understand the MLS and Realtor association landscape, the shifts and where opportunities lie, said Clint Skutchan, Vice President of Association and MLSs for T3 Sixty. Real estate consulting and research firm T3 Sixty has released its rankings for U.S. MLSs along with state and local Realtor associations. Part two of five of the Real Estate Almanac, todays release includes all 565 MLSs, 51 state Realtor associations (Washington, D.C., is tracked separately) and 1,086 local Realtor associations. MLS Rankings The rankings show that the nations 20 largest MLSs (approximately 3.5 percent of all MLSs) serve over 50 percent of the nations total MLS subscribers; this number will likely go up as consolidation increases across the country and MLSs become larger. While MLSs have declined roughly 30 percent from just over 800 in early 2014 to 565 today, local pride and politics keep some smaller organizations alive. Eighty-two MLSs serve less than 100 brokers and agents, struggling to effectively serve the growing, more advanced technology needs of their users. California Regional MLS (CRMLS) continues as the nations largest MLS while becoming the first organization to break into the six-figure count at 101,502 subscribers as at 12/31/19. Strategic additions this past year have also grown Bright MLS to 90,932 subscribers and Stellar MLS to 58,447 subscribers, making them the nations second and third largest MLSs, respectively. Dissecting and ranking the largest players in organized real estate helps everyone better understand the MLS and Realtor association landscape, the shifts and where opportunities lie, said Clint Skutchan, Vice President of Association and MLSs for T3 Sixty. Boards of directors can now have much more intelligent conversations about strategy and planning. Association Rankings The Realtor association side tells a similar story: an extreme differentiation in size and offering to their memberships. The three largest state associations track with those states populations with California, Florida and Texas leading the pack and the only associations with membership counts above 100,000 Realtors. Together, these three associations have 513,127 members (brokers and agents), accounting for 36.4 percent of the nations Realtor membership. As these three states only account for 26 percent of the nations population, this stat reflects the outsized role real estate plays in those states. Approximately a fifth of the nations 1,086 local Realtor associations account for 80 percent of the total memberships. Surprisingly, California has no local Realtor associations among the nations 10 largest. Florida has three in the top 10 (Miami at No. 1, Broward, Palm Beaches and St. Lucie at No. 3 and Orlando Regional at No. 8) and Texas has two (Houston at No. 2 and MetroTex at No. 6). Many remain small; 384 local Realtor associations have less than 200 members, revealing, once again the large range in the sizes in organized real estate. For full details of all associations (state or local) as well as all MLS organizations visit http://www.realestatealmanac.com About T3 Sixty Exclusively serving the residential real estate brokerage industry, T3 Sixty provides management consulting and counseling to real estate C-level executives, organized real estate leaders, broker-owners and leaders of high-performance teams to help them grow their businesses. T3 Sixty also offers in-depth research, information and best practices with its hallmark Swanepoel Trends Report, an annual analysis of the biggest trends impacting the industry, and the Real Estate Almanac, a comprehensive examination of the U.S.s largest brokerages, franchises, networks, associations, MLSs and technology providers. More at http://www.t360.com. About the Real Estate Almanac The Real Estate Almanac is a comprehensive compendium of information about the nations most powerful people, largest companies and organizations and the most important technologies. The inaugural publication includes five components: the SP200, a ranking of the nations most powerful leaders (released each January); a ranking of the nations largest MLSs and Realtor associations (released each February); a list of the nations most notable technology vendors (released each March); a ranking of the nations largest franchisors and holding companies (released each April); and a ranking of the nations 1,000 largest brokerages in the Mega 1000 (released each May). Together, these comprise the Real Estate Almanac. More information at http://www.realestatealmanac.com. UPPSALA, Sweden, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IAR Systems, the future-proof supplier of software tools and services for embedded development, announces immediate support for the new STMicroelectronics' STM32L5 series in the complete development toolchain IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm as well as in the integrated security tool C-Trust for simplified security implementation. The STM32L5 series of MCUs are based on Arm Cortex-M33 with Arm TrustZone hardware-based security. For maximum security, ST adds the freedom to include or exclude each I/O, peripheral, or area of Flash or SRAM from TrustZone protection, allowing sensitive workloads to be fully isolated. The STM32L5 also supports active tamper detection and secure firmware installation. In addition to this protection, ST has implemented ultra-low power techniques resulting in excellent ULPMark scores, which are key measures of ultra-low power efficiency based on real-world benchmarks developed by EEMBC. Using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm, ST has achieved the scores of 370 ULPMark-CoreProfile and 54 ULPMark-PeripheralProfile at 1.8V. Developers using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm can leverage advanced code optimization techniques and power debugging functionality to make sure the application is fast, efficient and highly compact. In addition, integrated static and runtime code analysis tools ensure code quality. Working as an extension to IAR Embedded Workbench, the security tool C-Trust enables application developers to deliver secure, encrypted code. The tool includes ready-made Security Context Profiles that automatically include all the necessary security and encryption settings for providing the application with a robust protection against intellectual property theft, malware injection, counterfeiting and overproduction. C-Trust supports the core security functions of the device, including Arm TrustZone for Arm Cortex-M. "By combining ultra-low power with security, we are creating new possibilities for IoT applications," says Daniel Colonna, Microcontroller Division Marketing Director, STMicroelectronics. "Our customers can leverage the extensive functionality and innovative security integration offered by IAR Systems' tools to make sure their applications fulfill the high demands of Industrial IoT applications and other applications with requirements for reliability and security." "Joint customers of IAR Systems and ST range from some of the world's largest corporations to tens of thousands of small and mid-sized companies, trusting us to provide the tools they need when they need them," comments Anders Holmberg, Chief Strategy Officer, IAR Systems. "We will continue to leverage our strong relationship to deliver superior technology and early device support, enabling our customers to take their connected products to the next level of security as well as energy efficiency." Support for the STM32L5 family is available using IAR Embedded Workbench for Arm. Learn more at IAR Systems' booth at embedded world 2020, Feb 25-27, in Nuremberg, Germany or at www.iar.com/iar-embedded-workbench. For companies who wants to customize or create their own Security Context Profiles, IAR Systems and its sister company Secure Thingz offer the Security from Inception Suite: a unique set of tools and services for implementing and customizing security in embedded applications, ensuring companies are successful in building the right level of security for their specific needs. Learn more at www.securethingz.com . CONTACT: IAR Systems Contacts AnnaMaria Tahlen, Content & Media Relations Manager, IAR Systems Tel: +46-18-16-78-00 Email: [email protected] Tora Fridholm, CMO, IAR Systems Tel: +46-18-16-78-00 Email: [email protected] This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com https://news.cision.com/iar-systems/r/iar-systems-delivers-tools-for-ultra-low-power-security-mcus-from-stmicroelectronics,c3040549 The following files are available for download: SOURCE IAR Systems Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 01:01:51|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close LONDON, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- The future relationship between Britain and the European Union (EU) is a "different ball game" to the one the EU has with Canada due to Britain's proximity to the bloc, a key EU aide said here Wednesday. Addressing a conference at the London School of Economics (LSE), Stefaan De Rynck, senior advisor of chief EU negotiator for Brexit Michel Barnier, said Britain is too geographically close to the EU for a Canada-style trade deal without guarantees that Britain will not undercut European standards. Following the end of Britain's EU membership on Jan. 31, both sides have until the end of this year to strike a future trade deal. Britain will continue to follow EU rules during the transition period ending Dec. 31. De Rynck's comments came after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's chief Brexit negotiator, David Frost, called for a "Canada free trade agreement-type relationship" and urged the EU to drop its demand for post-Brexit regulatory alignment. "We bring to the negotiations not some clever tactical positioning but the fundamentals of what it means to be an independent country," Frost said Monday in a speech in Brussels. In response, De Rynck said: "Some in the UK now seem to want to become Canadians. But Dover is much closer to Calais than Ottawa is...Proximity matters, distance matters. What also matters is the interconnectedness between our economies." He said trade deals struck by the EU are expected to include "level playing field" commitments, adding that it is not a specific demand on Britain. "Canada and Japan are also partners on upholding standards. Every trade deal concluded has level playing field commitments," De Rynck added. Barnier said Tuesday that Frost's remarks in Brussels breached Johnson's previous commitments to the EU, saying such an offer for a Canada-style trade deal "was not on the table". Wednesday's conference at the LSE was called to look at the financial consequences of Britain's Brexit negotiations with the EU. Formal trade talks between the two sides are scheduled to start in March. The police in Mecklenburg outside Burgersfort have launched a manhunt for a 52 year old suspect Senyatse Lucas Phasha, who allegedly killed his four children at ga-Pasha village, Polokwane.The bodies of the children were found at two different locations in the area. The suspect allegedly informed a neighbor on Tuesday morning, 18 February 2020, about the murders and and also indicated to him the places where the bodies were. The police were then informed and on arrival, the lifeless bodies of three children aged 09, 07 and 05 were found in the nearby bushes and that of a 3 year old was found next to the local mountain, at about 3 kilometers from the first scene. Preliminary police investigations indicate that the suspect stopped the vehicle transporting the kids from school on Monday 17 February 2020. The driver, who apparently knows the father, stopped and let the kids go with their father. Three of the children were found with stab wounds. The youngest was found with open wounds. The children were identified as follows: Katlego Pasha, 9 year old boy Joyce Pasha, 7 year old girl Tshepo Phasha, 5 year old girl Adel Phasha, 3 year old boy. According to reports on social media, the man had taken to Facebook to accuse the childrens mother of cheating and infecting him with HIV. See his alleged post below. The Provincial Commissioner of the South African Police Service in Limpopo, Lieutenant General Nneke Ledwaba, who also visited the scene has condemned this incident in the strongest possible terms, more so as it was allegedly perpetrated by someone who was supposed to protect these victims. Share this: Larry Tesler, the computer pioneer who created the ingenious cut, copy and paste functions, passed away on Monday (local time) at the age of 74. These widely used computer features we oftentimes take for granted have made the lives of countless computer users easier over many years and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The Verge cited Gizmodo according to which Tesler, who was born in 1945 in New York, pursued his degree in Computer Science at Stanford University. It was the year 1973 when he developed the cut, copy and paste features while working at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC has been widely recognised for its initial research on graphical user interface and its usage through the means of a computer mouse. According to The Verge, Tesler was also an advocate for "modeless" computing, a concept which ensures that a computer application shouldn't have separate "modes" where input by the user results into different outputs depending on whichever mode the application is running on. Tesler also served a long stint in Apple between the years 1980 and 1997 where he contributed towards the development of numerous products such as Macintosh, QuickTime, Lisa, and the Newton tablet. Lisa and Macintosh were the first PC platforms that popularised the cut, copy and paste features, made possible chiefly due to Tesler's involvement. In the year 1993, Tesler was promoted to the position of chief scientist, a role that was also served by Steve Wozniak, The Verge quoted Gizmodo. Tesler then went on to join Stagecast, an educational software startup that was a spinoff from Apple. After working for information giants by the likes of Amazon and Yahoo -- from 2009 onwards -- he established a UX consultancy in California. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) [February 20, 2020] State Fund Launches Next Phase of Sustainability Plan with Comprehensive Energy Program Designed by ENGIE and JLL State Compensation Insurance Fund (State Fund) and ENGIE North America today announced an agreement to build solar photovoltaic (PV) panels, energy storage systems, and electric vehicle (EV) charging stations across seven different State Fund locations throughout California. ENGIE and JLL jointly designed this comprehensive program to help State Fund embark on the next phase of its broader sustainability strategy. ENGIE will install up to 11 MW of solar panels across six State Fund facilities spanning from Riverside to Redding that will generate approximately 18,000,000 kWh of clean energy annually. This energy production will offset approximately 14,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions - equivalent to taking about 2,700 cars off the road or planting about 204,000 trees each year. The energy storage systems - approx. 4,240 kWh of battery storage at four locations - will allow State Fund to store energy and avoid buying power from the electricity grid during the most expensive times of peak energy use each day. Additionally, State Fund will install a network of more than 150 Level II and Level III electric vehicle (EV) charging stations at seven locations that will be used by fleet vehicles and available to employees. State Fund's fleet currently includes eight battery electric vehicles (BEVs), three of which are new long-range BEVs that allow employees to quickly travel between State Fund locations while lowering their reliance on fossil fuels. "Increasing our efforts and investments around sustainability initiatives will bring a number of benefits to State Fund customers and employees, our surrounding communities, and California as a whole," said Andreas Acker, Executive Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer at State Fund. "This project with ENGIE and JLL is a huge step forward in our drive to reduce our use of fossil fuels, limit the load we place on local and statewide electrical grids, and improve overall air quality throughout California." This initiative is part of a broader sustainability strategy that State Fund has been rolling out for several years and will ramp up significantly over the years to come. Examples of State Fund's sustainability efforts undertaken to date include: Installation of exterior and interior LED lighting and energy efficient heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems at several locations. Installation of daylight harvesting systems at all owned buildings. Adoption of water-saving measures such as waterless or dual-flush toilets and low-flow faucets at most sites. A recent internal campaign to "ban the bottle" and a substantial reduction in plastic water bottle purchases for State Fund-hosted events. Overall, eight State Fund buildings have become Energy Star certified and State Fund has reduced the energy used in its oned buildings by 10 percent since 2016. "ENGIE is honored to have been chosen by State Fund and JLL to help develop this ground-breaking solar, storage, and EV charging solution set to support State Fund's mission serving communities across California," said Gwenaelle Avice-Huet, CEO of ENGIE North America. "We believe that demand for renewable energy programs that incorporate additional, leading-edge solutions like battery storage and EV charging represent the next chapter of sustainability impact that will also effectively help us transition to a zero-carbon future." Kyle Goehring, Executive Vice President at JLL, added, "Bringing ENGIE - known for its zero-carbon transition ambition, history of delivering successful projects, and its strong balance sheet - together with State Fund's commitment to sustainability made tremendous sense. We are committed to finding the right energy partner for our clients and helping them achieve their ambitions." The initial phases of this comprehensive energy program have already begun at some sites, and the entire project is currently planned to be completed by the end of 2020. To learn more about State Fund, visit StateFundCA.com. About State Compensation Insurance Fund Established in 1914 by the state legislature, State Fund is California's most reliable provider of workers' compensation insurance and a vital asset to California businesses. State Fund supports California's entrepreneurial spirit and plays a stabilizing role in the economy by providing fairly priced workers' compensation insurance, helping California employers keep their workplaces safe, and restoring injured workers. For more information, visit www.StateFundCA.com. About JLL JLL (NYSE: JLL) is a leading professional services firm that specializes in real estate and investment management. JLL shapes the future of real estate for a better world by using the most advanced technology to create rewarding opportunities, amazing spaces and sustainable real estate solutions for our clients, our people and our communities. JLL is a Fortune 500 company with annual revenue of $18.0 billion, operations in over 80 countries and a global workforce of more than 93,000 as of December 31, 2019. JLL is the brand name, and a registered trademark, of Jones Lang LaSalle Incorporated. For further information, visit jll.com. About ENGIE North America ENGIE North America Inc. offers a range of capabilities in the United States and Canada to help customers decarbonize, decentralize and digitalize their operations. These include comprehensive services to help customers run their facilities more efficiently and optimize energy and other resource use and expense; clean power generation; energy storage; and retail energy supply that includes renewable, demand response, and on-bill financing options. Nearly 100% of the company's power generation portfolio is low carbon or renewable. Globally, ENGIE S.A. is the largest independent power producer and energy efficiency services provider in the world, employing 160,000 people in 70 countries. For more information on ENGIE North America, please visit our LinkedIn page or Twitter feed, www.engie-na.com and www.engie.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005573/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] SPRINGFIELD Gov. J.B. Pritzker on Wednesday tied his second-year state budget proposal to the unfinished marquee policy initiative of his first year a constitutional amendment that allows the state to impose higher income tax rates on higher income earners. If voters approve that graduated income tax initiative in the Nov. 3 general election, Pritzker is asking for a roughly $1.6 billion increase in state general revenue fund spending for the upcoming fiscal year, which begins July 1. That would bring total state spending in that fund to just over $42 billion, helping to pay for a $350 million increase in K-12 education, a 5 percent increase in higher education operating funds and an increase in contributions to the states backlog of unpaid bills and unfunded pension obligations. If the constitutional amendment fails, overall state spending would increase by about $200 million from a year ago in the general fund under the governors proposal, equaling roughly $40.6 billion. In that scenario, $1.4 billion in spending authority would be held in reserve in a combination of budget cuts and withholding of new spending on state programs. Because this reserve is so large, it inevitably cuts into some of the things that we all hold most dear: increased funding for K-12 education, universities and community colleges, public safety and other key investments but as important as these investments are, we cannot responsibly spend for these priorities until we know with certainty what the states revenue picture will be, Pritzker said. To pass, the graduated tax needs approval from 60 percent of those voting on the question or the majority of those voting in the Nov. 3 election. Republican leaders in the General Assembly argued the choice between the two budgets is a false one, saying Pritzkers address was nothing more than a sales tactic for the graduated tax. The reserves hes calling for are a marketing plan to sell his (graduated tax) increase, said Senate Minority Leader Bill Brady, R-Bloomington. If those resources werent there, I dont think this is the way he would have approached the spending plan and its not a way we would approach it. Both House and Senate Republicans called for greater efficiencies and reduced state spending. They also said $656 million in increased base revenue projections for the fiscal year mean the level of state investment in programs from a year ago can be maintained without new tax revenues. House GOP Leader Jim Durkin, of Western Springs, pointed to a surplus of roughly $180 million from the current years operating budget as a sign of the effectiveness of bipartisan budgeting. We have the money to be able to fulfill our obligations in every need for the state of Illinois, Durkin said in a news conference. So, to say that you go on two different tracks and say, Well, you know, if you dont pass a constitutional amendment, were going to have a world of hurt thats going to be delivered upon state employees, and also state retirees as well, and health care providers I just felt that thats a wrong approach. If the graduated tax passes, the new rates would effectively increase the tax burden on individuals and couples making more than $250,000 while keeping it level or lowering it modestly for all others. The tax increase would go into effect Jan. 1, 2021, meaning half of the budget year, which runs from July 1 to June 30. Republicans who oppose the graduated tax say no new revenues are needed and the rates could be changed to raise taxes on more Illinoisans in future budget years. While the governors office expects annual revenues from the tax to be $3.6 billion once it is in effect for a full year, budget officials said Wednesday they can expect only $1.4 billion in revenue from payroll withholdings for fiscal year 2021. The proposed budget with or without graduated tax revenues includes the full $8.6 billion general revenue fund contribution to the states pension fund that is mandated by law. That would be about 20 percent of all general fund spending, and another $100 million would be dedicated for that purpose if the graduated tax passes. Also with or without the graduated tax, funding for the Department of Children and Family Services would increase by 20 percent, or about $147 million, in the governors proposal. We will increase (DCFS) personnel numbers by nearly 150 new staff thats on top of the 300 workers we added over the last year. This would represent an 11 percent staffing increase over the past two years, Pritzker said. Also independent of the graduated taxs success is a proposed $50 million increase to Monetary Award Program grants that help students with financial need afford college, as well as other added investments in early childhood education and other social service programs. If the graduated tax fails, a 5 percent increase for public universities and community college operating grants would be withheld, as would $40 million in categorical funding for school districts, $42 million in Medicaid provider rate increases, $40 million in rate increases for the senior-based community care program and $3.5 million in costs for another Illinois State Police cadet class. For K-12 education, a state law passed in 2017 sets a target of $350 million of added funding for an evidence-based distribution formula each year. With graduated tax revenues, that number would be met. Without, the proposed budget would only include an added $200 million in K-12 spending. Local governments would see funding from sales and income taxes decrease by 5 percent, bringing total proration of that funding program to 10 percent. A budget without the graduated tax would also withhold $400 million in contributions to state employee group health insurance, put off payments of $300 million in corporate income tax refunds for the fiscal year and cut $30 million in funding for Open Space Land Acquisition and Development grants. Another $100 million in transit cost expenditures would be shifted from the general revenue fund to the road fund. Pritzker also noted the budget included $45 million in revenue from the legalization of adult-use marijuana. Thats about 45 percent of the tax revenue from the program, with the remainder going to reinvestment programs in communities adversely impacted by the war on drugs as well as mental health and drug conviction expungement programs. Republican legislative leaders said they would push to separate the budget from any proposed graduated tax revenues, however. I think my caucus just wants to see a balanced budget, Brady said. We have to live within our means. We believe we can do that and still meet educational needs, child safety needs, pension responsibilities and some other needs that are out there. New Delhi: Vinay Sharma, one of the four death-row prisoners in Nirbhaya case, on Thursday, approached a Delhi court with a fresh request to be treated at East Delhis Institute of Human Behaviour and Allied Sciences for mental illness, insanity, and schizophrenia. The Delhi court sought response from Tihar jail authorities. Additional session judge Dharmender Rana directed the prison authorities to file its reply on the plea by Vinay Kumar Sharma on Saturday. Earlier, Vinay had injured himself by banging his head against a wall of his cell in Tihar jail. According to prison officials, the incident took place in jail number 3 on Sunday afternoon and he got some minor injuries and was treated inside the prison premises. According to prison officials, Vinay had briefly stopped eating. He is irritable in nature and acts different from the other three convicts. His nature is different from the other three, they said. Sharma got hurt inside his cell after he banged his head against a wall on Sunday afternoon. While he was at it, security personnel saw him, stopped him immediately, and called the doctors, a senior jail official said. A Delhi court, on Monday, ordered that Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Kumar Sharma (26), and Akshay Kumar (31), the four convicts in the Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case, be hanged at 6.00 am on March 3. The court was informed that Vinay was on hunger strike in Tihar jail but he later broke the strike. It directed the jail superintendent to take appropriate care of Vinay as per law. Vinays lawyer had told the court that the convict was assaulted in jail and has head injuries, adding that he was suffering from acute mental illness and hence the death sentence cannot be carried out. The court rejected the ground of mental illness, saying that the issue was raised before the apex court and it rejected the plea on the basis of the report submitted by doctors, who said the convict was psychologically well adjusted and the general condition of the petitioner is stable. According to sources, with the date of execution approaching, the mental health of the four convicts is being regularly checked by doctors. They all are being kept in jail number 3 in separate cells and they are being monitored round the clock, the senior jail official said. Death warrants were earlier issued on January 7 and the execution was later deferred twiceon January 17 and January 31. Beijing Capital International Airport Company Limited (HKG:694), which is in the infrastructure business, and is based in China, received a lot of attention from a substantial price movement on the SEHK over the last few months, increasing to HK$7.87 at one point, and dropping to the lows of HK$6.28. 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 Beijing Capital International Airport's current trading price of HK$6.79 reflective of the actual value of the mid-cap? Or is it currently undervalued, providing us with the opportunity to buy? Lets take a look at Beijing Capital International Airports 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 Beijing Capital International Airport What's the opportunity in Beijing Capital International Airport? The stock seems fairly valued at the moment according to my relative valuation model. Ive used the price-to-earnings ratio in this instance because theres not enough visibility to forecast its cash flows. The stocks ratio of 9.9x is currently trading slightly above its industry peers ratio of 8.05x, which means if you buy Beijing Capital International Airport today, youd be paying a relatively fair price for it. And if you believe Beijing Capital International Airport should be trading in this range, then there isnt really any room for the share price grow beyond what its currently trading. Although, there may be an opportunity to buy in the future. This is because Beijing Capital International Airports beta (a measure of share price volatility) is high, meaning its price movements will be exaggerated relative to the rest of the market. If the market is bearish, the companys shares will likely fall by more than the rest of the market, providing a prime buying opportunity. Story continues Can we expect growth from Beijing Capital International Airport? SEHK:694 Past and Future Earnings, February 20th 2020 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. Beijing Capital International Airports earnings over the next few years are expected to double, indicating a very optimistic future ahead. This should lead to stronger cash flows, feeding into a higher share value. What this means for you: Are you a shareholder? It seems like the market has already priced in 694s positive outlook, with shares trading around its fair value. However, there are also other important factors which we havent considered today, such as the financial strength of the company. Have these factors changed since the last time you looked at 694? Will you have enough confidence to invest in the company should the price drop below its fair value? Are you a potential investor? If youve been keeping tabs on 694, now may not be the most optimal time to buy, given it is trading around its fair value. However, the optimistic forecast is encouraging for 694, which means its worth further examining other factors such as the strength of its balance sheet, 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 Beijing Capital International Airport. You can find everything you need to know about Beijing Capital International Airport in the latest infographic research report. If you are no longer interested in Beijing Capital International Airport, you can use our free platform to see my list of over 50 other stocks with a high growth potential. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. European Parliament Seeks Aligned EU-UK Rules by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels 20 February 2020 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) want the EU and UK to reach an ambitious new free trade agreement, but have stressed that there must be a "level playing field." On February 12, the European Parliament adopted a resolution providing MEPs' initial input to the negotiations on a new EU-UK partnership after the Brexit transition period. The text was adopted by 543 votes to 39, with 69 abstentions. Parliament said that the association agreement should be as deep as possible, and based on three main pillars: an economic partnership, a foreign affairs partnership, and specific sectoral issues. MEPs emphasized that a non-EU country cannot enjoy the same rights as a member state and that the integrity of the single market and the customs union must be preserved at all times. Regarding the negotiation of a new trade agreement, MEPs broadly agreed with the lines along which the Commission has proposed to proceed. The Commission has said that the "envisaged partnership should include an ambitious, wide-ranging, and balanced economic partnership," which should "aim at establishing a free trade area ensuring no tariffs, fees [or] or charges... provided that a level playing field is ensured through robust commitments." MEPs said that given the size of the UK's economy and its proximity to the EU, future competition with the EU must be kept open and fair through a "level playing field." This would entail guarantees for equal rules on tax, state aid, consumer protection, social, environmental, and climate matters. According to MPs, to maintain quota-free, tariff-free trade relations, the British Government should pledge to update its rules on competition, labor standards, and environmental protection. The intention should be to secure "dynamic alignment" of EU-UK laws. MEPs also made clear that to gain Parliament's consent, any EU-UK free trade agreement must be conditional on a prior agreement on fisheries being reached by June 2020. If the UK does not comply with EU laws and standards, the Commission should evaluate possible quotas and tariffs for the most sensitive sectors. Under the transition period, EU law will continue to apply to the UK until at least December 31, 2020. The transition period can be extended if a decision is made on this issue by July 1, 2020. Parliament's resolution is based on the European Commission's draft negotiating directives, which were published on February 3. These directives need to be signed off by the 27 EU member states' representatives in the Council, which is expected to happen on February 25. CHANDIGARH: Chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh announced in the Vidhan Sabha on Thursday that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) petition before the Supreme Court, challenging an earlier order of the Punjab and Haryana high court that had upheld the notification of the Punjab government to withdraw the investigation in the Behbal Kalan and Bargari sacrilege cases from the central probe agency, has been dismissed. Making the announcement on the floor of House on the opening day of the budget session, Capt Amarinder Singh said, Now the cases will be investigated by the Punjab Police only. Earlier, the CBI had challenged the legality of the state governments September 2019 notification to withdraw the three sacrilege-related violence cases from it in the high court but it had ruled that the chain of events showed that the same were inextricably linked and thus it did not feel the need to interfere in the decision of the state government to withdraw investigation from the CBI or to set aside the consequent notifications. New Delhi, Feb 20 : India on Thursday congratulated Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani on his re-election following the announcement of final results of the presidential elections. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan announced on Tuesday that Ghani won 50.64 per cent of the vote against Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, who secured 39.52 per cent of votes during the election on September 28 last year. However, Abdullah has contested the final results and vowed to form his own parallel government. In a statement issued on Thursday, Ministry of External Affairs said, "India supports the democratic aspirations of the people of Afghanistan and remains committed to continue to work with the new Government." Without referring to the ongoing US-Taliban peace talks, the government also reiterated that it will strive towards strengthening India-Afghanistan bilateral strategic partnership "in fighting the scourge of externally sponsored terrorism and for an enduring and inclusive national peace and reconciliation which is Afghan led, Afghan owned and Afghan controlled." The Ministry said it hoped that Ghani's new Government and all political leaders in Afghanistan would work to strengthen national unity, promote inclusivity and protect the rights and interests of all sections of society. by Melynda Fuller , February 20, 2020 is set to commemorate the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.s I Have a Dream speech through a high-tech immersive project and special issue. Immersive project The March blends VR, AI, film-production processes and machine-learning techniques to bring Kings speech and the events in Washington to life. The project was co-created by Times Mia Tramz and immersive storyteller Alton Glass. Viola Davis served as executive producer and narrator. Kings likeness and the events of the march were created with support from Intellectual Properties Management, Inc., licensor of his estate, and Times journalism. Work on The March began three years ago. Times Patrick Lucas Austin wrote of The March: When work on the project began, a big question needed answering. Was the existing technology capable of accomplishing the projects goals not just creating a stunningly realistic digital human, but doing so in a way that met the standards demanded by the subject matter?... Digital life after death has raised ethical questions before, especially when figures have been used in ways that seemed out of keeping with their real inspirations. advertisement advertisement Austin added the timeline of the day was compressed for The March, but Kings gestures were based on research to be as true to life as possible. Digitally restored audio, including the entirety of Kings 17-minute address, accompanies the project and will be re-released to audiences from Motown Records. The March debuts at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago on February 28. Times special issue focuses on both the March on Washington and the state of equality in the U.S. today. Time EIC and CEO Edward Falsenthal wrote of the issue, Our hope is that it will not only change the way we see history, but also help awaken in all of us an understanding of the power of our own voice to have a positive impact on the world. The issue features a cover image created from a historically-precise 3-D rendering of King designed by artist Hank Willis Thomas and pieces by Gabrielle Union and Dwayne Wade, John Lewis Janet Mock ands editorial staff, among others. An ineffective outcome seems to be written into the project because it glosses over the ground realities and betrays short-sightedness and ignorance of the political canvas on which the CAA law in reaction to which Shaheen Bagh has sprung has been inscribed. (Photo: G.N. JHA) While providing its good offices to deal with the subject of the peaceful Shaheen Bagh protest which has become politically complex on account of the Union governments obduracy and naming three well-intentioned interlocutors, the Supreme Court has just been lazily liberal. Its attitude can only bring comfort to the ruling establishment, though this may not be by design. An ineffective outcome seems to be written into the project because it glosses over the ground realities and betrays short-sightedness and ignorance of the political canvas on which the CAA law in reaction to which Shaheen Bagh has sprung has been inscribed. The initiative of the highest court appears not to be aimed at bringing any comfort to the thousands of poor slum women who have set a record by being on a street protest for nearly 70 days now, right through the coldest winter New Delhi has known in 117 years, offering the world a striking example of a satyagraha of a truly Gandhian dimension in these toxic times characterised by poisonous policies calculated to foster hate. The Supreme Court took it upon itself to reiterate what every child knows that the right to protest peacefully without causing inconvenience to others is a given in a democracy. The learned judges pointed out that this right had to be upheld. If this is indeed the pedantic aspect of the judicial pronouncement, the want of sensitivity revealed in the judges invitation to the protesters to go choose another site and return the road they are occupying to the normal flow of traffic is dismaying. Once the traffic angle the so-called Shaheen Bagh effect on road traffic in one of the more crowded parts of the national capital that connects to Noida in UP is understood in the light of physical reality and topography, it is easy enough to see that it is sheer establishment propaganda disseminated through newspapers, television channels, the social media, and above all word of mouth, to such a degree that everyone the Supreme Court not excluded accepts it as true. Before the Supreme Court felt compelled to ask the protesters to choose another site if they wished to continue protesting, it could have done itself no disservice if it had called for a report on the geography of Shaheen Bagh and adjoining areas and a before-and-after image of the vehicular flow. If it didnt do so, it could have at least asked the three interlocutors two of them eminent lawyers and the third a retired civil servant who has also held a constitutional position to acquaint themselves with the forensics, as it were, before they commenced to hold talks with the protesters. Anyone who has visited the protest site at Shaheen Bagh can see that it is not the protesters who have blocked traffic, causing snarls all over southeast Delhi which links to UP as well as to Faridabad in Haryana, but the Delhi police, and in imitation of the Delhi police, the UP police. Indeed, the police in Noida (UP Police) were reported in the media as saying that they would lift their road barricade the minute the Delhi police did so on the Shaheen Bagh side. It is pretty devious of the Union home ministry, which controls the Delhi police, that it kept mum about all this although Union home minister Amit Shah ran the BJPs campaign in the recent election for New Delhis Assembly in no small measure on the Shaheen Bagh issue, with his senior colleagues heaping calumny on the protesters. It is also surprising that the Aam Aadmi Party government in Delhi sat quiet about this aspect. None of this, of course, absolves the Supreme Court of its own responsibility to look at the facts with dispassion. Other than the geography and traffic aspects, the class aspect of Shaheen Bagh also needs to be looked at before making observations of a seemingly liberal kind. The thousands of Muslim women who have sat at their protest site through day and night for over two months are from the poorest strata of society. They are not the kind who can afford bus or metro rail tickets on an everyday basis for weeks on end and this is what they seem to wish to do to go to another place to protest, and then return home, day after day. Even if that were somehow imaginable, the determined women would not be able to stay put at night at an alternative site. Toilet breaks are needed, which their homes offer. Evidently, the learned judges overlooked these human aspects. It is more than evident that the protesting women are at Shaheen Bagh because they live right there. Their protest was not possible anywhere else even a place right next door. To ask them to move is to ask them to abandon their protest. In effect, such a stance disregards their right to protest peacefully. A show of greater sensitivity towards the poorer sections of society, especially on a matter of basic rights, might have been expected from the judges. The interlocutors, who have apparently cast themselves in the part of do-gooders, too appear not to have considered the human and class aspects. In light of Prime Minister Narendra Modis recent assertion that he had declined to succumb to pressures to go back on Article 370 (Kashmirs autonomy) and CAA (which brings in the religious dimension to the concept of Indian citizenship, and hence the concept of India), the women of Shaheen Bagh evidently have a long struggle ahead. The Narendra Modi government is not known for its regard of democratic sensitivities. If it did, a law like CAA would not have been brought. It clear aim is to discomfit Indias Muslim community, make them feel less wanted, and sow communal discord with a view to sending out the false message that so-called Hindu sentiments are being placed on a higher pedestal. This is the dog-whistle of setting up a Hindu desh or country to prepare for the higher political goal of a Hindu Rashtra, an ideological category which will need a vastly different Constitution from the one that grew out of the freedom movement. In this climate, no institution, not least the Supreme Court, should even indirectly curb the right to speak truth to power. WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Small Business Administration announced today the launch of its 17-state SBIR Road Tour. The Road Tour will stop at cities in the Southeast, Midwest, Rockies and the Central South. It will connect entrepreneurs working on advanced technology to one of the country's largest source of early stage funding the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. "SBA is focused on helping small businesses grow and expand. The $4 billion in federal early stage funding is often a critical piece to maturing an entrepreneur's research idea into a product or service. The Road Tours bring the federal managers to the entrepreneur and target areas and individuals that are underrepresented when it comes to receiving federal R&D funding," said SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza. "This tour reflects our continued commitment to ensure those innovators are aware of SBIR/STTR program resources." This will be the sixth year of the SBIR Road Tour, led by the SBA's Office of Investment and Innovation together with 11 participating federal agencies. NATIONAL SBIR ROAD TOUR SCHEDULE 2020: The Southeast Tour will run from April 13-17, with stops in Richmond, Virginia; Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina; Columbia, South Carolina; and Atlanta/Athens, Georgia. The Midwest Tour will run from June 1-5, with stops in Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Bloomington, Indiana. The Rockies Tour will run from August 10-14, with stops in Bozeman, Montana; Idaho Falls, Idaho; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Laramie, Wyoming. Finally, the Central Southern Tour will run from November 2-6, with stops in Jackson, Mississippi; Shreveport, Louisiana; Dallas, Texas; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Fayetteville, Arkansas. Small technology firms, innovators, scientists or researchers seeking more information on the SBIR Road Tour, including a schedule of stops and participating agencies should visit: https://www.sbirroadtour.com/. For more information about SBIR/STTR programs, please visit https://www.sbir.gov/ or follow us on Twitter. About SBIR/STTR SBA coordinates the SBIR/STTR programs, also known as America's Seed Fund, which each year provides more than $3.7 billion in early stage seed capital totaling over 5,000 awards to small businesses. Eleven participating federal government agencies announce funding opportunities as either grants or contracts to address their research and development needs. Companies supported by the SBIR/STTR programs often generate some of the most important breakthroughs each year in the U.S. Additional information about the programs, as well as past and current topics can be found at www.sbir.gov. About the U.S. Small Business Administration The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 and is a Cabinet-level agency of the federal government to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns, to preserve free competitive enterprise and to maintain and strengthen the overall economy of our nation. The SBA helps Americans start, build and grow businesses, and recover from disasters. Through an extensive network of field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations, the SBA delivers its services to people throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam. To learn more about SBA, visit www.sba.gov . Contact: [email protected] (202) 401-0035 Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs & Instagram Release Number: 20-20 SOURCE U.S. Small Business Administration Related Links http://www.sba.gov Dinh Minh Nhat, 57, dropped religion to spread hope, provide refuge to abandoned children in the Central Highlands. Hearing the sound of the familiar motorbike, dozens of children rushed to welcome their father Nhat. "They gave me clothes, and I picked this for you," one child said while handing him a shirt. Stemming from numerous areas across Gia Lai Province in the Central Highlands, the adopted children now reside at a house in Chu Se District. "Nhat is raising 106 children, none of them illiterate," said Nguyen Van Duong, leader of Hlop Commune, where Nhat and his big family are based. Nhat and 11-month-old Dinh Thien Duc, abandoned at a farm after birth. Photo by VnExpress/Phan Diep. The narrative commenced in 2005 when Nhat left Ho Chi Minh City for Hlop Commune to work as a priest, traversing forested areas to better learn local customs and engage with the community. During one trip he witnessed a crying infant at an ethnic Gia Rai funeral lying next to his dead mother. Knowing the child would be buried with his mother as a local custom, Nhat had to supply the village patriarch with a pig in exchange for saving the poor baby. "I just wanted to save the child," Nhat said, adding the thought of raising the infant never crossed his mind at the time. Back home, the inexperienced priest struggled to care for his adopted son, visiting many villagers asking for milk. Rahlan H' Un (L), 6, and Dinh Thi Thuy Tram, 1. Tram was adopted when she was 4 months old after her mother passed away, leaving her grandparents unable to afford bringing her up. Photo by VnExpress/Phan Diep Fearing bad luck, most local women refused to share their milk, with only a small number adding some to a bowl for the crying infant. "Some breastfed, but fearing the hungry baby would deplete their supply, they stopped sharing their milk," Nhat recalled. Developing a strong connection with the child, Nhat decided to become his father, naming the boy Dinh Hong Phuc. As a result, the priest had to hang up his cloak. Three years later, hearing a couple had passed away leaving five children alone in Chu Puh District, Nhat drove the 40 kilometers through the forest to save the destitute siblings. To bring up his sons and daughters, the former priest resorted to coffee cultivation, amongst other jobs. In 2018, Nhat was forced to leave some of his children at home to work the night shift at a local hospital, only bringing the youngest. Seeing their adopted father illtreated at the hospital, the children eventually advised him to quit. While growing older, many of his kids started following Nhat around the farm to experience the true value of honest labor. Besides, Nhat had to learn the local Gia Rai dialect to communicate with his adoptees, wanting them to remember both their roots and mother tongue. After 14 years, he is now proud of the fact his spelling beats theirs. "You are a member of the Gia Rai. Even though you struggle with the language, the blood of the forest runs through your body," Nhat once told his son Hong Phuc. Reflecting on his most challenging charge, Nhat mentioned Hiep, abandoned by his parents at six months, and adopted by a childless couple. Hoping his son could benefit from a real family, Nhat only asked to visit Hiep regularly and eventually noticed signs of domestic abuse. Hiep, currently 5 years old and back with Nhat, hardly ever smiles. 5-month-old Dinh Duc was left at a church before being adopted. Photo by VnExpress/Phan Diep. "Now, no matter what happens, I will keep my children by my side. It will be hard, but we have love," the altruist said. Nhats large family now has a decent house to live in, with beds and blankets for everyone. On weekdays, they eat dried fish and vegetable soup, with meat only served at weekends. Some children, now grown, help their father with housework and taking care of their younger siblings. Last year, as one of his kids graduated from university, Nhat was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Suffering from frequent bouts of fainting, the children started worrying about their father. "I will start working after high school and not attend expensive university to help father buy milk," said HRa, 18. H'Ra and her siblings rarely nap after lunch, instead gathering talk about their fathers health, and rubbing his head to reduce the pain. Qatar Airways announced that it has signed a codeshare agreement with Bulgaria Air. Sales will start from February 18 onwards with the first codeshare flights to operate from 2 March. The agreement will provide Bulgaria Air passengers with a seamless connection to destinations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Qatar Airways passengers will benefit from access to two new destinations in Bulgaria: Varna and Burgas. Qatar Airways Group Chief Executive, Akbar Al Baker, said: This agreement with Bulgaria Air follows other recent partnership announcements we have made with airlines across the world, demonstrating our commitment to working with our peers to provide passengers seamless connectivity and unrivalled service. Bulgaria Air Chief Executive Officer, Hristo Todorov, said: It is a great pleasure for Bulgaria Air to add Qatar Airways to its partnership network, which is undoubtedly one of the most respected and prestigious airlines in the world. We are delighted that they have chosen us as a partner enabling our passengers to travel quickly and conveniently to over 170 destinations with Qatar Airways. This cooperation is only a part of our long-term development strategy and we are happy to welcome the passengers of Qatar Airways onboard our aircraft. Qatar Airways first launched services to Sofia, Bulgaria on 22 September 2011 beginning with a four-times-weekly service. In the years since, due to the strong demand by travellers, the service has grown to 14 weekly flights. A multiple award-winning airline, Qatar Airways was named Worlds Best Airline by the 2019 World Airline Awards, managed by the international air transport rating organization Skytrax. It was also named Best Airline in the Middle East, Worlds Best Business Class, and Best Business Class Seat, in recognition of its ground-breaking Business Class experience, Qsuite. It is the only airline to have been awarded the coveted Skytrax Airline of the Year title five times. Qatar Airways currently operates a modern fleet of more than 250 aircraft via its hub, Hamad International Airport (HIA), to more than 170 destinations worldwide. The worlds fastest-growing airline will add Osaka, Japan; Santorini, Greece; Dubrovnik, Croatia; Almaty and Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan; Accra, Ghana; Cebu, Philippines; Lyon, France; Trabzon, Turkey; Siem Reap, Cambodia and Luanda, Angola to its extensive network in 2020. Bulgaria Air is the largest Bulgarian airline and national carrier of the Republic of Bulgaria. It performs direct flights to 25 cities in Europe, including domestic flights to Varna and Bourgas. In 2019, the airline won the Most Preferred Airline in the Bulgarian Market at the annual Sky Awards. The national carrier was also honoured in two other categories Most Preferred Airline for Short and Medium flights to/from Bulgaria and Most Preferred Airline by the Professionals. 3.7k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard Trump wants to make sure that the intelligence community cant blow the whistle on him in 2020, so he picked a loyalist to act as his interim Intelligence Director. The New York Times reported: President Trump on Wednesday named Richard Grenell, a vocal loyalist who quickly antagonized the German establishment as the American ambassador there, to be the acting director of national intelligence overseeing the nations 17 spy agencies. By choosing Mr. Grenell, who has little experience in intelligence or in running a large bureaucracy, the president signaled that he wants a trusted, aggressive leader atop an intelligence community that he has long viewed with suspicion and at times gone to war against. This all should sound very familiar. Trump was worried about getting Senate confirmation for his loyalist, so he is bypassing the Senate by installing his choice as interim director. It is a trick that Trump has used frequently throughout his first term. There is a similar pattern unfolding across the Executive Branch. Trump is taking over anything that could potentially limit him or stop him from cheating in the 2020 election. Grenell isnt there to run the bureaucracy. He was installed to make sure that nothing stands in Trumps way when it comes to violating the law and cheating to win. Trump has found his Barr to corrupt the intel community in Richard Grenell. For more discussion about this story join our Rachel Maddow and MSNBC group. Follow Jason Easley on Facebook Roger Stone was sentenced to three years and four months in prison on Thursday for lying to Congress, witness tampering, and obstruction of an official proceeding related to his efforts to obstruct a congressional inquiry into 2016 election interference by Russia, and, in the words of the judge presiding over the case, covering up for Donald Trump. The seemingly typical sentence comes after the cases new Justice Department attorney, appointed after the previous attorneys withdrew following interference from Attorney General William Barr, seemed to acknowledge that said attorneys harsher sentencing guidelines were correct. Advertisement Barr faced calls for his impeachment after he intervened in the case last week. He advocated for reducing the initial sentencing recommendation for the friend and ally of Trump, which led to the withdrawal of the entire prosecution team and the resignation of one attorney. On Thursday, one of the replacement prosecutors said that at least one of the original sentencing enhancementsover a violent threat Stone made to a witness, one part of the calculation that led to the original recommendation of seven to nine yearsshould still apply. Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed on that particular sentencing enhancement but also felt the sentencing guidelines were inflated and opted for a 40-month sentence and $20,000 fine. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Trumps interference in the casehe maligned the judge, jury, and prosecution team and called the original sentencing recommendation unfaircoincided with Barrs own efforts to lower the sentence and resulted in calls for Barr to resign or be impeached. Barr condemned the presidents tweets about the case and said that Trumps efforts to influence politically charged DOJ investigations made it harder for him to do his job, even as his DOJ announced last week a series of moves in line with Trumps personal wishes. Advertisement Advertisement Prosecutors in the case argued successfully that Stones motive in lying to Congress and threatening his friend Randy Credico was to protect Trump from political embarrassment. Stone was convicted in November after he sought to hide information regarding efforts to provide a back channel to the Trump campaign with WikiLeaks Julian Assange, who released a treasure trove of emails on Democratic officials that were hacked by Russia. Judge Amy Berman Jackson mentioned this in sentencing. He was not prosecuted, as some have claimed, for standing up for the president, she said, according to Voxs Andrew Prokop. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president. The defense team argued at trial that even if Stone had lied to Congress about his efforts to secure damaging information on Hillary Clinton from WikiLeaks and provide it to the Trump campaign, it didnt matter, repeatedly saying, So what. Advertisement Advertisement Jackson was particularly harsh to this line of defense. The truth still exists. The truth still matters, Jackson said, echoing a line from the prosecutions closing statements. Roger Stones insistence that it doesnt [poses] a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the very foundation of our democracy, she added. She also dismantled Trumps arguments that the case was somehow politically motivated. Advertisement Advertisement There was nothing unfair, phony, or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution, she said, according to Prokop Finally, Jackson said she would not favor or punish Stone for his political connections. Roger Stone will not be sentenced for who his friends are, or who his enemies are, she said. Just prior to sentencing, Trump again tweeted about Stone, accusing his political enemies of committing similar crimes. Trump has declined to say whether a pardon might be in line for Stone but has danced around the issue in press statements. On Tuesday, Trump pardoned a group of white collar criminals he knows socially, perhaps signaling what is to come next for Stone. When I saw the job post, I hesitated. Like many listings on my schools alumni Facebook page, this one was prefaced with a warning: Not Journalism. For such jobs, former students who could code or produce audio were often in demand. This one preferred someone with a sturdy set of legs. Ken Auletta, a respected journalist for the New Yorker, was looking for someone to stand in line for him at the Harvey Weinstein trial. Auletta is writing a book about Weinstein, so it was imperative that he attend the trialbut the New York County Criminal Court at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan holds just 120 people, and around 200 journalists from around the world had registered to attend. Auletta had a solution: he would pay someone from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism twenty dollars per hour to stand in for him, starting at 5:00 or 6:00 AM. Before 8:00 AM, he would show up, claim the spot, and enter the courthouse. Not Journalism, indeed. I emailed him anyway. Auletta responded on Christmas Eve: First come, first hired. Deal. Either I was a go-getter or I was the only one who had answered. No matter. I agreed to the terms, and we exchanged info. My first day was January 6th. ICYMI: The devil in Details The commute from my home to Centre Street was a little more than an hour. At 6:00 AM, twenty people were already in line. It was cold; I had brought a book to read, but my fingers quickly froze so I resigned myself to stretching my legs and chatting about the case with the people next to me. Eventually, at 7:45 AM, Auletta showed up to take my place. He wore slacks and a dark wool coat, cutting a more refined figure than the sea of down jackets and jeans waiting in line. He grasped my wrist and asked how I was doing. I said I was ok, though I was barely awake. I was on my way soon after. Sign up for CJR 's daily email Later that day, I came home to a deluge of posts on Twitter and Facebook. Though Aulettas listing had come out the previous month, it was getting attention because of the start of the trial. Students and alums of the journalism school considered the offer insulting. How could Auletta even think of asking such a thing, and how could the school allow the offer to be advertised? People believed it was lazy on Aulettas part, or that it held students in low esteem. I was surprised at the intensity of the criticism. I messaged a former classmate and close friend and asked her what she thought. Other than the money, do you think its worth it? she asked. She reasoned that anyone who accepted could theoretically report on the trial themselves, for their own byline. True, I replied, but I have a full-time, salaried job as a journalist for the Asahi Shimbun. The paper isnt covering the Weinstein trial, and I dont have time to do it freelance. The pay in journalism being what it is, $40 to $60 a day for merely standing in line sounded like a good deal. After the first day, the online squabble died down, but some of my fellow reporters had noticed me. Youre the one waiting in line, said a woman at the front of the line, her eyes wide. The whole thing was being blown out of proportion, she thought. At least one of the other reporters in line was doing the same thing I was. BuzzFeed had posted a similar ad to Aulettas on the Facebook pages of the Columbia and Craig Newmark schools of journalism. The terms of the BuzzFeed job were admittedly better: youd also have a chance at a byline. Auletta, meanwhile, offered cash and a chance to chat. People who sign up for this work would be engaged with Ken and can certainly talk to him about the case, but thats about as close to journalism as this would likely get, the post read. Auletta, for his part, didnt understand what the problem was. Broadcast networks and large institutions, he noted, usually send interns to stand in line for journalists; the only difference in his case was that he paid me out of pocket. How are you being exploited? Im paying you money! You choose to do it or not, he told me. You chose to do it. God bless you! I mean, I think its kind of silly. The people criticizing Auletta saw the situation as an encapsulation of everything wrong with the old ways in media: a successful, well-off writer who had made his bones decades before was using me, a young journalist, as day labor. Still, Auletta is a nice and personable man. I stood in line for him on and off for two weeks, until January 16th. He paid according to our agreement, and on time. Thats all that mattered to me. The people who complained that the job reeked of elitismthe idea that a New Yorker reporters Midas touch would graze me with greatnessmissed out on something else. I didnt reach out to Auletta so that I could network with him; I can do that on my own. In an industry that emphasizes the importance of journalism as a craft and as a callingand is simultaneously hemorrhaging jobsit felt refreshing to do something that was clearly and simply transactional. Many journalists work side gigs to make rent. What was so different about this? My friend who disapproved of the job told me that this wasnt what I went to J-school for. I dont disagree. When I was in school, I would never have accepted this jobbut not because I thought it was insulting. There was simply no time. I barely got enough sleep just making sure my head was above water, and my classmates were no different. At the time, my professors told me to never devalue myself. They taught us how much to accept, and not, in the way of writing fees. But what does this mean now, in the workforce? After J-school, a friend of mine struggled to feed himself. Others got lost in freelance purgatory, unable to land full-time positions. I consider myself lucky. I work full time on staff at a paper, with all the standard benefits. Yet the Asahi Shimbun ceased publishing their US edition this past September. The industry is in crisis. Its hard to break in and its even harder to make a living, and for some, Aulettas ad triggered these long-simmering frustrations. But the feeling that I am devaluing myself doesnt come from standing in lineits always there. RECENTLY: Glenn Greenwald, and the dumbwaiter defense Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today Eddy Martinez is a 2017 graduate of the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY. He is a staff reporter for the Asahi Shimbuns New York bureau, and a freelance writer. TORONTO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - Retained executive search firm Caldwell (TSX: CWL) reported that at its Annual Meeting of shareholders on February 19, 2020 there were 84 shareholders voting by proxy and in total, holding 5,296,116 voting common shares, representing 25.96% of the total number of Voting Common Shares outstanding. Each of the directors listed as nominees in the management proxy circular dated January 9, 2020 were elected directors of the Corporation until the next Annual Meeting. The results of the vote for the election of directors and reconfirmation of the shareholder rights plan are as follows: 1. Election of Directors - Elected Each of the directors listed as nominees in the management proxy circular dated January 9, 2020 were elected directors of the Corporation until the next Annual Meeting. The vote was conducted by a show of hands. Voted for Percentage* Withheld from Voting Percentage* Paul R. Daoust 99.87% 0.13% Darcy D. Morris 99.78% 0.22% Elias Vamvakas 98.99% 1.01% John N. Wallace 98.84% 1.16% Kathryn A. Welsh 99.83% 0.17% John Young 99.90% 0.10% 2. Appointment of Auditors - Appointed Voted for Percentage Withheld from Voting Percentage* The shareholders appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP as auditors of the Corporation and authorized the directors of the Corporation to fix the remuneration of the auditors. The vote was conducted by a show of hands. 99.78% 0.22% 3. Reconfirmation of Shareholder Rights Plan - Passed Voted for Percentage* Voted Against Percentage* The shareholders reconfirmed the shareholder rights plan of the Corporation and the Shareholder Rights Plan Agreement dated as of May 10, 2010 between the Corporation and Valiant Trust Company (predecessor entity to Computershare Trust Company of Canada), as rights agent, as described in the Management Proxy Circular dated January 9, 2020. The vote was conducted by a show of hands. 96.47% 3.53% * As the vote for each motion was taken by a show of hands, the number of votes disclosed reflects only those proxies received by management in advance of the meeting, plus any shares voted by a show of hands at the meeting in respect of which the shareholder voted against, or withheld authority. About Caldwell At Caldwell we believe Talent Transforms. As a leading provider of executive talent, we enable our clients to thrive and succeed by helping them identify, recruit and retain the best people. Our reputationnearly 50 years in the makinghas been built on transformative searches across functions and geographies at the very highest levels of management and operations. We leverage our skills and networks to also provide agile talent in the form of flexible and on-demand advisory solutions for companies looking for support in strategy and operations. With offices and partners across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, we take pride in delivering an unmatched level of service and expertise to our clients. Caldwell's Common shares are listed on The Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: CWL). Please visit our website at www.caldwellpartners.com for further information. SOURCE The Caldwell Partners International Inc. Related Links http://www.caldwellpartners.com MANISTEE One local teacher is proving that education can reach further and spread faster than even the most virulent disease. On a normal night while most of Michigan is asleep, Maggie Patterson teaches English to students in China. The online instructor works part time for VIPKid, a company which pairs English teachers with students in China for one-on-one language lessons conducted over video chat. Students in the program are provided with aliases by VIPKid in order to protect their identities. Patterson teaches from her home in Manistee where she has constructed a make-shift classroom around her computer desk. Behind her chair is a backdrop, decorated in both English and Mandarin. It reads, Stay strong Wuhan. Stay strong China. Most of Pattersons students, age 5 to 15, have remained under quarantine for weeks due to the spreading coronavirus outbreak which is believed to have originated in Wuhan province. In January, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China which Chinese officials identified as an outbreak of a novel (new) type of coronavirus. There are over 73,000 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus strain, according to WHO the majority of which have come from China. I have students from all over China relating their daily experience staying home, no school and no work for their parents, Patterson said. Like many teachers, Patterson has developed a bond with her students and remains concerned for their well-being. My heart breaks for my students every day, Patterson said. I try to make class as normal as possible and keep it happy and fun. I cant imagine my kids trapped at home for weeks and weeks without ever going out. Schools in China have been on winter break since January, and Patterson believes her English lessons are a constructive way to occupy time when children are prevented from going outside. Every week, Patterson teaches a 12-year-old girl who lives in the epicenter of the outbreak, near a hospital in Wuhan. She tells me that shes afraid, Patterson said. She says, We live right by the hospital and its very busy there and sometimes Im afraid. According to Patterson, the young girl said that her neighbors had become infected with the virus. Little babies are ill, she told Patterson during one of their lectures. During one of their weekly video chats, Patterson asked her student who goes by the name Julia what she did that day. I stayed in, Julia said on the recorded lessons. One day, Julia failed to report in for their scheduled video chat, leaving Patterson to fear for the girls safety. She didnt show up; she just didnt come, Patterson said. I went to my bible study here and Im like, We need to pray for Julia. She didnt come to class. She always comes to class. She lives in Wuhan and I dont know why she didnt come to class. A tearful Patterson was relieved to discover that her student was still healthy, and had only experienced a Wi-Fi outage. Liz, another of Pattersons students from Shenzhen in southeastern China, said that a neighbor infected with the coronavirus was taken away by an ambulance earlier this week. The hospital is coming, can you hear it? Liz asked Patterson during one of their lessons. One (person) in the family is ill. He went to Wuhan and (came) to Shenzhen 24 days (ago). Patterson said her students are taking the quarantine in stride, though most are struggling with cabin fever. The general attitude is that we just need to wait this out and its going to be fine, she said. Pattersons students expect the quarantine to end between March and April. For Patterson, online education programs like VIPKid demonstrate how interconnected the world has become. She notes that her work has brought money from quarantine zones in China back to northern Michigan. Theres no way that you can live in isolation anymore, she said. If the upper middle class in China no longer pays for private English lessons because of the economic impact of this crisis, companies like VIPKid will be impacted, then 70,000 teachers will lose all or part of their present income. Despite the current health crisis and strained political climate, Patterson remains hopeful that programs like VIPKid can be a powerful tool to benefit Chinese and American relations. The parents of the kids who are enrolled in VIPKid value connections with America and they are teaching their children to learn about America, to learn about the world and Im very hopeful that we will get to a point where its less adversarial, she said. The next generation in China is being taught that learning about America is valuable, and they seem interested in wanting to develop relationships instead of being adversarial. Im encouraged because the generation that is coming up in China is going to see value in the global economy beyond China. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 14:04:59|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Brazilian Senator Cid Gomes was shot in the chest in the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceara on Wednesday, as he tried to intervene in a strike by military police demanding higher salaries. Gomes, a former governor of Ceara state, opposed the strike and tried to drive a backhoe through the gate of a police base. He was shot while storming the barricades, reportedly by one of the officers. The bullets did not hit any vital organ and the senator is not in danger, according to his brother Ciro Gomes, also a Brazilian politician. After the shooting, the federal government decided to deploy the National Public Security Force to the state. An order to this effect, signed by Justice and Public Security Minister Sergio Moro, requested that federal forces stay there for at least 30 days. Though Brazilian military police officers are forbidden from going on strikes, sometimes they break the rule, calling for better salaries and working conditions. Congress leader Digvijaya Singh on Wednesday said he will send defamation notice to BJP leaders GVL Narasimha Rao and Amit Malviya stating that the two leaders accused him of being "ISI mole". "I received info that BJP spokespersons Narasimha Rao and Amit Malviya accused me of being an ISI mole. If that is the case then Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Amit Shah are incompetent, why have not I been arrested? I will send both of them (Rao and Malviya) defamation notice," Singh told reporters here. Earlier, BJP leader Rao said that there is a "connection emerging between Congress' idea of Hindu terror and LeT and ISI's 26/11 strategy". "We can see a connection emerging between Congress' idea of Hindu terror and LeT and ISI's 26/11 strategy. Was someone from India helping ISI as a handler to give terrorists Hindu identity? Was Digvijaya Singh working as a handler? Congress should answer this," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) New Delhi, Feb 20 : Welcoming the apex court judgment on permanent commission to women officers, Army Chief General Manoj Mukund Naravane said on Thursday that the force did not discriminate between its members on the basis of religion, caste, creed or gender. "Indian Army's outlook has been like this throughout. That's why we started inducting women officers as early as 1993," Naravane said. His assertion came in the wake of Supreme Court's order to grant permanent commission to women officers within three months. "The decision is welcome as it brings a sense of clarity and purpose to gainfully employ officers for better efficiency of the organisation," he said. Naravane said the Army had taken the initiative to induct women in its rank and file, pointing out that the first batch of 100 women soldiers is presently undergoing training at the Corps of Military Police Centre and School, Bengaluru. He assured that everybody in the Army, including women officers, will be given equal opportunity to contribute to the nation as also progress in their careers. Asked about the new Army headquarters, he said the proposed Thal Sena Bhawan in Delhi Cantt will bring all Army offices under one roof to help improve efficiency, reduce carbon footprint and logistics requirements. "It will also allow more family time for all the soldiers on peace postings in Delhi," the Naravane said. On the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) plenary in Paris and its effect on Pakistan's terror activities in Jammu and Kashmir, Naravane said, "China has also realised that they cannot back their all-weather friend (Pakistan) all the time. "If the FATF comes down heavily on them, they may have to do a rethink on their rhetoric and activities. FATF is a factor (in the reduction of terror activities in Kashmir Valley)." He added that a 'summer strategy' will be put in place as infiltration bids may go up in the next few months. GlobeNewswire The Board of Invalda INVL has decided to increase the share capital of its subsidiary INVL Life, which is seeking an insurance company license, from EUR 7.5 million to EUR 48 million. The Board of Invalda INVL has decided to transfer the following shareholdings to INVL Life for a preliminary amount of EUR 36 million: 1,889,123 shares, which makes up 23.43 percent of the authorized capital, of INVL Baltic Real Estate;1,873,678 shares, which makes up 15.39 percent of the authorized capital, of INV Facing severe fund crunch, Panjab University has proposed a fee hike of 5% in all traditional and self-financed courses for the upcoming 2020-21 academic session. The decision was taken on Friday in a meeting of a committee constituted by vice-chancellor Raj Kumar to discuss the fee structure at PUs teaching departments and regional centres. The proposed fee hike will be applicable only on new enrolments. The increase in fee is capped at 7,500 in self-financed courses, but has no limit when it comes to traditional courses. The committees proposal is subject to approval first from the syndicate and then the senate. Last year, the senate had approved a 10% hike for traditional courses and 7.5% increase in fee for self-financed courses for the 2019-20 session. However, it had decided to limit the hike at 5% for all courses in future. Self-financed courses are those running on fee collected from students, and hence have a higher fee structure. Among others, the 19-member committee comprises dean university instructions, dean students welfare, registrar, president of Panjab University Teachers Association and president and secretary of the Panjab University Campus Students Council. Among those opposing the hike were senator Prabhjit Singh and campus president Chetan Chaudhary. We expressed our dissent in the meeting as despite fee hike there is no development in the departments. Students will go on protest if the hike is approved, Chaudhary said. Devinder Singh, a professor at the department of laws and a member of the panel, said, If at all the fee has to be increased, the scholarship for needy students should also be raised. In 2017, a protest over fee hike at the varsity had turned violent after students clashed with police who had used tear gas to disperse the protesters. Opposition BJP on Thursday raised unemployment issue both inside the Odisha Assembly and outside, accusing the BJD government of failing to meet aspirations of the youths in the state. Leader of opposition Pradipta Kumar Naik of BJP alleged, in the House, that the state government has not been serious to address the unemployment problem. "The government has so far given employment to only 26,000 youths as against 22.57 lakh applicants registered with the employment exchange offices," Naik said. If the government cannot give employment to the youths, what is the point of spending around Rs 55 crore in the name of holding job fairs, Naik asked. Outside the Assembly, the youth wing of the BJP held a demonstration and begged for jobs on the streets. Senior BJD MLA and former minister Debi Prasad Mishra said, "The number of jobs in the government secor has come down. The state government has been trying to create employment opportunities for youths in the private sector and also through self-employment by imparting skills." Congress Legislature Party leader Narasingha Mishra blamed both the BJP-led government at the Centre and the BJD dispensation in the state for the unemployment problem. "What has Prime Minister Narendra Modi done for the youths. He had promised two crore jobs every year in 2014. How many youths were given jobs," Mishra said, adding that the state government also failed to create enough employment opportunities. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Lars Ugland appointed Steam Packet Non-Exec Director A new member of staff has been appointed at the Steam Packet Company. Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan MHK has welcomed Tynwalds approval of Lars Ugland as non-executive director of the travel operator. He will take the role of chair, replacing Robert Quayle who retires from the post on 31 March after serving 11 years as chair and 20 years as director. Mr Cannan said: I am delighted to make this appointment, and look forward to Mr Ugland contributing to the success of the Steam Packet under government ownership. The role is crucial in establishing the strategic direction of the Islands sea services, and the incoming chair brings a wealth of experience gathered during a career in international shipping spanning more than 50 years. Mr Uglands career began in 1968 as an ordinary seaman on-board a bulk carrier and developed through roles with a range of shipping companies and consultancy firms. A member of the Isle of Man Shipping Association since 2007, he served as the Honorary Norwegian consul to the Isle of Man 2011-2019. The Treasury undertook the recruitment process as a sole shareholder following the IOM Governments purchase of the company in May 2018, which was aimed at providing long-term stability to the Islands lifeline ferry operations. The company continues to operate as a commercial enterprise at arms length from Government. After a daylong talk earlier this month about the future of education in Chippewa Falls, school administrators gathered Thursday to decide how to bring some of the ideas to fruition. The Chippewa Falls Area Unified School District held a community conversation event Feb. 1, where school administrators met with hundreds of area residents to talk about what needs to be addressed in the district. Chippewa Falls Superintendent Heidi Taylor-Eliopoulos said the event was incredibly productive, and a wide array of ideas were brought to the table for discussion. It was wonderful to have so many diverse viewpoints in the room and still have it be a very productive conversation, Eliopoulos said. People were able to share their viewpoints based on their experiences and their interests in the community. Everyone seemed to be able to listen to each other and build off of each others ideas in a constructive way. Community members said they want to see more individualized learning opportunities not just academic ones, but also career, military and post-secondary offerings to better prepare students for what comes after graduation. Those in attendance also said the mental health of students, staff and families should be paramount, and resources should be increased in that area. On Thursday, 26 members of the school administration met to develop a three-year strategic plan to put the ideas into practice. The community conversation was similar to one held in 2014, and Eliopoulos said what was talked about then still has an impact today. When we take the top 10 themes from 2014, we can see things in our schools every single day that are a direct result of the input from the community, Eliopoulos said. We can point to those things and tell the community we listened and heres what we did. Weve reframed how we approach our students learning, and I think it really shows. Since the 2014 conversation, the district has grown internship opportunities for students, offered a diverse range of curriculum tracks for graduation, volunteer opportunities have increased, and a district newsletter is sent to the community three times each year to improve communication. The way courses are taught also changed, because critical thinking and problem solving were concerns community members wanted to see addressed. In addition, incorporation of physical movement in the classroom was increased, a personal finance course is now a graduation requirement, and mental health counseling is offered to students and families. As the district develops its new strategic plan, Eliopoulos said the most important thing is the mental health of students and helping prepare them for life after graduation and beyond. I appreciate our community members giving up a full day, and in return we are genuinely committed as a district to use that feedback as we plan for the future, Eliopoulos said. We are doing this because the kids in our schools today will be tomorrows business owners, health care workers, newspaper journalists, superintendents, police officers, elected officials and theyll be filling so many other roles. We need to plan our work that we do with them with the needs of the community in mind. Love 0 Funny 2 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Want to see more like this? Get our local education coverage delivered directly to your inbox. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 20 By Ilhama Isabalayeva Trend: An online information platform on Azerbaijans tourism potential, developed for foreign tourism companies, will be introduced in the country for the first time, Trend reports on Feb. 20 referring to the Azerbaijani State Tourism Agency. Along with providing foreign companies, involved in organizing tourist trips and selling vacation packages to Azerbaijan, with detailed information, the e-learning platform will also play the role of an online course informing about the country's new opportunities in the field of tourism. The users will be provided with the information about Azerbaijans tourist attractions, historical monuments, culture, cuisine, cultural heritage, architecture, nature, climate, population, language, national holidays, traditions and customs not only in the form of text but also in audio and video formats. The participants who upon the completion of the course will give the correct answers to the questions in a timely manner, will get the appropriate certificates. The presentation ceremony of the online platform will be held on April 29 at the Baku Convention Center as part of the Travel Business Azerbaijan 2020 forum. The event organized by the State Tourism Agency and the Azerbaijan Tourism Board will be held in Azerbaijan for the first time. The registration of forum participants is underway. The event will bring together over 400 representatives of travel agencies and tour operators, various airline holding companies from Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia. The representatives of over 150 local travel agencies, hotels and organizers of active tourism were registered to participate in the event. Both local and foreign companies are registered via www.travelbusiness.az. [February 20, 2020] Exabeam Unveils Cybersecurity Scholarship Program Exabeam, the Smarter SIEM company, today announced the Exabeam Cybersecurity Scholarship Program, an initiative designed to support the next generation of professionals in pursuing an education and career in the security field. As the cyber landscape evolves and threats become more complex and difficult to detect, Exabeam is looking to invest in students who are passionate about addressing the cybersecurity challenges of the future and possess the curiosity to pursue innovative solutions. "We are pleased to launch the Exabeam Cybersecurity Scholarship Program to recognize the exceptional and diverse talents of students who are exploring the possibilities of a career in cybersecurity," said Nir Polak, CEO, Exabeam. "Reflecting on my own journey, the opportunities that promoted my passion and interest in this discipline ultimately led to the founding of Exabeam. To sustain progress in defending cyberthreats, address the ongoing cybersecurity labor shortage, and drive our industry into the future, we must all work to cultivate the next generation of talent." The program awards a total of $8,000 to three winning applicants. To participate, applicants must submit academic transcripts along with either a 600- to 1,000-word essay or a 5-minute video between March 1 and June 30, 2020 that answers one of three security-related questions: How would you go about making U.S. elections safer? How would you protect user privacy and security on social media platforms? Do you think your generation is more or less secure than your parents' generation, and why? Potential winners will be selected based on a combination of originality and creativity and grade point average. Exabeam will publish winning essays and videos on its website and promote on social channels. The Exabeam Cybersecurity Scholarship Program isone prong in a multi-faceted practice that Exabeam has created to focus on education, information sharing and diversity to develop more cybersecurity leaders. "One thing we have in abundance is knowhow-and we should be sharing it more widely," said Polak. "While there is a great deal of knowledge sharing happening inside our industry, we also need to be reaching new audiences, educating and advocating, and that will require a broader culture of giving back." "To fight continuous threats and adversaries, cyber professionals need the support of a multidisciplinary approach," continued Polak. "Building and sustaining a diverse team that offers many perspectives creates a holistic view of the problem, while also delivering a range of valuable problem-solving skills. In that way, diversity truly improves the overall outcomes of the team." Ultimately, Exabeam aims to set an example for the cyber industry and inspire others to be more inclusive and invest in equal opportunities, which can broadly help a sector that chronically struggles with a lack of progress toward diversity and enough talent overall. The Exabeam Cybersecurity Scholarship Program is open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 16 years of age or older at the time of application and who are currently enrolled (or have been accepted to enroll) in an accredited post-secondary institution of higher learning (e.g., college or university) with a minimum 3.0 grade point average. To learn more and for full terms and conditions of the Exabeam Cybersecurity Scholarship Program, please visit: https://www.exabeam.com/scholarship/. About Exabeam Exabeam is the Smarter SIEM company. We help security operations and insider threat teams work smarter, allowing them to detect, investigate and respond to cyberattacks in 51 percent less time. Security organizations no longer have to live with excessive logging fees, missed distributed attacks and unknown threats, or manual investigations and remediation. With the modular Exabeam Security Management Platform, analysts can collect unlimited log data, use behavioral analytics to detect attacks, and automate incident response, both on-premise or in the cloud. Exabeam Smart Timelines, sequences of user and device behavior created using machine learning, further reduce the time and specialization required to detect attacker tactics, techniques and procedures. For more information, visit https://www.exabeam.com. Exabeam, the Exabeam logo, Threat Hunter, Smarter SIEM, Smart Timelines and Security Management Platform are service marks, trademarks or registered marks of Exabeam, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other brand names, product names, or trademarks belong to their respective owners. 2020 Exabeam, Inc. All rights reserved. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005087/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Update: The teenager who died in last nights Cork city car crash has been named as Kimberly O'Connor. In a moving statement from her mother Jennifer, Kimberly OConnor was described as a very kind and generous person. She said: Our hearts are broken today at the loss of our beautiful daughter, sister, granddaughter, aunt, niece and friend Kimberly O'Connor. Kimberly had a bright future and was a very kind and generous person who was loved by so many people. The bereaved mother described how her daughter had just returned from Kolkata in January with the Hope foundation with her school at Terence MacSwiney community College where she raised funds and participated in the Hope You Can Paint Project visiting and painting local orphanages. Ms Haynes also said her daughter was involved in an exchange program with Cooperation Ireland visiting Belfast and engaging in cross-border projects and relationships working with students in the north of Ireland. Kimberly had a great interest in drama and singing and was very talented and a great career lay ahead of her, she said. She also played a leading role in two musicals in the Terence MacSwiney community College over the last two years with her friends and teachers. She was very popular and generous and really loved by all her family, peers and teachers." Our lives are shattered today and it is difficult to put into words how we are feeling. "We are grateful for the support of her family, neighbours and friends, her teachers, our local priest and the community at large An Garda Siochana at this very sad time. We pray for those who are injured and thank the emergency services for attending the accident last night and ask for all your prayers at this very sad time. Earlier: Girl, 16, who died in horror Cork crash just returned from school trip The death of the teenager who died in a car accident last night in Cork city has been described as a terrible tragedy by her school principal. The girl died after the car in which she was a passenger crashed on Harbour View Road, Knocknaheeney, Co Cork at approximately 11.45pm last night. Pictures: Larry Cummins Moments earlier, the car had been seen driving up the straight road, past Cork City Councils Northwest Quarter Regeneration housing estate, leading to the lights. Emergency services and the Roads Policing Unit rushed to the scene but the teenage girl was pronounced dead at the scene. Two teenage males found at the scene sustained serious injuries and both were taken to Cork University Hospital for treatment. One of the males is believed to be critical. A third teen, believed to be aged 16 and the driver, later presented himself to Mercy Hospital with non life-threatening injuries. Ms Phil OFlynn, principal of Terence McSweeney community College, said: I am deeply saddened to report the death of one of our female students and the injury of two other boys, one a current student and the other a past pupil, as a result of a road traffic accident last night. "This is a terrible tragedy for the families of the students, our school and our community. Our sympathies and thoughts are with the families and friends of the deceased and injured. She said that the schools Critical Incident Management Plan has been implemented. She said she has also been in contact with the National Educational Psychological Service (MEPS), Senior Management personnel of the Cork Education and Training Board, community gardai and members of the local community services and staff members of the school who have been assisting her in supporting her students and their families. The school is open to students, parents and the wider community. Staff members, including counselling personnel, are on site to offer support, advice and guidance. And she added: We have been in contact with the families of the students involved in the accident and we would ask that their privacy be respected at this time. The teens remains were removed to the mortuary at Cork University Hospital where a post mortem is due to be carried out. The Harbour View Road is partially closed for Garda Forensic Collision Investigators with local diversions in place. Cork City North West councillor Tony Fitzgerald, who lives on the same road, said: Harbour Hill Road is a very long road, so I didnt hear about it until the early hours of this morning. The community is in mourning, everybody is shocked and devastated by what has happened. We share the loss of a very young life and our sympathies go to the family and to her friends and loved ones. We are just hopeful that those who are critical make a full recovery. Councillor Kenneth Collins added: This is a very sad day for everybody who knew her. Its a terrible shock and our hearts and sympathies go to her family and friends. It is also a very sad day for Cork as there have been three road deaths in almost as many days here. The Lee University Writers Series will continue with Amy Wright, a poet and creative non-fiction writer, on Thursday, Feb. 27, at 7 p.m. in Lees Rose Lecture Hall. We are so glad that Amy Wright is coming to share with us her essays about the environment, the creative processes of humans, and other lifeforms, said Dr. William Woolfitt, associate professor of creative writing at Lee. In a time of climate crisis and diminishing resources, Wright helps us think about ethical action and responsible citizenship. Ms. Wright is the author of two poetry books, Cracker Sonnets and Everything in the Universe, in addition to one poetry collaboration and six chapbooks. Her most recent publication is a collection of essays titled Think Ill Go Eat A Worm. Ms. Wrights essays won first place in two contests, sponsored by London Magazine and Quarterly West. She has also been awarded two Peter Taylor Fellowships to the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, an Individual Artist Grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission, and a fellowship to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Ms. Wright lives in Tennessee where she teaches writing and co-edits Zone 3 journal and Zone 3 press. Her writing has been anthologized in works such as the Southern Poetry Anthology Volumes III and VI and most recently in Waveform: Anthology of Women Essayists. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, Brevity, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals. Rose Lecture Hall is located in Lees Helen DeVos College of Education on Parker Street. For more information on the Writers Series, email Dr. Woolfitt at wwoolfitt@leeuniversity.edu. Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg says Trump supporters can't be Christian Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has been accused of being 'anti-God' by his husband's pastor brother. Rhyan Glezman, 35, a pastor in Clio, Michigan, was reacting to Buttigieg's assertion this week that it was impossible to be a Christian and to vote for Donald Trump. Glezman, whose younger brother Chasten is married to Buttigieg, said on Tucker Carlson Tonight: 'Just everything that Pete is pushing is, it's anti-God. I'm just gonna be honest with you. 'Nothing lines up with Scripture for him to make cases like to say that you cannot be a Christian and vote for Trump. He's the one that is openly contradicting God's word over and over.' He added that it was 'the height of intellectual dishonesty for Pete to make claims that there's no compatibility with being a Christian and voting for Trump.' He said: 'Pete, in fact, is the one who is pushing agendas and rhetoric that is against, clearly against Scripture.' Buttigieg, 38, made his comments after being asked by CNN host Erin Burnett: 'Do you think that it's impossible to be a Christian and support Trump?' Pete Buttigieg's brother-in-law Rhyan Glezman (pictured) has accused the Democratic presidential hopeful of being 'anti-God' after saying you can't be Christian and vote Trump Buttigieg (right) met Chasten Glezman (left) in 2015 on a dating app and they married in 2018 'I'm not going to tell other Christians how to be Christian,' Buttigieg said during a town hall. 'But I will say I cannot find any compatibility between the way this president conducts himself and anything I find in Scripture.' Buttigieg met Chasten, a teacher, in 2015 on a dating app and they married three years later. Glezman also reacted to a clip of Buttigieg on The View addressing partial-birth abortion after he was asked where his 'line is.' 'But my point is that it shouldn't be up to a government official to draw the line,' Buttigieg said. 'It should be up to the woman who's confronted.' Glezman told Tucker on Wednesday: 'I'm just in a state of lament when you hear that we have someone running for commander in chief who can't make a moral decision on whether to keep a child after it's already been born or to have it killed. 'What kind of moral suggestions is he going to be given if he can't come to an understanding of that? It's just, it's alarming.' Buttigieg has previously clashed with his brother-in-law last year when Glezman accused the politician of hijacking his family's history for political advantage by crafting a bogus backstory of poverty, homelessness, and homophobia. Glezman said he received death threats and hate mail when stories circulated claiming he was a bigot who had fallen out with his younger brother Chasten when he told his family he was gay. Glezman insisted he'd been supportive and that he wanted 'the best for him' but he admitted he opposed gay marriage. He added last May: 'A mayor from a small city and his husband, a child who grew up with nothing and his parents kicked him out it makes a perfect political story for the campaign. 'To me that's very sad. If that's all you have to stand on, you're not fit to be president of the United States.' Chasten shared this Instagram post in June last year celebrating their one year wedding anniversary. The two got married at Cathedral of St. James in South Bend . [February 20, 2020] Item 9 Labs Corp. Closes on Nevada Asset Purchase Agreement PHOENIX, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Item 9 Labs Corp. (OTC: INLB) (Item 9 Labs or the Company), a leader in comfortable cannabis health solutions for the modern consumer, announced on February 14, 2020 the closing of an Asset Purchase Agreement for Item 9 Labs to acquire all outstanding interest in cultivation, production, and distribution licenses in Pahrump, NV, from Strive Wellness of Nevada, LLC (Strive Wellness). Item 9 Labs previously had a January 2019 joint venture agreement with Strive Wellness to construct and manage a 20,000 square-foot medical marijuana cultivation and production facility in Pahrump, NV, under which these licenses were awarded. Were excited to bring our quality products to such a robust market, stated Bryce Skalla, President of Item 9 Labs. Weve been diligently researching Nevada trends for the past year to best fill existing holes in current product offerings, this new opportunity allows us to showcase more of our intentionally developed, premium products. With the 20,000-square-foot cultivation and production facility near completion, compelling Nevada market forecasts helped us determine it would be in the best interest of shareholder value and financing needs to move forward with the acquisition of the cultivation, processing and distribution licenses, stated Andrew Bowden, CEO of Item 9 Labs Corp. Forecasts for upcoming years sales suggests Nevadas retail cannabis market could have over $1 billion in total sales value by 2025. This forecast was included in a larger set of forecasts indicating the 2017 total dollar value of cannabis sales would be $103 million. Actual numbers were greater than $250 million, followed by $530 million in 2018, and $639 million in 2019. For information visit Item9LabsCorp.com . About Item 9 Labs Corp: Item 9 Labs Corp. (OTC: INLB) creates comfortable cannabis health solutions for the modern consumer. The Company is bringing best industry practices to markets from coast to coast through culivation and production, distinctive retail environments, licensing services, and diverse product suites catering to different medical cannabis demographics. Item 9 Labs Corp. is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, with medical cannabis operations in multiple U.S. markets. Item 9 Labs Corp.s asset portfolio includes Item 9 Labs, Dispensary Permits, Dispensary Templates, and Strive Life. These assets provide services specific to different stakeholder groups. Dispensary Permits is the Companys consulting firm specializing in strategic license application and compliance. Dispensary Templates, a subdivision of the firm, is a technology platform with an extensive digital library of licensing and business planning resources. Strive Life is a turnkey dispensary model for the retail sector, elevating the patient experience with consistent and superior service, high-end design, and precision-tested products. It is currently implemented in North Dakota. In addition, Item 9 Labs Corp. is advancing the industry with its dynamic product suites. The Company has created complementary brands Item 9 Labs and Strive Wellness to channel consumer diversity. Propriety delivery platforms include the Apollo Vape and Pod system, as well as a pioneering intra-nasal device. The Company has received multiple accolades for its medical-grade flower and concentrates. For more information, visit Item 9 Labs Corp. at www.Item9labscorp.com . Forward-Looking Statement: This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, risks and effects of legal and administrative proceedings and governmental regulation, especially in a foreign country, future financial and operational results, competition, general economic conditions, proposed transactions that are not legally binding obligations of the company and the ability to manage and continue growth. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual outcomes may vary materially from those indicated. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements we make in this news release include the introduction of new technology, market conditions and those set forth in reports or documents we file from time to time with the SEC. We undertake no obligation to revise or update such statements to reflect current events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events. Media Contact: Kyle Jennings Item 9 Labs Corp. [email protected] (518) 265-9217 Investor Contact: Jeffrey Rassas Item 9 Labs Corp. [email protected] (480) 463-4246 [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] A six-year-old boy flying alone in Brazil aboard LATAM airlines, one of Latin America's largest airlines, was allegedly raped while being watched by an employee in a hotel overnight, a new lawsuit claims. The unaccompanied boy was flying to Orlando from Belo Horizonte in May 2018 but when employees couldn't find his travel documents during a transfer in Sao Paulo, he was held in a hotel overnight to await a new flight the next day. A male employee is alleged to have sexually assaulted the boy while supervising him in the hotel. The father of that six-year-old boy filed a federal lawsuit against the airline on Monday in Florida's Middle District accusing LATAM of negligently training its employees and failing to protect the young boy. The lawsuit claims the child suffered 'traumatic injuries' from the alleged assault. A six-year-old boy flying alone aboard LATAM airlines from Brazil to Florida in May 2018 was allegedly raped by a male employee, new lawsuit states. He was allegedly assaulted in a Brazil hotel following a document mix-up that caused him to miss his Florida-bound flight and stranded him in Sao Paulo overnight (file image) The six-year-old boy was on a flight from Belo Horizonte to Sao Paulo where he would transfer to another flight bound for Florida. His mother put his travel documents in a folder around his neck. During the flight from Belo Horizonte to Sao Paulo, a flight attendant removed the folder from around the boy's neck and placed it in his backpack. A different employee who took the boy to his connecting flight couldn't find his documents, which included his Brazilian and American passports, according to the lawsuit. As a result he missed his flight because Brazilian police would not let him on the plane. Later the employee found the folder in the backpack. LATAM employees then 'unilaterally decided' to keep the boy at one of its hotels overnight. The child spent at least 15 hours in a hotel room 'with just one employee at a time', as per the lawsuit. There four airline employees took turns supervising him over that span of time. One of those employees, a man, allegedly sexually assaulted the boy during that time. A spokeswoman for the father's attorney on Wednesday would not comment when asked whether law enforcement was notified. 'LATAM, and the airline industry generally, had actual knowledge of the risk to unaccompanied minor children during lengthy layovers, and that unaccompanied minors who are negligently cared for could result in assaults of children,' the lawsuit said. A spokesperson for LATAM, which is based in Chile, said that the company has not been served with the lawsuit. 'However, it takes any allegation of this nature seriously and will cooperate with any resulting investigation,' the company said to DailyMail.com. The lawsuit, filed by a lawyer the Morgan & Morgan firm, argued the airline had a duty to 'furnish suitable, proper, and safe means to transport the unaccompanied minor'. It further argues the boy suffered 'traumatic injuries' that were 'the result of defendant airlines wilful misconduct or, alternatively, an accident that defendant, LATAM, did not take all necessary measures to avoid.' The lawsuit seeks damages in excess of $75,000. VIA Institutional Advisory Board members, VIA Founder, VIA Chief Scientist & Veronafiere representatives 'This steady growth in the number of certified Ambassadors goes hand in hand with the expansion of the VIA alumni community...; so, the 615 candidates of 2019 will potentially reach 800 by the end of 2020.' Stevie KIM, VIA Founder The year 2020 will be decisive to consolidate Vinitaly International Academy (VIA)s efforts in the promotion of Italian wine through multi-level wine courses and business activities which connect international professionals with the Italian wine world. A year and a half into its reformatted, tasting intensive program and a new ecosystem which sees a stronger participation of Italian wine trade associations, VIA forges ahead with a rich program of initiatives and a growing international community of wine professionals highly specialized in Italian wine. On February 5th, 2020, VIAs 4 Institutional Advisory Board members (Federvini, FIVI Vignaioli Indipendenti, Unione Italiana Vini, Federdoc), Chief Scientist Attilio Scienza, and Vinitaly Wine & Food Area Manager Gianni Bruno met with VIA Founder Stevie Kim and her team in Verona, Italy, for a discussion on the state-of-the-art of the project. With 5 advanced Italian Wine Ambassador courses in Italy plus 10 overseas held from 2015 to 2019, in 2020 VIA will run 5 Ambassador courses (1 in Italy and 4 overseas) and steadily increase the number of certified Ambassadors. With an average of 60 to 70 Italian Wine Ambassadors certified per year, in 2020 the Ambassador community is projected to reach around 300 members (starting from 230 of 2019). VIA Founder Stevie Kim commented on VIAs projections for 2020: This steady growth in the number of certified Ambassadors goes hand in hand with the expansion of the VIA alumni community, that is, all the wine professionals who attended VIA courses without necessarily gaining the certification; so, the 615 candidates of 2019 will potentially reach 800 by the end of 2020. We are talking about a solid base of specialists based in over 36 countries who can become dedicated collaborators. Advisory Board members commented on their collaboration with VIA to date. Ottavio Cagiano de Azevedo, President of Federvini, highlighted the importance of educational and cultural initiatives to spread knowledge about wine internationally: Federvini is proud to cooperate with VIA: our associated Members have always sustained wine culture as the main tool to help introduce consumers worldwide to drinking wine. To this end, VIA structured important educational formats: Federvini will continue to support and develop initiatives to echo these efforts. Federdoc President Riccardo Ricci Curbastro also stressed the value of education in the promotion of Italian quality wine denominations: The mission of Federdoc, which I represent, is to inform and educate about Italian denomination wines, as well as to elevate their status. For this reason we cannot but support and share the educational program that Vinitaly International Academy is developing in these years. VIAs activities resulted in the training and education of an important number of Italian Ambassadors who increasingly play a crucial role in promoting Italian quality products worldwide amongst targeted audiences, and also influence consumers choices towards our quality wines. Matilde Poggi, President of FIVI, underlined the value of the VIA program and the need to continue to support it: The work undertaken by VIA to educate and enhance knowledge about Italian wine is unique in Italy. I hope this work will be supported in the future, otherwise we will all lose a great ally for the promotion of our rich Italian wine heritage. Paolo Castelletti, General Secretary of Unione Italiana Vini, emphasized the role that wineries and producers must have in these international training programs: As weve always maintained during our meetings with ICE-Italian Trade Agency, Vinitaly, and Vinitaly International Academy, training foreign professionals and opinion leaders on the distinctiveness of our vinicultural heritage allows to spread into foreign markets a strong message about the Italian wine system and to promote our brands amongst local consumers. For this reason, these educational programs must be delivered in close contact with wineries and producersthe real protagonists of the marketplace and hence able to adequately influence the contents and priorities of this training. Our feedback on the establishment of VIAs Advisory Board is positive; may this work continue to prosper in the future. Another area of significant development for VIA in 2020 is its course offer. In addition to the flagship Italian Wine Ambassador certification, VIA will also deliver the intermediate-level Italian Wine Maestro course globally. Following the launch of the online Italian Wine Educator program in 2019, where 38 Ambassadors from the community were certified to teach VIAs Maestro course, in 2020 between 20 and 40 Maestro courses will operate worldwide. VIAs objective for 2020 is to certify additional 100 Educators who, in turn, will teach Maestro courses in their destination markets. In addition, VIAs team is set to finalize the pilot version of the lower-level Italian Wine Fellow course that will be rolled out globally in 2021. Finally, for 2020 VIA plans to boost its Incoming Program, that is, field trips organized in collaboration with local bodies such as Consortiums and aimed at bringing VIA Ambassadors to Italy to meet producers and attend dedicated seminars. In 2019 Ambassadors travelled to the Bolgheri region in Tuscany and to Sicily; in 2020 field trips will be planned in Apulia, Sicily, Sardinia, and Campania. To kick off VIAs dense program of initiative for 2020 is the Italian Wine Ambassador course in Verona, Italy, to be staged shortly before the Vinitaly expo, from April 10th to 14th, 2020, and organized by Veronafiere, Vinitaly, and Vinitaly International with the support of ICE-Italian Trade Agency. Applications for VIA Verona are currently being received. After Verona, additional locations and provisional dates for the Ambassador courses in the United States include: Atlanta in June, Seattle in July, Houston in August. About: Vinitaly International Academy (VIA) aims to be the gold standard of Italian wine education. It offers a complete educational path with standardized courses that will teach professionals and educators to master the diversity of Italian wine in a rigorous, organized manner. VIAs main objective is to foster a global network of highly qualified professionals such as Italian Wine Ambassadors and Italian Wine Experts: in turn, they will support and promote Italian wine throughout the world. VIA was founded by Stevie Kim, Managing Director of Vinitaly International. The new VIA ecosystem avails of the guidance of Italian trade associations Federdoc, Federvini, Vignaioli Indipendenti FIVI, and Unione Italiana Vini as members of the Institutional Advisory Board. Italian vine genetics scholar, Prof. Attilio Scienza, oversees VIAs scientific and educational direction as the Chief Scientist. VIA Faculty Sarah Heller MW and Henry Davar teach the flagship Italian Wine Ambassador course. The following trade associations in the Italian wine industry have also joined as VIA Supporters: Italia del Vino; Italian Signature Wines Academy; Le Famiglie del Vino, Wi-Fi Wine from Irpinia, Consorzio di Tutela Vini del Trentino; Consorzio di Tutela Sicilia DOC; Franciacorta; Consorzio di Tutela Vini dAbruzzo. To date the VIA community comprises 215 certified Italian Wine Ambassadors and 15 Italian Wine Experts. Since its foundation in 2014, over 615 candidates from all over the world have taken VIAs courses. SACRAMENTO California lawmakers apologized Thursday for the Legislatures role in advancing discrimination against Japanese Americans and their incarceration during World War II. The Assembly passed a resolution by unanimous voice vote formally apologizing for its past actions in support of a wartime policy that led to the internment of about 120,000 people of Japanese descent in camps across the United States. HR77 by Assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, D-Torrance (Los Angeles County), acknowledged discriminatory legislative actions dating back to the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which prohibited immigrants from Japan and other Asian countries from purchasing agricultural land. It also apologized for resolutions encouraging Japanese Americans to renounce their citizenship and urging Congress to make personal property left behind by internees available for other Americans to use. It was approved one day after the 78th anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelts Executive Order No. 9066, ordering Japanese Americans removed from the West Coast in the aftermath of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood (Los Angeles), said it was an important reminder that the Legislature must continue to work to eliminate racism from the criminal justice system. In order that our successors are not left apologizing for what we did, we need to make sure that our actions on this floor every day are true and just, he said. This is not just about incarceration a long time ago. This is about a system of justice in the present. A group of former internees visited the Assembly for the apology, including Jeanette Inouye, 84, of Sacramento, who was 6 years old when her family was sent to the Tule Lake camp in Siskiyou County and then the Topaz camp in Utah. They were incarcerated for four years. Inouye said she hoped that the resolution would bring more attention to a historical wrong she feels has been largely forgotten and that it would serve as a warning of what can happen when Americans do not hold their government accountable. We need to remember its something that we did, she said. An apology is not a weakness. Its morality. Alexei Koseff is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: alexei.koseff@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @akoseff SAGINAW, MI A 33-year-old Saginaw County man is accused of raping two minors. On Aug. 31, Michigan State Police troopers went to a Bridgeport Township residence for a sexual assault complaint. Upon troopers arrival, the mother and grandmother of an underage girl told them Lee A. Amos Sr. had sexually assaulted the child, according to MSP Special 1st Lt. David Kaiser. Through subsequent investigation, troopers learned of a second alleged victim, this one a minor male, Kaiser said. Authorities issued a warrant for Amos on Nov. 8. Prosecutors allege the abuse of the two minors occurred at multiple locations throughout the county and spanned July 2018 through the day troopers were first summoned. Amos on Nov. 12 was arraigned in Saginaw County District Court on six counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct with a victim 13 or younger. The charge involves penetration and is a life offense, with the young age of the victims attaching a 25-year mandatory minimum should Amos be convicted. The arraigning judge denied granting Amos bond. A Saginaw County judge in July 2016 sentenced Amos to 20 months to four years in prison on a conviction of assaulting, resisting, or obstructing police. The Michigan Department of Corrections paroled him on Sept. 14, 2017, then discharged him from parole on Dec. 14, 2018. In late November, a judge granted a defense request to have Amos sent to the Center for Forensic Psychiatry in Ypsilanti for evaluations of his competency and criminal responsibility. Gauging competency means determining if a defendant's current mental or emotional state is fit enough for trial, to the extent he or she understands the charges against them and their constitutional rights. Criminal responsibility assesses if a defendant should be deemed responsible or not for the alleged crime based on their mental or emotional state when the offense occurred. Amos is to appear for a competency hearing at 8:45 a.m. on Feb. 24. On February 4, 2020, French newspaper La Tribune reported that Egypt is on the verge to sign a deal with Fincantieri to purchase a pair of European Multi-Purpose Frigate (FREMM) warships from the Italian shipbuilder. On February 4, 2020, French newspaper La Tribune reported that Egypt is on the verge to sign a deal with Fincantieri to purchase a pair of European Multi-Purpose Frigate (FREMM) warships from the Italian shipbuilder. The Italian Navy's tenth and final FREMM Frigate: Emilio Bianchi (Picture source: Fincantieri) According to the report, these frigates may be drawn from the Italian Navys procurement program the vessels Spartaco Schergat and Emilio Bianchi, launched in January 2019 and January 2020, respectively enabling Fincantieri to sell the vessels for an estimated cost of 1.2 billion. Of the two frigates in question, the Emilio Bianchi was launched in January and was due for delivery to the Italian navy in 2021, while the Spartaco Schergat is due for delivery in a few months. The "Emilio Bianchi" vessel, like the other units, features a high degree of flexibility, capable of operating in all tactical situations. 144 metres long with a beam of 19.7 metres, the ship has a displacement at a full load of approximately 6,700 tonnes. The vessel has a maximum speed of over 27 knots and has a maximum accommodation capacity for a 200-person crew. Spartaco Schergat is a general purpose-configured variant with a full-load displacement of 6,900 tons and 144 meters in length. It carries an OTO Melara gun, a 16-cell vertical launch system launching Aster 15 and Aster 30 missiles, an MU90 lightweight torpedo launching system (Torpedo Launching System) and the Teseo MK2/A anti-ship system, based on the Teseo missile. The ship also has a flight deck for embarking two helicopters. If they are sold to Egypt, the Italian navy may decide to order its replacement ships with anti-submarine warfare capabilities, an upgrade reflecting heightened tensions in the Mediterranean. In addition to the frigates, Egypt is waiting for four other frigates and 20 Falaj II patrol boats. WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Ivy Rehab Physical Therapy ("Ivy"), a national leader in outpatient musculoskeletal rehabilitative services, is proud to announce that it has partnered with the world renowned Hospital for Special Surgery ("HSS") to launch the "HSS and Ivy Rehab Orthopedic Physical Therapy Residency Program". This intensive, one-year didactic and mentorship-based program was created jointly by HSS and Ivy to contribute to the professional development of clinicians in the field of orthopedic physical therapy. This program utilizes HSS curriculum and follows APTA guidelines. Additionally, the program prepares residents to successfully complete the American Board of Physical Therapy Specialists Orthopedic Certified Specialist ("OCS") examination to attain board certification that is held by less than 7% of all physical therapists across the United States. "The HSS curriculum will be the didactic foundation for the program," said JeMe Cioppa-Mosca, Senior Vice President of Rehabilitation at HSS. "Working collaboratively with Ivy to advance the skillsets of physical therapists through continued learning is the mission of our residency program." The inaugural class of residents consists of 8 physical therapists individually selected through a rigorous application process. Each resident has been partnered with an expert clinician who will serve as their personal mentor throughout the course of their residency. Residents are required to complete a minimum of 300 hours of didactic content and 150 hours of one-on-one mentoring. This level of intensive training will establish a team of highly trained orthopedic clinical specialists and professional leaders across the Ivy Rehab Network. "The unique collaboration between HSS and Ivy on the creation of our Orthopedic Residency Program raises the bar for advanced clinical education and training for our physical therapists," said Troy Bage, Ivy's COO. "The best-in-class training, hands-on treatment techniques and cohort-based learning are all designed to develop top-tier clinicians through the program. Ivy is truly honored to have partnered with a world leader in HSS to develop this residency program." About Ivy Rehab Founded in 2003, Ivy Rehab is a rapidly growing network of over 225 best-in-class outpatient physical, occupational, speech therapy and ABA clinics located throughout the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast regions of the United States. The Ivy Rehab Network is made up of multiple brands all dedicated to providing exceptional care and personalized treatment to get patients feeling better, faster. With the support of leading middle-market private equity firm Waud Capital Partners, Ivy Rehab will continue its strategic growth via the ongoing investment in new partners who embrace a common mission, vision and values as well as a culture of being "All About the People". About HSS HSS is the world's leading academic medical center focused on musculoskeletal health. At its core is Hospital for Special Surgery, nationally ranked No. 1 in orthopedics (for the tenth consecutive year) and No. 3 in rheumatology by U.S. News & World Report (2019-2020), and named a leader in pediatric orthopedics by U.S. News & World Report "Best Children's Hospitals" list (2019-2020). An affiliate of Weill Cornell Medical College, HSS has a main campus in New York City and facilities in Florida, New Jersey, Connecticut, and the Long Island and Westchester County regions of New York State. www.HSS.edu. Contact Information: Ivy Rehab Network Jeremy VanDevender [email protected] SOURCE Ivy Rehab Network Related Links http://www.ivyrehab.com Downing Street experienced a new political reshuffle today as a removal van arrived to move ex-chancellor Sajid Javid out to make way for successor Rishi Sunak. The hefty lorry parked up outside Number 11 Downing Street this morning to help the former finance chief move his family effects out of the grace-and-favour pad. The vehicle was from Bishop's Move, the same firm that moved Mr Javid in when he was appointed last July. He moved his family into the two-bedroom apartment above No 10 after Mr Johnson chose to move into the larger, four-bedroom flat about No 11 with girlfriend Carrie Symonds. A source close to the ex-chancellor confirmed that the lorry was moving his effects out to make way for Mr Sunak and his family. The removal van in Downing Street this morning moving Mr Javid's family effects from the No 10 flat And an articulated lorry from the same firm moving him and his family in to the flat back in August last year Mr Javid is thought to have spent more time at the large family home in Fulham which features extra security added when he was made home secretary Bringing your work home: David Cameron working on one of his red boxes in the flat above Number 11, with Samantha Cameron in the kitchen Samantha Cameron, wife of then Prime Minister David Cameron, having breakfast in her 11 Downing Street apartment The MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, dubbed the Maharajah of the Yorkshire Dales, is married to Akshata and they have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka. Earlier this week he declared the Budget will go ahead on March 11 as scheduled despite the abrupt departure of Mr Javid last week. He killed off rumours of a delay saying he was 'cracking on' with preparations for the crucial financial package. Downing Street had previously signalled that the Budget could be pushed back after the dramatic resignation of Mr Javid during the reshuffle last week. The vehicle was from Bishop's Move, the same firm that moved Mr Javid in when he was appointed last July Earlier this week Mr Sunak declared the Budget will go ahead on March 11 as scheduled despite the abrupt departure of Mr Javid A picture of Sajid Javid at work which he posted on Instagram three months ago The MP for Richmond in Yorkshire, dubbed the Maharajah of the Yorkshire Dales, is married to Akshata and they have two daughters, Krishna and Anoushka Pictured: the interior of the ground floor of number 11 Downing Street, where the Chancellor of the Exchequer works Tony Blair referred to the downing street properties as 'Tardis like' for their internal dimensions. Pictured: the boardroom in Number 11 A ground floor meeting room in Number 11, downing Street, photographed in 2009 The spacious ground floor of No 11 has armchairs, sofas and a glass panelled bookcase The Downing street properties feature high ceilings large windows and chandeliers The apartment above the finance minister's office in No 11 has been home to PMs and their families since 1997, when Tony and Cherie Blair, who had a young family, chose it over the two-bedroom flat above the more famous black door. The tradition was upheld by subsequent Prime Ministers, with Gordon Brown and his wife Sarah, and David and Samantha Cameron and their children enjoying the more spacious home above Number 11. But Mr Johnson, whose children are grown up, shares the spacious living quarters with only Ms Symonds, 31. Mr Javid by contrast has a wife and small children, but he is thought to have spent more time at the large family home in Fulham which features added security since he was made home secretary last year. The Academy Awards paid tribute to many famous faces who passed on over the last year with its In Memoriam segment on Sunday night, but at least three notable names were omitted from the list: Luke Perry, Sid Haig, Tim Conway and Cameron Boyce. Recently deceased legends Kobe Bryant, who died Jan. 26, and Kirk Douglas, who passed on Feb. 5, did make it into the 2020 Oscars slideshow honoring the deceased, which was accompanied by Billie Eilish and Finneas OConnells performance of The Beatles Yesterday at the Dolby Theater. Other noteworthy stars in the 92nd Annual Academy Awards In Memoriam segment included Doris Day, John Singleton, Peter Mayhew, Agnes Varda, D. A. Pennebaker, Peter Fonda, Diahann Caroll, Rip Torn, Robert Forster and John Witherspoon, among many more. You can watch the tribute via the video above. Also Read: Oscars 2020 Winners: The Complete List The Academy did not immediately respond to TheWraps request for comment on the exclusions of Perry, Haig and Boyce from the segment. The three are included in the Oscars online gallery, which you can view here. Best known as Dylan McKay from Beverly Hills, 90210 and Archie Andrews father, Fred Andrews, from The CWs Riverdale, Perry died on March 5, 2019 after suffering a stroke. His final film role was Quentin Tarantinos Best Picture contender Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He was 52. Boyce, a star of the Disney Channels Descendants films, died July 6, 2019 at the age of 20 after suffering an epileptic seizure. Also Read: Oscars 2020: South Korea Celebrates Historic 'Parasite' Win Haig, who was a cult favorite actor for playing the part of Captain Spaulding in Rob Zombies House of 1000 Corpses trilogy, died Sept. 21, 2019. He was 80. Conway, who died last May at the age of 85, was best known for his comedic work on TVs The Carol Burnett Show but also starred in a string of Disney movies like 1973s The Worlds Greatest Athlete, 1975s The Apple Dumpling Gang and its 1979 sequel. He co-starred with Don Knotts in 1979s The Prize Fighter and 1980s The Private Eyes. Read original story Luke Perry, Sid Haig and Cameron Boyce Not Included in 2020 Oscars In Memoriam (Video) At TheWrap Can't allow every person who thinks of some solution to COVID-19 to file petition: SC SC stays death warrant issued by Guj court in rape and murder of 3 year old India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 20: The Supreme Court has stayed a death warrant issued by a Gujarat sessions court. The warrant was stayed as the court had issued the same without waiting for the mandatory 60 day period. The 60 day waiting period is mandatory as it gives the convict the time to appeal before the Supreme Court. While staying the order, Chief Justice of India, S A Bobde was visibly upset. He asked the Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta, why such black warrants are issued despite the Supreme Court's reported order in 2015 in the Shabnam case. The CJI said despite our judgment, how is it that such black warrants are issued before the exhaustion of the period of limitation. The judicial process cannot go on like this. Tell us why this has happened, the CJI also asked. Explained: What the Supreme Court sought to know on Electrical Vehicles NEWS AT NOON, FEBRUARY 20th, 2020 The case related to the hanging of a man who raped and murdered a 3 year old girl in Gujarat in 2018. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, February 20, 2020, 12:03 [IST] New Delhi, Feb 21 : After the outbreak of Novel Coronavirus in China, Indian tourists have turned to Western countries instead of Eastern ones. Tourists going abroad for picnics now like to go to Western countries including Europe, America. People associated with the tourism industry said that people traveling to China in connection with the business have cancelled their tours. At the same time, tourism in Eastern countries including Malaysia, Singapore has been affected. Asked about the impact of the Coronavirus on the Indian tourism business, Ajay Jaipuria, Managing Director of Travel Oysters, told IANS that outbound tourism has been severely affected, as China's tourism has almost come to a standstill. He said that travel to Malaysia and Singapore have also been affected by about 20 per cent, while tourists visiting Hong Kong have reduced by about 25 per cent. Jaipuria said that there has been a decrease in tourists coming from the Oriental countries. However, there has been a slight increase in tourists coming to and from Europe and America, because these countries have issued advisories to tourists to not to visit some countries, India is not included in the list. Devang Riya, Director of Visa.com, a visa-related business company, said that around 500 people were going to China, who have cancelled their tour. He said that at this time no one wants to go to China and Vietnam, although the number of tourists visiting Europe, America, Middle East and Australia has increased slightly. Dewang said, "People go China more for business purposes instead of visiting the country, but they are not visiting China at the moment. Our daily Visa productivity, which was 300, has been completely exhausted. If we talk about the whole trade, the daily visa would be 2,000-3,000, that is not happening at all because the people going to the Chinese embassy for the visa are negligible." However, hotel industry-related businessmen say that the Coronavirus outbreak in China has not yet had any significant impact on the hotel business in India. Sanjeev Nair, Managing Director of Welcome Heritage Group, a company associated with the hotel business, said his business has had a slight impact, especially in Rajasthan where the number of foreign tourists reaching his hotels has decreased. Another tourism-related businessman told that people who used to travel to the eastern countries for picnics, nowadays have started to travel to different tourist places of the country. In China, the number of people who died of the deadly coronavirus has increased to 2,118, while the number of people suffering from it has also risen to 74,576. Health officials gave this information on Thursday. (Pramod Kumar Jha can be contacted at pramod.j@ians.in) --IANS Now that most major carriers are selling usage-based car insurance, one of the pioneers in that sector is selling its technology to other carriers as a claims management tool. San Francisco-based Metromile announced that Tokio Marine Holdings had deployed a first notice of loss product through its $13 billion personal auto book of business in Japan. The Metromile Report product allows consumers to file claims using their smart phones and provides data to claims adjusters that helps detect fraud and apportion fault. Metromile, starting as a managing general agent in 2011, was one of the first companies to use technology to sell insurance based on the number of miles driven. The company became a licensed insurer in its own right in 2016 and now sells coverage throughout the United States. Metromile Communications Director Rick Chen said the platform that Metromile built to sell insurance on its own can be useful throughout the industry. We realized that the underwriting claims technology we were building for our flagship insurance product was going to be valuable to other insurers too, Chen said. We can help them reduce loss-adjustment expenses by up to 30 percent. Nine of the top 10 private passenger automobile insurers have usage-based insurance programs in place, according to the Insurance Information Institute. In 2018, there were 10 to 11 million telematics-enabled insurance policies in place, out of some 200 million insured automobiles, according to the Institute. Metromile is packaging its technology in a software-as-a-service offering called Metromile Enterprise. The platform includes Report the loss reporting tool and three other products. Metromile Replay is a virtual witness that recreates accidents based on data collected from the Pulse sensors that Metromile attaches to the onboard diagnostic ports in customers cars. Metromile Detect alerts adjusters if its programming finds reason to suspect a claim is fraudulent. Metromile Streamline provides back-office automation and customer intelligence. Tokio was the first carrier to deploy Metromiles technology, starting with the Streamline product in August 2018. In that same year, the Japan-based carrier was among investors that provided $90 million in equity during Metromiles Series E funding round. Tokio explained its investment in Metromile within its 2019 annual report. President and Group Chief Executive Officer Satoru Komiya said in a letter to shareholders that Metromile aspires to deliver the worlds highest level of response to automobile accidents. Metromile uses its world-leading technologies to automate the automobile insurance claims service process to the greatest degree possible, Komiya said. In a section of the annual report titled Prompt Claims Payments, the carrier said Metromile simplifies the claims reporting process for consumers while allowing clams adjusters to devote their energies toward complicated settlement negotiations. The same report featured Tokios other investments in technology. Tokio said Orbital Insight Inc. will speed up claims payments after natural disasters by using satellite images and artificial intelligence to determine the scope of flood damage. NTT Docomo uses artificial intelligence to propose optimal insurance coverage based on customer needs and budgets. Metromile joins some technology heavyweights in usage-based insurance technology sector. In January, Cambridge Telematics announced the launch of Claims Studio, an account reporting system built on its existing telematics technology, which monitors customers driving habits. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company was launched in 2010. The company says its technology is now used in more than 50 active programs with insurers and other partners in 25 countries. Munic, based in Villejuif, France, also provides a patented on-board telematics product that is used by several U.S. carriers. The company on Feb. 10 listed an initial public offering on the Euronext Growth stock exchange in Paris. Metromile reinvention as a technology provider comes after it took a beating as an insurance carrier. The company lost $2.5 million in 2018, $308,000 in 2017, and $2.9 million in 2016, according to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners. Metromile reported $87 million in net written premiums in 2019, according to NAIC, and $32 million in 2017, according to an examination report by the Delaware Department of Insurance released in January 2019. Topics Carriers Claims InsurTech Tech Hajia Hamdatu Ibrahim Haruna, Acting National Chairperson of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) has picked nomination forms to contest for the highest position of the party at the National Delegates Congress. The Congress is slated tentatively for Friday 27 and Saturday, 28 March at Kumasi in the Ashanti Region. Other leading members who have picked nomination forms at the close of business on Wednesday, February 19 were: three for the chairmanship: Hajia Hamdatu Haruna; Mr Kweku Quansah, an Architect and Mrs. Araba Bentsi Enchill. Mr John B. Daniels, Acting Deputy General Secretary has picked forms to contest for the Vice Chairmanship slot; while Mr Ebenezer Agbenya, a Teacher by profession; and Nana Yaa Jantuah have picked forms for the General Secretary position. Mr Moses Yirimambo Ambing and Mr Rashid Alao have picked forms to contest for the National Organiser, while Mr Nabila Basiru and Mr Osei Kofi Acquah has picked forms to contest for the National Youth Organiser; and Hajia Aisha Futa and Rose Tenadu both picked forms to contest for the National Women Organiser slot. Hajia Hamdatu Haruna in an interview with the Ghana News Agency urged supporters, aspirants and the rank and file of the party to conduct themselves in a civil manner and gave the assurance that, at the end of congress whoever emerged winner would have the support of the party. She called for party unity ahead of the congress and after, we need to focus on the general election. Our collective interest must supersede our individual interest. Use internal structures to address any operational challenges. The CPP Acting Chairperson called on Election Committee, Constituency, Regional and National Leaders to remain open to all candidates and offer each Aspirants the needed assistance at all time, we are one family and must work together at all times. Nominations, which was opened from February 6th is expected to end on Friday February 28th and nominations forms pegged at GHC2,000.00, a statement signed by Mr J. B. Daniels, Acting Deputy General Secretary and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Accra stated. According to the CPP Congress timetable, prior to the congress, a National Executive Council (NEC) meeting would be held on Friday, March 27 in Kumasi. The CPP Central Committee earlier decided to hold a joint Congress for the election of the flagbearer and the National Leadership to manage affairs of the party for the next four years. The CPP National Delegates Congress shall consist of all members of the National Executive Council; all Founding Members; all members of the Council of Elders; all Constituency Chairpersons, Secretaries, Treasurers, Organizers, Women Organizers, Youth Organizers and Education Secretaries. Others include; two other representatives from each Constituency, at least one of whom shall be a woman; a representative from each of the tertiary institution's chapters of the Party; and two representatives from each overseas branch approved by the Central Committee. The National Delegates Congress shall be presided over by a member of the Council of Elders appointed for the purpose by the National Executive Council. The National Delegates Congress shall elect the National Chairperson, National, Vice-Chairpersons, the General Secretary, the National Treasurer, the National Organiser, and the National Womens Organizer. 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 [February 20, 2020] Simplify Medical Selected to Present Two Podium Presentations at the 20th ISASS Annual Conference SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Simplify Medical Pty Ltd, maker of the Simplify cervical artificial disc, announced today the International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery (ISASS) has selected two abstracts on the Simplify Disc for podium presentations at the 20th Annual Conference. The largest international society meeting focused exclusively on spine surgery is being held at the Dr. Pedro Rossello Gonzalez Puerto Rico Convention Center in San Juan, PR from Wednesday, February 26th to Friday, February 28th 2020. 20th Annual International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery (ISASS) Date: Wednesday, February 26th 2020 Session: Best of Awards Time: 7:50 am Atlantic Standard Time (AST) Title: Comparison of MRI Artifacts of Cervical Artificial Discs Presenter: Domagoj Coric, MD Chief, Department of Neurosurgery, Atrium Healthcare Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Location: Ballroom B Date: Friday, February 28th 020 Session: Cervical Disc Replacement Time: 1:05 pm Atlantic Standard Time (AST) Title: Clinical Outcomes of a PEEK-on-Ceramic Total Disc Replacement: Data from Three Sites Participating in the Two-Level Cervical FDA IDE Trial Presenter: Richard Guyer, MD Co-Director Center for Disc Replacement, Fellowship Director Center for Disc Replacement at Texas Back Institute Location: Ballroom B The company will also have a booth for the conference attendees at location #303 in the convention center. About Simplify Disc Simplify Disc is a mobile-bearing cervical artificial disc designed to allow for advanced imaging capability of MRI, and to better match patients anatomies. It is composed of primarily non- metal materials (PEEK-on-ceramic) to permit the full diagnostic imaging capability of MRI and may eliminate the need for CT/Myelogram and CT imaging in order to minimize patient exposure to radiation. The Simplify Disc is anatomically designed, offering a broad range of disc heights including low height implant options to better fit patients anatomies. With no metal in its articulating components, the disc is also designed for low levels of wear to optimize long-term durability. Implantation of the Simplify Disc is accomplished in a straightforward, three-step procedure. About International Society for the Advancement of Spine Surgery (ISASS) ISASS is a special interest group of medical and associated specialists devoted to the field of clinical and structural amelioration and restoration of the joints of the spinal column. The societys focus is on restoration, or replacement and potential return to normal function lost by degenerative conditions of spinal joints, especially where prostheses or orthoses may be required to accomplish these goals. About Simplify Medical Simplify Medical is a medical device company focused on cervical spinal disc arthroplasty, using innovative, MRI-compatible materials designed to decrease the need for ionizing radiation and enhance patient options. Simplify Medical is located in Sunnyvale, California. To learn more, visit http://www.simplifymedical.com/. Company Contact: Simplify Medical, Inc. Kelsey Welch Director of Marketing +1-951-836-1062 [email protected] Investor Contact: LifeSci Advisors, LLC Bob Yedid +1-646-597-6989 [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Courtesy Hawaii Police Department On Wednesday, distraught Google product manager Sonam Saxena spoke to a local Hawaii newspaper, pleading for help in finding his missing wife. The couple from Washington state, who had two young daughters, were on their annual family vacation to Hawaii when Smriti Saxena disappeared at around 10 p.m. on Tuesday. Sonam said hed left his wife on a secluded beach south of Anaehoomalu Bay to take a 20-minute walk back to their Waikoloa Beach Marriott Resort room to retrieve Smritis asthma inhaler. When he returned, her purse and phone were there but she was gone. She got an asthma attack right there on the beach and she was feeling weak, he told West Hawaii Today. So, I said, Hey, you know what? You stay here, you have your phone with you and Ill just go to the room grab your inhaler and pump and come back. Sonam pleaded for Big Island residents to help find Smriti. He even tweeted a message to Hawaiis governor and shared it with his LinkedIn network. Can you please promote this tweet so that I can tell my daughters where their mom is, he wrote. However, on Wednesday, Hawaii Island Police arrested Sonam on one count of murder in the second-degree after a female body believed to be Smritis was found near Anaehoomalu Bay in the district of South Kohala. An autopsy is scheduled to determine the cause of death. Smriti, a 41-year-old business program manager for Microsoft, was last seen on Tuesday night at the Lava Lava Beach Club in Waikoloa, police said. Her husband, a 43-year-old who works in Googles Seattle office as the head of product for Googles Cloud Deployment Manager, said theyd taken a stroll to the beach shortly after. He told West Hawaii Today that he was disturbed when he came back from fetching the asthma inhaler to find his wife missing. He said he rushed back to the hotel to check if shed returned to the room before calling 911. Hawaii Police put out a missing persons alert for Smriti at about 1:30 a.m. the following morning, and discovered her body six hours later. By that afternoon, they had arrested Sonam. Story continues The pair had been married for 17 years with two daughters, aged 13 and 8. They celebrated the older daughters birthday in Hawaii each year, Sonam had said. According to his LinkedIn, Sonam moved to Seattle from India in 2008 and worked for SkyKick and Microsoft before joining Google. Read more at The Daily Beast. Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now! Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more. New Delhi, Feb 20 : Sedition accused Sharjeel Imam was being taken to Assam, his legal team said and claimed that they have been kept in the dark about the development. They also raised questions about the Delhi Police Crime Branch's motive. Sharjeel Imam, who is in judicial custody for his "chicken neck" remark about Assam and the Northeastern states, was arrested last month from his hometowm Jehanabad in Bihar. His legal team has reached Guwahati, however Iman is yet to arrive, his lawyers told IANS over the phone. The lawyer said: "We were not even informed when they sought his transit remand. We will raise objections about this. I am not aware what the Crime Branch is up to." Drastic containment efforts, including quarantining millions in Hubei, have started to pay off, officials say. At least 114 new deaths from the coronavirus outbreak were reported on Thursday, bringing the death toll to 2,118 in China. Chinas National Health Commission also reported 394 new confirmed cases, significantly lower than the 1,749 infections announced nationwide the previous day. A total of 74,576 victims are now infected. The drop, the largest in almost a month, came after Chinese authorities changed their methodology for counting cases in Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak, to only include those confirmed through genetic testing. Here are the latest updates: Click here for February 21 updates. Thursday, February 20 Virus may end by end of March: Chinese diplomat Chinas Consulate General in Karachi, Pakistan, said experts in China believe the peak of the epidemic (had) already arrived and it could be over by the end of March. I have seen that according to the experts in China, they are saying the peak of the epidemic has already arrived and it will come down no matter from the epicentre and across the whole of China, Li Bijian said. This will [be] coming down this week and next week, and the epidemic maybe go over by the end of March, he added. Ukraine protesters clash with police over China virus evacuees Dozens of people clashed with police outside a hospital in central Ukraine over government plans to quarantine evacuees from coronavirus-hit China in the facility. Six buses with the evacuees arrived at the medical center, accompanied by law enforcement officers, a video published by Ukrainian media showed. The policemen had to disperse the protesters to unblock a road that leads to the hospital and to create a cordon for the vehicles. WHO says no time for complacency as China coronavirus cases fall A continued decline in the number of new cases of coronavirus infections in China is encouraging, the World Health Organization said, but it is too early to know if this trend will continue. We are encouraged by this trend but this is no time for complacency, the WHOs director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, told a briefing in Geneva. He noted that the number of coronavirus cases in the rest of world was very low compared inside China, but added: That may not stay the same for very long. China backs Pakistan decision not to evacuate students A Chinese diplomat backed Pakistans decision not to evacuate Pakistani students from the province at the centre of Chinas coronavirus outbreak, a day after parents confronted government ministers demanding their children be brought home. Pakistan has ruled out bringing back more than 1,000 students in Hubei province and its capital Wuhan, where three-quarters of the more than 2,000 deaths from the outbreak have been recorded. If such large number of students come back, this will cost huge health operations for the Pakistani government. If the isolation facilities are not ready, this can cause another outbreak of this virus in Pakistan, Li Bijian, Consul General of China in Karachi, told reporters. China sees drop in new virus cases: Control efforts working China touted a big drop in new cases of the coronavirus as a sign it has contained the epidemic, but fears grew abroad after two former passengers of a quarantined cruise ship died in Japan and a cluster of infections increased in South Korea. Chinese officials said this week their drastic containment efforts, including quarantining tens of millions of people in Hubei and restricting movements in cities nationwide, have started to pay off. Results show that our control efforts are working, Foreign Minister Wang Yi said at a special meeting on the virus with Southeast Asian counterparts in Laos. Chinas forceful action has contained the spread of the virus inside China and also the spread of the virus to other parts of the world, Wang said, adding the country has the capacity and determination to overcome this outbreak at an early date. Russia losing 1bn roubles a day in trade with China The coronavirus outbreak of coronavirus in neighbouring China had caused a drop in trade with Russia of 1 billion roubles ($15.7m) a day, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said. Siluanov made the comments to the RBC online news portal. Switzerland delays high-level health meet over coronavirus Switzerland has postponed a high-level health summit that had been scheduled for next week because of the outbreak of the deadly new coronavirus. The decision was made because numerous participants must remain in their own countries to deal with the COVID-19 epidemic, Switzerland said in a statement, without announcing new dates. The Ministerial Summit on Patient Safety was due to take place in Montreux, in western Switzerland, on February 27 and 28. Iran call for religious gatherings to be suspended in Qom Iranian health officials urged all religious gatherings to be suspended in Qom, news agency ISNA said, after two more people tested positive for the coronavirus in the holy city, where two had previously died from infection. In all, three more people had tested positive for the virus, an Iranian health ministry spokesman said: Two people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Qom and one person in Arak, bringing the total of confirmed cases to five in Iran, spokesman Kianush Jahanpur said in a tweet. KLM airlines extends ban on China flights due to coronavirus KLM, the Dutch arm of Air France KLM, said it will extend a ban on flights to China because of the coronavirus outbreak. All KLM flights to Beijing and Shanghai have been suspended until 28 March 2020, the airline said on its website. Flights are expected to resume on 29 March 2020. Coronavirus cases on Japan cruise ship rise to 634 Another 13 people on board a cruise ship that was quarantined off the coast of Japan have been diagnosed with the new coronavirus, the countrys health ministry said. Confirmation of the new cases, from 52 additional test results, brought the total number of infections diagnosed on board the Diamond Princess so far to 634, the ministry said in a statement. 634 people on board the Diamond Princess have been diagnosed so far [Franck Robichon/EPA] 3 more infections reported in Iran Three patients have tested positive for the coronavirus in Iran, a health ministry spokesman said. Two people have tested positive for COVID-19 in Qom and one person in Arak, bringing the total of confirmed cases to five in Iran, Health Ministry spokesman Kianush Jahanpur said in a tweet. Two people died in Qom from the virus on Wednesday, bringing the total to five reported cases in the country. Ukraine residents protest evacuees landing Residents in central Ukraine have protested the arrival of a plane carrying evacuees from Chinas Hubei province, fearing they could be infected with the coronavirus despite authorities insisting there was no danger. Protesters from the village of Novi Sanzhary blocked the road leading to a sanatorium where the evacuees are due to be held in quarantine for at least two weeks to make sure they were not carrying the virus. In this handout photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, a group of medical personnel stand ready at the Ukrainian aircraft chartered by the Ukrainian government for evacuation from the Chinese city of Wuhan [The Associated Press] South Korea reports first death South Korea health authorities have reported the first death from coronavirus in the country. Infections have ballooned in recent days, raising the total to 104, with many traced to a church in the central city of Daegu. On Thursday alone, the country announced 53 new cases. Workers wearing protective gear spray disinfectant against the coronavirus in front of a church in Daegu, South Korea [Lee Moo-ryul/The Associated Press] Egyptair to resume flights to China from next week Egyptair said in a statement it will resume some flights to and from China starting next week. The national airline suspended all flights to China in early February over the coronavirus outbreak. Egyptair has decided to resume a flight weekly every Thursday, it said. China lab says conspiracy theories hurting efforts to curb virus An outbreak of disinformation in China and elsewhere has hurt global efforts to combat the new coronavirus, said a specialist infectious disease lab located at the epicentre of the epidemic. The lab has been at the heart of a number of conspiracy theories, including that it artificially synthesised the virus. In a statement, the state-backed Wuhan Institute of Virology said internet rumours had received close attention from all walks of life and caused great harm to our research staff on the front line of scientific research. A man checks the temperature on a street in Qibao, an old river town on the outskirts of Shanghai, China [Aly Song/Reuters] Australia extends ban on China arrivals into fourth week Australia will extend a ban on arrivals from mainland China into a fourth week to contain the risk of exposure to the coronavirus, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said. The National Security Committee of Cabinet has today decided that the continuing coronavirus infections in mainland China make it necessary to continue the travel restrictions on foreign nationals entering Australia for a further week to 29 February, Morrison said in a statement. Employees work in the DaAn Gene laboratory in Guangzhou on developing faster testing [EPA] China says media spreading racial discrimination must pay the price Media organisations that spread racial discrimination and maliciously smear China must pay the price, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang said, following Beijings decision to revoke the press credentials of three Wall Street Journal correspondents. Geng told reporters during a press briefing that China was not interested in the division of labour at the Wall Street Journal in response to a question on why it is acting against the papers journalists, who had no involvement in the publication of a opinion column in the paper that the Chinese government found offensive. Read more here Mayor of South Korean city urges 2.5 million people to stop going out The mayor of South Korean city of Daegu has urged its 2.5 million people to stop going outside as its virus cases spike. Mayor Kwon Young-jin made the request in a televised news conference after the southeastern city and nearby towns reported 35 additional cases of infection with the new coronavirus on Thursday. Health authorities say 28 of those 35 patients went to church services attended by a previously confirmed virus patient. South Korea has reported a total of 82 cases so far. Japan reports two deaths from Diamond Princess cruise ship Japans health ministry reported on Thursday that two elderly cruise ship passengers who were hospitalised with the viral infection have died. The ship had a total of 621 confirmed cases of the virus, the most in any single location outside of China. South Korea reports 31 new cases of coronavirus, bringing total to 82 South Korea reported 31 new cases of coronavirus on Thursday, bringing the number of people infected in the country to 82, Koreas Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said in a statement. Of the new cases, 23 cases were traced to church services that a 61-year-old patient who tested positive had attended in the central city of Daegu, the agency said. On Wednesday, Shincheonji Church posted a statement on its website confirming 10 of its members were infected by the woman, who had attended services. A recovered patient is discharged from a newly built makeshift hospital for novel coronavirus patientsin Wuhan in Chinas central Hubei province [China Out/AFP] Japan cruise ship passengers arrive in Australia A group of Australians landed in Darwin airport on Thursday after being evacuated from the virus-stricken cruise ship in Japan. About 180 nationals and permanent residents had earlier left Japan on a Qantas plane chartered by the Australian government, local media reported. The evacuees had been confined on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama for the past two weeks. The ship had a total of 621 confirmed cases of the virus, the most of any single location outside of China. Pompeo denounces Chinas expulsions of WSJ reporters US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has denounced Chinas expulsion of three Wall Street Journal newspaper reporters and urged Beijing to respect freedom of the press. Mature, responsible countries understand that a free press reports facts and expresses opinion. The correct response is to present counter-arguments, not restrict speech, Pompeo said in a statement. The move follows a complaint about the headline of an opinion article, which referred to China as the Real Sick Man of Asia and a decision by Washington earlier this week to treat five government-controlled Chinese news organisations as foreign government functionaries. All Ukrainians being evacuated from China are healthy: Deputy health minister All Ukrainians being evacuated from Chinas Hubei province this week are in a healthy condition, Dmytro Koval, the deputy health minister, told reporters. Everyone is healthy, he told a televised briefing. There is no threat. Ukraine is evacuating 48 of its citizens in response to the outbreak. They are expected to arrive on a charter plane at 8am local time (06:00 GMT) and be put in quarantine for two weeks. Several foreigners are being evacuated on the same flight. Man with coronavirus in Egypt recovering, no longer a carrier: WHO The World Health Organization (WHO) said that the person previously confirmed as having coronavirus in Egypt is on his way to recovery, after latest tests showed he was no longer carrying the virus. He will remain in quarantine until the full 14-day period is over and will be undergoing further required tests to ensure he was fully recovered, WHO spokeswoman Inas Hamam wrote in an email. Two Iranians die after testing positive for virus Two Iranians have died in hospital after testing positive for the new coronavirus in the central city of Qom, the head of the citys University of Medical Sciences told Irans Mehr news agency, saying the two had died of a respiratory illness. Separately, Health Ministry official Kianush Jahanpur said in a post on Twitter that both patients died in ICU due to age and immune system deficiency. Iran had confirmed the two cases the first in the country earlier on Wednesday. Read the full story here. Surviving coronavirus in Wuhan Scrambled eggs with tomatoes thats the first dish Yangyang made for herself after being discharged from No 7 Hospital in Wuhan. After escaping what she describes as a near-death experience, Yangyang is now one of the estimated 14,000 people in mainland China who have beaten the COVID-19 virus. Read the full story here. Some 14,000 people have reportedly recovered from coronavirus in China [Stringer/EPA] Malaysia firm offers AI-based profiling of Chinese visitors for virus Malaysias MYEG Services Berhad said it had developed a coronavirus risk-profiling system for visitors from China and was offering the artificial intelligence-based serviced to the government of Malaysia and the Philippines. The fully-automated system analyses a vast number of available data points, including visitors previous known whereabouts as well as heart rate and blood pressure readings crossed-referenced against public transportation ridership and exposure to locations with incidences of infections, MYEG said in a statement to the stock exchange. HIV patients in China risk running out of drugs: UNAIDS HIV patients in China risk running out of life-saving drugs because quarantines and lockdowns aimed at containing the coronavirus disease outbreak mean they cannot replenish vital medicine stocks, the United Nations AIDS agency said. Nearly a third of the more than 1,000 HIV-positive people surveyed by UNAIDS said lockdowns and restrictions on movement in China meant they were at risk of running out of their HIV treatment in the coming days. Of these, almost half 48.6 percent said they did not know where to collect their next antiretroviral therapy refill form. Ukraine protesters clash with police over China virus evacuees Dozens of people clashed with police outside a hospital in central Ukraine over government plans to quarantine evacuees from coronavirus-hit China in the facility. Six buses with the evacuees arrived at the medical center, accompanied by law enforcement officers, a video published by Ukrainian media showed. The policemen had to disperse the protesters to unblock a road that leads to the hospital and to create a cordon for the vehicles. Read the updates from Wednesday, February 19 here. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 20) President Rodrigo Duterte affirmed Thursday his trust for Immigration chief Jaime Morente whose bureau is embroiled in an alleged scandal which has supposedly granted Chinese nationals easy entry into the country for a fee. Si Morente, mahal ko yan kasi chief of police yan dito (Davao City), mabait yan, Duterte said in a speech before graduates of the Public Safety Officers Basic Course and the Public Safety Officers Advance Course in Davao City. [Translation: I love Morente because he was the chief of police here, hes kind.] Duterte, however, suggested that Morente was unable to act on the alleged bribery scheme called pastillas after the rolls of money Immigration officials supposedly receive from Chinese nationals. Hindi niya kaya, sabi ko sa kanya. Limitado rin kasi, the President said. [Translation: He couldn't do it, I told him. There are limits as well.] He said he has relieved officials allegedly involved in the bribery scandal and ordered Morente to file charges against them so they will eventually be dismissed. Immigration spokesperson Dana Sandoval said they have removed 18 employees from their posts, which comes days after the Senate investigation that exposed the alleged payoff scheme that gives Chinese nationals easy access into the country. During the third Senate probe on the issue, an immigration officer revealed Chinese nationals pay 10,000 as service fee or grease money for a special entry treatment. The grease money is higher for Chinese fugitives, whistleblower and Immigration Officer Allison "Alex" Chiong told a Senate body. Once the Chinese national arrives, the immigration officer on duty would leave his booth and tell the foreigner to follow him to an office, where the visitor's passport is processed for entry. This is a departure from the standard practice where all foreigners are screened through immigration booths in ports. Fugitives would be allowed entry without even scanning their passports to avoid arrest, Chiong said. Sandoval said Tuesday that five immigration officials assigned at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport have been relieved pending investigation on the "pastillas" scheme, which she expects to last 15 days. She also said that the probe could be expanded to cover other international airports. Presidential Spokesperson Salvador Panelo said the pastillas scheme and the manner by which Morente is running the bureau will be discussed in the next Cabinet meeting. Minnesota Congressman Announces He Has Stage 4 Cancer Rep. Jim Hagedorn (R-Minn.) announced on Feb. 19 that he has been receiving treatment for cancer for the past year, but he has no plans to step down. The Minnesota Republican, who was elected in 2018, was diagnosed with stage 4 kidney cancer in February 2019, he said in a news release. Today, one year later, I am happy to say I feel great and continue to perform my job in Congress unimpeded. I have not missed even a single vote due to illness, he said, adding that he will keep fighting cancer and fighting for America and the people of southern Minnesota. Hagedorn said the cancer was discovered by chance and he received the diagnosis exactly two months after marrying my wife, Jennifer, and just six weeks into my job as the First Districts congressman, according to the release. READ my statement on my battle with cancer. Im pleased to report that Im feeling great, and I will continue to fight cancer and fight for America and the people of southern Minnesota. #MN01 pic.twitter.com/6n6RHVANGl Congressman Jim Hagedorn (@RepHagedorn) February 20, 2020 Ive been able to do my job, make hundreds of stops across the First District, hold 18 town hall meetings, and make 39 round trips to and from Washington, D.C. to perform my legislative duties, he continued. I am a candidate for reelection in 2020. The congressman wrote that he hopes the diagnosis will provide hope to others that those who have been diagnosed with a serious illness can still live normal lives. His doctor, Lance Pagliaro, said in the statement that the Hagedorn has responded well to immunotherapy, which has been key to his recovery. Today my husband MN-01 Congressman Jim Hagedorn, announced he was diagnosed on February 15, 2019, with stage four kidney cancer. Jim loves our country and serving in Congress more than anything in the world. We appreciate your thoughts and well wishes. https://t.co/lDPL3dwKFp Jennifer Carnahan (@jkcarnah) February 20, 2020 Hagedorns wife, Jennifer Carnahan, said the congressman loves our country and serving in Congress more than anything in the world. Carnahan is the chairwoman of Minnesotas Republican Party. His Democratic opponent, Dan Feehan, wished him a full and speedy recovery in a Feb. 19 Facebook post. Hagedorn isnt the only congressman currently suffering from stage 4 cancer; Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) announced in December 2019 that he was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. According to medical website Cancer.net, stage 4 means the tumor has spread to any other organ, such as the lungs, bones, or the brain or the tumor has spread to areas beyond Gerotas fascia and extends into the adrenal gland on the same side of the body as the tumor, possibly to lymph nodes, but not to other parts of the body. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 08:08:04|Editor: zyl Video Player Close Artists paint in front of the language martyrs' memorial monument in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on Feb. 19, 2020. Bangladesh is preparing to celebrate the International Mother Language Day which falls on Feb. 21. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared Feb. 21 as the International Mother Language Day. (Str/Xinhua) West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressing concern over 'steady reduction' of Central funds to the state and 'inordinate delay' in their release. The BJP called the letter a 'political ploy to befool people' ahead of civic polls in the state. Kolkata: West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday wrote a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expressing concern over "steady reduction" of Central funds to the state and "inordinate delay" in their release. The BJP called the letter a "political ploy to befool people" ahead of civic polls in the state. In her letter, Banerjee asserted that despite the decline in central funds the state's GSDP grew by 10.4 percent against the national GDP growth of 5 percent in 2019-20. "I write to you with deep concern regarding steady reduction of central funds to the state and also inordinate delay in release of funds to us from the Government of India," Banerjee wrote. She said the state is yet to receive its share of central funds totalling Rs 50,000 crore till January 2020. This "extradordinary situation" is creating major difficulties in meeting obligations for the welfare of the state, she said. The letter said, "You will, no doubt, appreciate that both the central and the state governments are expected to fulfil the constitutional obligations and the commitments to the people, so that respective governments run smoothly ... However West Bengal is being deprived of the huge outstanding dues." Banerjee said West Bengal's index of industrial production (IIP) in April-November 2019-20 stood at 3.1 percent against the national figure of 0.6 percent, while growth of the services sector at 16.4 percent was much higher than the national number of 6.9 percent. "I would, therefore, urge upon you to kindly take all necessary action to address the issues mentioned above so that the state government can usher in more and more development works for the people of the state," she added. Reacting to the letter, BJP national secretary Rahul Sinha wondered why did it take the chief minister so long to write it. "What was the state government doing for so long? Just ahead of the municipal elections, all of a sudden, it has realised that it has been deprived of funds. This is merely a political ploy to befool the people of the state," he said. Elections to 107 civic bodies in the state and the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) are likely to be held in April. The municipal polls are being billed as 'mini Assembly elections' ahead of the 2021 state polls. Salem/UNI: In a gruesome tragedy, six tourists from Nepal were killed and 28 others injured after two Omni buses collided each other at Naripallam near Omalur in this district of Tamil Nadu on Wednesday midnight. Police said, a group of 34 tourists from Kathmandu were proceeding to Rajasthan in an Omni bus after visiting Kanyakumari, when the accident occurred. The Nepal tourists had decided to take rest in a temple mandapam (hall) for the night and to continue their journey on Thursday morning. The driver of Omni bus carrying Nepal tourists reportedly made a sharp turn to move to the other lane of the road without noticing another Omni bus approaching on the lane. The other Omni bus that was proceeding to Thiruvananthapuram from Bengaluru hit the tourist Omni bus. Six Nepalese, including a woman were killed in the accident. The injured were admitted to the government hospital. Further investigation is on. By Hyonhee Shin and Ryan Woo SEOUL/BEIJING (Reuters) - The streets of South Korea's fourth-largest city were abandoned on Thursday, with residents holed up indoors after dozens of people caught the new coronavirus in what authorities described as a "super-spreading event" at a church. The deserted shopping malls and cinemas of Daegu, a city of 2.5 million people, became one of the most striking images outside China of an outbreak that international authorities are trying stop from becoming a global pandemic. New research suggesting the virus is more contagious than previously thought added to the alarm. In China, where the virus has killed more than 2,100 people and infected nearly 75,000, officials changed their methodology for reporting infections, creating new doubt about data they have cited as evidence their containment strategy is working. U.S. stocks fell on Thursday and gold prices hit their highest in seven years as investors sought safe havens over worries about the coronavirus' economic impact. [MKTS/GLOB] U.S. manufacturers are scrambling for alternative sources as supply chains in China, the workshop of the world, dry up. "If you look at today's chain of supply, if China suffers, everyone in the world will suffer as well," China's ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Chen Xu, told reporters. Online site for coronavirus news - https://www.reuters.com/live-events/coronavirus-6-id2921484 In South Korea, Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin told residents to stay indoors after 90 people who worshipped at one church showed symptoms and dozens of new cases were confirmed. The church had been attended by a 61-year-old woman who tested positive, known as "Patient 31." South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the outbreak there as a "super-spreading event." "We are in an unprecedented crisis," Kwon told reporters, adding that all members of the church would be tested. "We've asked them to stay at home isolated from their families." Story continues Describing the abandoned streets, resident Kim Geun-woo, 28, told Reuters by telephone: "It's like someone dropped a bomb in the middle of the city. It looks like a zombie apocalypse." South Korea now has 104 confirmed cases of the flu-like virus, and reported its first death. In China, officials have been pointing to evidence that new cases are declining as proof they are succeeding in keeping the virus largely contained to Hubei province and its capital, Wuhan, where the virus initially emerged. "We are encouraged by this trend but this is no time for complacency," World Health Organization (WHO) Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing in Geneva. Some 25 other countries have reported 1,076 cases to the WHO, including five in Iran, the latest affected, he said. As a result, Kuwait Airways has suspended flights to Iran. Iranian health officials urged all religious gatherings to be suspended in Qom, news agency ISNA said on Thursday, after two more people tested positive for the coronavirus in the holy city, where two died of it this week. Graphic: Tracking the novel coronavirus - https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-MAP/0100B59S39E/index.html BEIJING MAY BE NEXT HOT SPOT Japan reported the deaths of two elderly passengers from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship on Thursday, the first fatalities from aboard the ship where more than 630 cases account for the biggest cluster of infection outside China. Japan, due to host the Olympics in July, began allowing passengers who test negative to leave and hundreds disembarked on Wednesday and Thursday. China's Global Times newspaper reported 36 new cases at one Beijing hospital as of Thursday, a sharp increase from nine cases two weeks earlier. It said this had led "many to fear a potential explosion of infection numbers in the capital." China has imposed severe controls in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, to halt the spread of the virus, and has taken urgent steps to keep the overall economy from crashing. On Thursday, its central bank cut a borrowing rate, while the authorities extended an order for businesses in Wuhan to shut down until March 11. Schools in the city, which had been due to re-open on Friday, will also stay shut. "The economic and social impact of course is obvious, to what extent I cannot pre-judge. It is safe to say the cost will be very much," said China's U.N. ambassador Chen, adding that masks, protective gear and respiratory machines are needed. Revisions to China's methodology for confirming cases have raised doubts about its data. Under the latest methodology, which excludes cases identified by chest X-rays, China reported fewer than 400 new cases over the past day, less than a quarter of the number it had been finding in recent days under the previous broader method. (Reporting by Hyonhee Shin in Seoul and Ryan Woo in Beijing; Additional reporting by Linda Sieg, Chang-Ran Kim, Akiko Okamoto, Ju-min Park and Daewong Kim in Tokyo, Sangmi Cha in Seoul, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Parisa Hafezi in Dubai, Keith Zhai and Patpicha Tanakasempipat in Vientiane, Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva and Kate Kelland in London; Writing by Peter Graff, Nick Macfie and Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Angus MacSwan, Frances Kerry and Bill Berkrot) KYIV, Ukraine Ukraines effort to evacuate more than 70 people from China over the outbreak of a new virus faced setbacks Thursday as weather conditions delayed the return of the evacuees and protests broke out near a hospital where they were to be quarantined. Several hundred residents in Ukraines Poltava region protested seekingto stop officials from quarantining the evacuees in their village because they feared becoming infected. Demonstrators put up road blocks and burned tires, while Ukrainian media reported that there were clashes with police. More than 10 people were detained, and Ukraines Interior Minister Arsen Avakov personally visited the site of the protests to calm the crowd down. Avakov urged the protesters not to fall for provocations and be understanding of the necessity for these temporary measures. The situation is rather heated, Poltava regional police spokesman Yuri Sulayev said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy weighed in, saying the protests showed not the best side of our character. He tried to reassure people that the quarantined evacuees wouldnt pose any danger to residents of the village of Novi Sarzhany. In a statement published on his Facebook page, Zelenskiy said the people evacuated from China are healthy and will live in a closed medical center run by the National Guard in the village as a precaution. In the next two weeks it will probably be the most guarded facility in the country, Zelenskiy said. In the early hours of Thursday, a plane with 45 Ukrainians and 27 other foreign nationals took off from Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak that has infected more than 75,000 people worldwid e and killed over 2,100. Authorities said those evacuated included people from Belarus, Kazakhstan, Argentina, Ecuador, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Panama, as well as other countries. The plane stopped off in Kazakhstan to drop off Kazakh passengers. Later, it sought to land in Kharkiv, a city in northeastern Ukraine, but could not due to bad weather conditions. Instead it flew to Kyiv to refuel, and eventually arrived in Kharkiv. Also Thursday, the Russian Embassy in Japan said that two more Russians aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Japan have been diagnosed with the virus. That raises to three the number of Russians on the ship confirmed to have the virus. The two will be transferred to a hospital in Japan for treatment, according to the embassy. In Slovenia, authorities said two of six Slovenian citizens who were on the cruise ship have been hospitalized in Japan after testing positive for the virus. The four others have tested negative. Two of them have arrived back in Slovenia and will be quarantined at home for two weeks. The Diamond Princess has been docked in the Yokohama port near Tokyo since Feb. 4, when 10 people on board tested positive for the virus. So far 621 cases of the disease, which has been named COVID-19, have been confirmed among the the Diamond Princesss original 3,711 people on board. Russia so far has reported only two cases of the disease on its soil. Two Chinese nationals diagnosed with the virus and hospitalized in two different regions of Siberia in late January have recovered and have been released from hospitals. ___ Associated Press writer Daria Litvinova in Moscow contributed reporting. ___ See more AP coverage of the virus outbreak at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak 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. Halfway through the school year, and two months after the Orleans Parish school district said it would ramp up oversight of bus safety, four public schools in the city have still failed to ensure that all the buses they use to transport children across the city are properly licensed, officials said this month. NOLA Public Schools Superintendent Henderson Lewis Jr. said that Benjamin Franklin Elementary Mathematics and Science School, IDEA Oscar Dunn School, Sophie B. Wright Charter School and Warren Easton Charter High School still weren't in compliance with bus safety standards. Lewis had set a February deadline for all buses to come into compliance with the city's permitting laws. The ultimatum followed a December crash that injured at least nine students when a school bus overturned on Interstate 10. He said schools needed to either show that all buses were properly permitted or submit corrective action plans by Feb. 13. He threatened unspecified "increased accountability actions" for those not hitting the deadline. But Henderson said last week that the charters "have demonstrated significant progress" and he was giving them another extension. Leaders of most of the four charter schools said they were still working to get a few remaining buses licensed, and that they expected the process to be done by the end of February or March. "An extra layer of accountability is being applied to ensure our buses are code-compliant, which required additional time," Warren Easton Principal Mervin Jackson said. Data indicate that bus regulation in general is being more effectively enforced now than it was at the beginning of the school year in August, when city officials first took over the task of school bus licensing. 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 Trey Caruso, a spokesman for Mayor LaToya Cantrell's office, said that as of Feb. 14, 625 of 652 school buses nearly 96% had passed all inspections. He noted that the city had extended deadlines for companies to bring buses in for inspection. In December, only 430 of 740 licensed school buses in New Orleans, or roughly 58%, had proper city inspection permits. Caruso said some bus operators had opted to surrender licenses for a number of their vehicles, effectively agreeing to take them off the street. Orleans Parish has 86 schools, all of which are run by charter organizations or other nonprofits. Of them, 75 are authorized by the local district, while some are overseen by the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Last year, the New Orleans City Council adopted new school bus rules, to be enforced by the city's Ground Transportation Bureau, requiring drivers to undergo background checks and bus companies to bring their fleets in for regular inspections. But the lack of a centrally operated bus system has made it hard to enforce rules. At the Orleans Parish School Board meeting in February, district officials announced they'd formed a working group with the city's permitting office, the Regional Transit Authority and other groups to "identify long-term solutions" for improved bus safety. Board member Leslie Ellison requested that parents and the Louisiana State Police or New Orleans Police Department be included in the working group. Lewis said in February the district would do on-site spot checks with school bus vendors until all schools are compliant. "We have made significant progress, but we wont be satisfied until 100% of the fleet is meeting standards," Lewis said. CERAWeek, an oil and gas industry conference that will bring thousands of international visitors to Houston March 9-13, is taking precautions to protect attendees amid concerns about the coronavirus outbreak in China. Organized by the global energy data firm IHS Markit, the conference attracts more than 4,000 high-level politicians, company executives and journalists. But this year's gathering is taking place amid the backdrop of the coronavirus outbreak that began in China and has killed more than 2,100 people and infected 75,000 more around the world. So far, there have been no confirmed cases in Houston and the overall risk for Texans remains low but CERAWeek organizers announced that they have partnered with Houston Methodist Hospital to ensure the safety of attendees, including providing 24-hour access to hospital staff and services. Further details weren't available. "The safety and health of CERAWeek participants is our highest priority," organizers said in a statement. "We will continue to follow national and international guidance regarding the situation. As in previous years we are coordinating with all relevant agencies, including local and national public health officials, to ensure a safe and productive environment at the conference." Outbreak: Mobile World Congress canceled due to coronavirus concerns CERAWeek is moving forward with its conference as fears about the virus have prompted others to be canceled. Just last week, Facebook canceled its 5,000-person Global Marketing Summit in San Francisco because of concerns about the virus. Organizers of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona did the same days earlier. Under a Jan. 31 presidential order, foreign nationals who have traveled to China 14 days before arriving in the United States, won't be allowed to enter the United States. American citizens and lawful permanent residents and their families who traveled to China within a 14-day period will be allowed into the country, but they'll be redirected to one of 11 airports to undergo health screening. China is the largest buyer of oil and gas in the world, so the travel restrictions will no doubt affect some CERAWeek visitors. The conference normally receives a large number of delegates from the Asian superpower but this year, with participants from China not being allowed into the United States, they might have to watch panel discussions, speeches and other events online. "We do regret that delegates from China will not be able to attend this years conference due to travel measures already in place in the United States," conference organizers said. "We are exploring solutions to provide expanded virtual engagement options for those delegates and look forward to their participation again next year." Fuel Fix: Get daily energy news headlines in your inbox Another Wuhan doctor is reported dead by communist party officials as one of the fatalities of coronavirus. On Tuesday, Liu Zhiming, who was the Wuhan hospital director of Wuhan Wuchang Hospital, died from a viral infection at 10:30 am. Before him, Li Wenliang also died from exposure to coronavirus and made news about the circumstances of his death. He was punished by the local officials for whistle-blowing about the virus before Beijing acknowledged the pandemic that came from Wuhan. Reports indicate that the origin of coronavirus came from a seafood market. Many medical workers are risking life and limb, to help prevent the rapid spread of the virus, but more cases are continually reported every day. On the reported death of Zhiming, the Communist Party wrote on social media the director has died from viral infection. Another contradictory post said that he was still alive, but did not die from the virus yet. On Monday night, his official death was not without questions, and it was similar to the circumstances of Wenliang's passing. Errors in reporting the time of actual death and the inconsistencies of the official statements have a negative effect on the actual situation. The whole misinterpretation in the government posts was attributed to one of Zhiming's friend, according to Wuhan officials. Another source of the official statements is a relative of Zhiming, who reportedly said the hospital was trying to save the doctor. Also read: Chinese Central Bank Disinfects, Destroys Cash to Reduce Coronavirus Infection After these confusing social media messages, the officials are now quiet on the death of Zhiming. Similar to the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) epidemic in 2003, the Chinese leadership is under suspicion of a cover-up to keep the true numbers of the coronavirus pandemic under wraps. But Beijing has requested transparency regarding the rising death toll that exceeds SARS or MERS. A grim number was reported by Chinese officials that has 1,716 infected while on the job. Meanwhile, already six have died from assumed viral exposure to coronavirus. The reaper's scythe has earned a total of 1,873 death since the start of the China coronavirus pandemic. Total lockdown on the mainland Chinese who cannot leave cities and several cities are no man's land, with viral contagion spiralling out of control. Plus, China's economy is getting from dealing with the coronavirus. The deceased Liu Zhiming, Director at the Wuchang hospital, was a neurosurgeon and he worked with the coronavirus cases at Wuhan. Before getting infected by the virus and dying early due to complications associated with it. His death may have been aggravated by the loss of supplies, and vital equipment that is not enough to cope with the rampaging coronavirus in China. Many have criticized the inability of the government to support medical personnel, who are at the breaking point as the virus seems to overwhelm all efforts. Last Tuesday, government news organs cited the efforts of the medical field to stave off the virus from getting any worse. But, their efforts make them martyrs for the cause in curing the infected of the contagion. Though most deaths are in the mainland, others died from the China coronavirus in other countries. As the Wuhan Director becomes one of the coronavirus collateral deaths, many are asking if a cure is coming soon. Related article: Labs Take Frantic Efforts to Detect Hidden Coronavirus Infections Soonest @ 2022 HNGN, All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. President Akufo-Addo has urged Ghanaians to eat well and avoid being obese. Too many of us are overweight he said sparking laughter in the house while presenting his fourth State of the Nation Address (SoNA) in Parliament on Thursday. According to him. "as the nation has made progress in eradicating the communical diseases that used to be the main cause of mortality; were in danger of falling into the lifestyle disease traptoo many of us are overweight and obesity is an increasing problem even among young people. The food we eat, mode of cooking and the lack of exercise are all now having a great impression on our health". He further urged that "it is time we all learn to take responsibility for our individual health and accept that our health is determined by our lifestyle" Listen to him in the video below 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 Guwahati local court sends Sharjeel Imam to 4-day police remand India oi-PTI Guwahati, Feb 21: The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student Sharjeel Imam has been sent to four-day police remand by a local court in Guwahati. Imam was arrested on the charges of sedition, and was brought to Assam on Thursday evening for interrogation. Imam was brought to the city from New Delhi by train and then taken to a hospital for medical checkup, Guwahati Police Commissioner Munna Prasad Gupta told PTI. After his checkup, Imam was produced before the chief judicial magistrate's court which sent him to four day's police remand, he said. The police had sought 14 days' remand to interrogate him. The student, who came into the limelight during the ongoing protests at Shaheen Bagh against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, was arrested from Bihar's Jehanabad on January 28 in a case of allegedly making inflammatory speeches at the Jamia Millia Islamia University and in Aligarh. Imam was slapped with a sedition case after his alleged speeches went viral on social media wherein he was heard speaking about Assam's possible secession from the country in the wake of the CAA. A case under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) has been registered against him in Assam. Chargesheet filed in Jamia violence case, Delhi police names Sharjeel Imam as instigator On Tuesday, the Delhi police had named Imam as "instigator" in its charge sheet filed against 17 people in a case related to violence during protests against the CAA at New Friends Colony near Jamia Millia Islamia last year. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Friday, February 21, 2020, 2:01 [IST] Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh on Thursday said the special investigation team of Punjab police will now probe into the cases of the desecration of religious texts and police firing incidents in 2015 as the Supreme Court has rejected the CBI plea to investigate them. Singh made the announcement in the state assembly on the first day of its Budget session. I want to make an announcement and I think the entire House will appreciate it. You all know about the issue of Behbal Kalan and Bargari (sacrilege cases) which had been going on for long. We started investigations. The previous (SAD-BJP) government had handed over the inquiry into matter to the CBI. "The CBI in the lower court filed a closure report and thereafter they moved the Supreme Court, saying this matter should be looked into by them. "It is a matter of joy today that the decision of the House (handing over the probe to SIT) has been upheld by the SC and the CBI has lost the case," he added. "Now we will go to the bottom of the case, Singh told the House drawing applause from the treasury benches and AAP members. Singh also assured the House that the SIT investigation into the 2015 sacrilege incidents atBargari and Burj Jawahar Singh Wala villagesand police firing incidents at Behbal Kalan and Kotkapura in Faridkot would be taken to its logical conclusion. Two persons, who were part of the anti-sacrilege protesters, were killed in the police firing at Behbal Kalan in 2015. Amarinder Singh said the apex court has vindicated the state government's stand by rejecting the CBI plea to let them probe the cases. Describing the Apex court decision as major legal victory for the state government, an official statement later said the Supreme Court on Thursday morning allowed the state to carry on its investigations into the sacrilege cases and the subsequent police firing in these cases. During the hearing in the apex court, a division bench of justices Rohington Nariman and Ravindra Bhatt dismissed the CBI plea, said Punjab Advocate General Atul Nanda in a statement later. Previous SAD-BJP government had handed over three sacrilege cases -- theft of a 'bir' (copy) of Guru Granth Sahib from a Burj Jawahar Singh Wala gurdwara on June 1, 2015, putting up of hand-written sacrilegious posters in Bargari and Burj Jawahar Singh Wala on September 25 and torn pages of the holy book being found at Bargari on October 12, 2015 in Faridkot to the CBI for probe. The Punjab assembly, however, in 2018 had passed a resolution, withdrawing the probe from the CBI and handing over the matter to SIT of Punjab police. Later last year, the CBI filed its closure report in the CBI court at Mohali, but took a u-turn later praying before the court to keep the report in abeyance andsaid the investigation was still continuing. The Congress-led government had accused the Centre of pressurising the CBI at the behest of Badals to scuttle the probe. Main opposition AAP MLAAman Arora, meanwhile, hailed the SC decision and urged the CM on the floor of the House to ensure time-bound investigations into the cases so that the guilty could be punished at the earliest. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Keshav Prasad Maurya on Thursday suggested harnessing of untapped potential of key sectors to boost cooperation with Japan. Addressing FICCI's Forum of Parliamentarians in partnership with the Embassy of Japan, Maurya shared his views on improving ties of that country with Uttar Pradesh. "India and Japan share strong cultural and civilizational ties and have engaged in various institutional dialogue mechanisms to strengthen bilateral as well strategic partnership," he noted. Maurya said the bilateral relations between the two countries have set an example for the international community. The 4th Dialogue with States titled Japan's Connect with Uttar Pradesh was part of the series launched by FICCI to highlight the potential of Indian states and the socio economic connect with Japan. Previous dialogues were successfully held in Patna, Shillong and Jaipur, FICCI Secretary General Dilip Chenoy said. Ambassador of Japan to India Satoshi Suzuki in his keynote address favoured greater collaboration between Japan and Uttar Pradesh in economic, cultural and educational spheres. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A day after Ram Janmabhoomi Nyas chief Nritya Gopal Das was named the chairman of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerath Kshetra Trust, he claimed more land will be acquired for the construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya if required. Talking exclusively to IANS on Thursday, Das said the Ram Janmabhoomi movement has finally culminated and a grand temple will be built at the birth place of Lord Ram. On being made the chairman of the temple trust, Das said he will discharge his responsibility with the utmost honesty. According to him, the next meeting of the trust will deliberate on the model and design of the temple which is likely to be the same as proposed by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and then other work will be taken up. The temple trust chairman clarified that only those stones will be used for the temple construction which have been kept for the purpose. More stones will be brought if required, he said. About 70 per cent work of the temple construction has been completed. The next meeting will be held after Holi in consultation with Nripendra Mishra, former principal secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been chosen chairman of the Ram Temple Complex Development Committee. Nritya Gopal Das said the cost of the temple construction will be met from donations only and no government help will be sought. "Most probably the work of temple construction will start in 6 months from now, and since the temple will be a grand one, it may take more than two years to complete," he said, adding, "when CM Yogi and PM Modi are associated with the work of the temple construction, you can imagine how grand it will be. It will definitely meet the aspirations of the devotees." "If there is a need, we will acquire more land for temple construction. We will write to UP government if required," he said. Das brushed aside the objection of some seers who raised questions about the composition of the trust. He said when the temple will be constructed, the entire Hindu society will feel proud of it. On the question of objection to the trust by NCP chief Sharad Pawar, Das said, "Sharad Pawar can help Muslims build a mosque if he wants. Here we are working for the construction of Ram temple only. We don't bother about him." Mysuru gang-rape case: HD Kumaraswamy says 'follow what was done in Hyderabad' 'Disgruntled' Karnataka BJP leaders call for 'late-night meeting' with HD Kumaraswamy India oi-Ajay Joseph Raj P Bengaluru, Feb 20: Umesh Katti, a disgruntled BJP leader is said to have met former Karnataka chief minister HD Kumaraswamy at his residence on Tuesday that has questioned the stability of BS Yediyurappa-led Karnataka government. According to reports, it is alleged that Katti, who was accompanied by Goolihatti Shekar, a BJP MLA from Hosadurga, held talks with JD(S) leader Kumaraswamy. It is also said that "injustice and bitrayal" in the govenrment made the duo to knock the doors of the JD(S). It is allegedly said that a source who is close to Kumaraswamy had said that the did happen as the legilators were disgruntled by the state government. During the meeting, Kumaraswamy is said to have remained tight-lipped and only said that let's wait for another 10-15 days before taking any political action. With sources claiming that the meeting did happen, Katti denied the claims and said that it was a "baseless rumour". It can be seen that the disgruntled BJP MLAs meeting JD(S) leader came in the wake of meeting at Industries Minister Jagadish Shettar's house on Monday evening. The meeting at Shettar's residence by legislators were mostly from north Karnataka in the midst of the ongoing assembly session raised eyebrows within the ruling BJP circles. However, Shettar had said that few legislators had met him regarding their constituency-related work. NEWS AT NOON, FEBRUARY 20th, 2020 Speaking to reporters, Shettar had said, "I'm a minister, daily several legislators come and go, it is a routine process, so yesterday four to five legislators had come for their work, I spoke to them, after which they left." Meanwhile, former Prime Minister and JD(S) chief HD Deve Gowda said that BJP is a deciplined party arcertained that let Yediyurappa and his party leaders continue to do good work in their term. He also said that dissidence is present in Congress - BJP and said that the respective parties should handle it as JD(S) is not interested in taking them into its fold. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, February 20, 2020, 11:56 [IST] T wo off-duty US police officers foiled an attempted armed robbery at a fast-food joint while they were enjoying a chicken dinner together on a date night. Husband and wife Chase and Nicole McKeown were eating a meal at Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers in Kentucky when a man in a white mask walked into the premises. The pair, who were sat in a booth, realised something wasnt right when the cashier suddenly raised her hands in the air. Making eye contact with each other, the couple said it only took one shared look to know what needed to be done. A man in a white mask walks to the counter with a gun / PA The pair pulled out their own weapons and approached the suspect, who in turn dropped his gun and fled. The officers chased him down the road and managed to detain him. "It was a right place, right time type of deal," Mr McKeown told the Washington Post. CCTV still of the couple eating at the restaurant (PA) / AP "We didn't do anything that any other officer wouldn't have done." The couple said they chose the venue because it was where they ate after their wedding around six months ago He added: "We aren't big on real fancy things." One of the off duty police officers chases after the suspect with his gun drawn / PA Louisville Metro Police Department told the paper they went to the scene to help the husband and wife team. The Seldoms dance company presents a multimedia performance addressing climate instability, followed by a conversation with the co-director of the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts about climate science and how our region is likely to be affected. 6-7:30 p.m., 60 W. Walton St.; 312-943-9090, register at eventbrite.com The UK general election on June 8, 2017, produced a hung Parliament, leaving the Conservatives with 317 seats as the largest party, but with 650 seats in the House of Commons they were short of the 326 they needed for a majority. This placed the DUP at the centre of the British political stage and resulted in a media and political frenzy. There was an intense media focus on the DUP and the party came under forensic scrutiny from many national and international journalists, who reviled what the party stood for. Now, another general election has created a situation where there is a hung parliament and another political party that has been placed centre stage. This time it is a general election in the Irish Republic and the party is Sinn Fein. South of the border no single party has a majority and, even though Sinn Fein received the largest number of first-preference votes, its vote was just short of 25%. The party had a good day, but it is important to remember that 75% of voters chose other parties for their first preference. Nevertheless, Sinn Fein has recovered the ground that it lost last year and has made a further advance. It is now a very significant party in terms of the arithmetic of forming a government in Dublin. So, will we see Sinn Fein receive the same degree of media scrutiny to which the DUP was subjected in 2017? There is certainly plenty to scrutinise and you don't have to dig into the past. David Cullinane, who was elected for Sinn Fein in Waterford, was certainly keen to remind voters. He ended his victory speech by shouting "Up the Ra and tiocfaidh ar la". Meanwhile, in Dublin, Dessie Ellis celebrated his victory by joining his supporters in a raucous rendition of a song that says "tell them how the IRA made you run like hell away". There was something of an online backlash, but Ellis was unlikely to distance himself from the IRA. Back in 1983 Ellis was sentenced to 10 years in prison after explosives and bomb-making equipment were found under his bed. Subsequently, one of his friends described his decision to store explosives under his bed as "not very smart". So, would Mary Lou McDonald condemn the pro-IRA sentiments? Of course not. Instead she dismissed the online and media criticism by saying that Cullinane's "Up the Ra and tiocfaidh ar la" was a "throwaway comment" and a "distraction". However, her best line was: "I'm not their mammy and I don't censor them either." So, Mary Lou, you're not their mammy, we know that, but you are their party leader and president. Nevertheless, it was a clever line, it got her through the interview and it reflects the fact that she is a good media performer. You can't imagine a grizzled Gerry Adams saying: "I'm not their daddy." And, as for Michelle O'Neill, she is positively ponderous in comparison with her president. Mary Lou didn't condemn the pro-IRA sentiments of her re-elected TDs, but then she hasn't got a squeaky-clean record herself. In August 2003 she joined IRA members at a commemoration in Dublin for Sean Russell, an IRA leader and Nazi collaborator, who died onboard a German submarine during the Second World War. The main speaker that day was the late Brian Keenan, an IRA chief of staff, with Mary Lou in a supporting role. But that was back in 2003 and, the following year, Mary Lou failed to secure election to the European Parliament. Now Sinn Fein has moved from the margins into the mainstream and some of their supporters are even demanding that Mary Lou become the next Taoiseach. So, how will the media respond to this situation? Peace process journalism tends to tread lightly when it comes to the misdemeanours of Sinn Fein. Everyone else, especially unionist politicians, is subject to intense scrutiny while any scrutiny of Sinn Fein is sporadic, superficial and soon forgotten. We have a right to expect a forensic media scrutiny of Sinn Fein, which is surely the most sullied party on either side of the border. We have a right to expect it and a right to demand it, but I will not be surprised if it fails to materialise. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 19:07:43|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Chinese tech firms have brought their newest medical products and services to aid the fight against the novel coronavirus epidemic and many internet firms have seen strong business growth during the period. The epidemic has brought challenges as well as opportunities for corporate innovation, said Daniel Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of tech giant Alibaba Group. SHENYANG, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- The novel coronavirus epidemic may have temporarily affected economic activities across China. However, many tech companies and internet firms are playing their parts in the fight against the epidemic and contributing to the growth of the country's economy. Some tech companies have brought their newest medical products and services to join in the fight against the virus and many internet firms have seen strong business growth during the period. MEDICAL EQUIPMENT To aid the fight against the virus, leading software developer Neusoft developed a type of remote CT equipment in just seven days. Photo taken on Feb. 16, 2020 shows the remote CT equipment developed by Neusoft Medical Systems Co., Ltd. in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province. (Xinhua/Pan Yulong) "The equipment can quickly diagnose using AI computing and reduce contact between medical workers and patients," said Liu Jiren, chairman of Neusoft. Over the past few years, Neusoft has been seeking to empower the health care industry with information technology. "The epidemic has made us more determined in our business strategy and we will develop and manufacture more medical equipment deeply integrated with internet technology," Liu said. Robots are also joining the fight to reduce cross-infection risks and improve efficiency. Siasun, a leading robot manufacturer, has rolled out medical delivery robots and electric adjustable beds. Engineers adjust a medical delivery robot developed by robot manufacturer SIASUN Robot & Automation Co., Ltd. in Shenyang, northeast China's Liaoning Province, Feb. 3, 2020. (Photo by Yang Qing/Xinhua) With advanced technologies such as laser positioning, intelligent navigation and human-computer interaction, medical delivery robots can help health workers spray disinfectants and hand out medicine to patients. The electric adjustable beds allow infected patients to eat in bed and assist them to sit up and roll over. Siasun is also developing a robot that can replace nurses in conducting throat testing for the virus. Siasun president Qu Daokui said apart from maintaining a leading position in industrial robots, the company will develop new products for health and elderly care to nurture new business growth drivers. FRESH FOOD E-COMMERCE E-commerce platforms, particularly online fresh food retailers, reported marked business growth as people are asked to stay at home to avoid potential infection when shopping at crowded brick-and-mortar stores. Fresh food delivery app Missfresh saw sales soar 3.5 times year on year during the nine-day Spring Festival holiday, while the fresh food subsidiary of e-commerce giant JD.com saw sales surge 2.15 times. To cope with business growth and labor shortages, tech giant Alibaba's Freshhema, a fresh food retailer that offers delivery service, came up with the idea of "sharing employees" with restaurants and ride-sharing firms hard hit by the coronavirus outbreak. Wei Yin (R) and her colleague, both of whom working as shared staff, discuss at a Hema store in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 14, 2020. Some local catering enterprises, which have suspended their business temporarily, reached the deal of "staff-sharing" with Hema. Their staff will join Hema to do jobs like packaging, sorting and arranging goods during the fight against the epidemic. (Xinhua/Ju Huanzong) Fresh food online platforms are also helping fruit and vegetable growers in the remote countryside whose sales were stalled by the epidemic. "Our strawberries now sell well on these platforms and we no longer have to worry about the sales," said Ma Yandong, head of the local strawberry-growing association in the city of Donggang in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Sales in the country's largest strawberry-growing base were once stalled because of the epidemic. "Many of our rural cooperatives are no longer accepting new orders as they now worry about the supply shortages," said Ma. CLOUD Cloud-related services, from cloud education to remote medical consultation and cloud working, also saw rapid growth amid the epidemic. School openings after the Chinese Lunar New Year holiday were postponed due to the epidemic, but online class services are helping minimize the impact. On the first day of the spring semester on Feb. 10, a large number of primary and middle school students across the country took online lessons at home. By Feb. 10, schools in 300 cities nationwide have joined the cloud class program of Alibaba's communication app DingTalk, benefiting a total of 50 million students. Remote medical consultation services are also bustling as they can help prevent cross-infections and ease pressure on hospitals. More than 10 major hospitals in Hefei, capital of the eastern province of Anhui, have launched free online medical consultation services for patients with fever after the province launched its top public health emergency response on Jan. 24. Medical specialists provide online services to patients in Henan Provincial People's Hospital in Zhengzhou, central China's Henan Province, Feb. 1, 2020. (Xinhua/Li Jianan) Internet medical platforms have also reported surge in online services. WeDoctor, which provides online access to licensed doctors, said doctors received more than 100,000 consultations on the platform on the first day of the lunar year. All patients from across China can access free medical consultation services on the platform amid the novel coronavirus outbreak, according to the company. Cloud technology also helps minimize the impact on the resumption of work after the holiday. DingTalk said it has served 200 million staff workers from more than 10 million enterprises and organizations as of Feb. 3. To meet the huge demand in peak hours, DingTalk has added over 20,000 temporary servers and expanded bandwidth to enhance its calculation capacity. The epidemic has brought challenges as well as opportunities for corporate innovation, said Daniel Zhang, chairman and chief executive officer of tech giant Alibaba Group. "We are fully confident in the digitalization process of the Chinese economy and society and ready to lay a more solid foundation for Alibaba's long-term growth," Zhang said. Facing the epidemic, an increasing number of consumers choose and are growing accustomed to the digital life and work styles, he added. Liu Qingfeng, chairman of China's major artificial intelligence (AI) company iFlytek that also offers cloud classes, expected the coming of the AI era. "Like water and electricity, AI will enter almost all industries including education, medical care, finance, transport and smart cities in the next five to 10 years," Liu said. (Writing by Li Baojie; Reporting by Xu Yang, Wang Bingkun, Zou Mingzhong, Ma Shurui, Ma Xiaocheng, Yin Xiaosheng; Video reporters: Gao Ming, Li Ang; Video editor: Wang Han) The Minority caucus on the Trade, Industry and Tourism Committee of Parliament want the Minister of Trade and Industry summoned before the House to provide answers for the recent demolition at Trade Fair. The caucus intends to achieve this through the filing of an urgent question. Some days ago, structures of some companies were demolished to pave the way for the Trade Fair Company to redevelop the area. The firms demolished include that of a popular journalist, Raymond Archer. Speaking to Citi News after visiting the site where the demolition took place, Ranking Member of the Trade, Industry, and Tourism Committee, Emmanuel Armah Kofi Bua, described the exercise as simply unjust. Look at the control panel over there, it is completely on the ground and everything here is destroyed and it is very sad. And if you listen to the chronology of events, they [companies operating at the premises of Trade Fair] had gone to court and the court put an injunction on any destruction of property until the matter is resolved and there was a decision made. The injunction was lifted and they went back to court and so the court processes have not ended and it means that as citizens, they still have the complete right and this is completely unjust. The Ranking Member indicated that they will file an urgent question to summon the Trade and Industry Minister to come and explain why this was done. We are not going to end this matter. We are immediately going to summon the Minister of Trade to come to Parliament to explain and answer questions on why this was done and we will follow up from there. The Member of Parliament for the Tamale Central constituency, Inusah Fuseini who was at the scene also said the people who did that lack compassion and are wicked. We came with you to see the level of destruction and to understand the lack of compassion of those who did this. And having seen this, I believe the people who carried out this had no soul and they are wicked people and impure humanity in them. ---citinewsroom Aaron Evans, 28, was arrested at the Whitehall branch of McDonald's in Westminster, central London, on January 31 for drunk and disorderly behaviour (SWNS) A drunk off-duty soldier threw condiments at customers and tried to headbutt a police officer in a McDonalds restaurant. Private Aaron Evans, 28, was arrested at the Whitehall branch of the fast food chain in Westminster, central London, on 31 January. Evans, who is based at Camberley Barracks in Surrey, admitted that he had too many beers and pleaded guilty to drunk and disorderly behaviour at Westminster Magistrates Court. He had been out drinking with friends at The Clarence, a pub that sits directly opposite the Department for International Development. Evans pleaded guilty to a charge of drunk and disorderly behaviour when he appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court (SWNS) Onlookers said Evans was swaying, shouting and slurring outside the pub, before ducking into the McDonalds branch next door. After entering, prosecutor Priya Varma said that Evans was being a general nuisance, and throwing condiments at other customers inside, before police were called to the scene. Miss Varma added: He was abusive to officers and refused to leave McDonalds. He was making threats and at one point lashed out with his head and feet at officers. The soldier was given a fine after it emerged that he had been charged with the same offence by Cheshire Police just a week earlier. Read more from Yahoo News UK: Tory pledge of 50,000 more nurses hits more bumps in the road Dog given PSDA commendation for boosting morale of WWII soldiers Two men stabbed in suspected robbery at cannabis factory The court heard that Evans has 20 previous convictions for 29 different offences _ including an arrest for drunk and disorderly behaviour just one week before the incident on Whitehall. Asked to explain his actions by Magistrate Fenella Taylor, Evans said: I had too many beers. It will never happen again. Im now seeking help. My senior officers are not happy with me. They have put me through welfare to talk about my drinking and my anger issues. It emerged during the trial that he had been charged with the same offence by Cheshire Police just a week earlier (SWNS) Issuing Evans with a fine, Miss Taylor said: This sort of behaviour seems very unbecoming for a member of Her Majestys Forces. Story continues We are going to fine you. It is a Band C fine, aggravated by the fact that you have previous convictions for the same offence. It is going to be 320. That takes account of your guilty plea. Evans is also ordered pay 85 in court costs and a 32 victims surcharge fee. Miss Taylor added: As important as the payments is getting some help for your drinking, because its clearly problematic. BERKELEY (BCN) The city of Berkeley is calling on residents to help rename a two-block stretch of Shattuck Avenue that was recently realigned to make it a continuous two-way street. The city realigned the street in December and is now seeking community input to rename Shattuck Avenue "East" in honor of one of six culturally and historically significant Berkeley residents. The city said Tuesday it narrowed the list to six potential names after receiving more than 900 community suggestions. The finalists are: Kala Bagai, who was dubbed "Mother India" for her efforts in the 20th century to end racist housing practices against South Asian immigrants in the city; Maggie Gee, a Congressional Gold Medal recipient and UC Berkeley-educated physicist who trained fighter pilots during World War II; William Byron Rumford, a pharmacist, activist and state Assemblyman; librarian, suffragist and Assemblywoman Anna Saylor; human trafficking victim Sitha Vemireddy; and Ohlone or a similar indigenous name as identified by the Bay Area's Muwekma Ohlone Tribe. Residents can take the online survey to rename the street by 5 p.m. Feb. 26 at opentownhall.com/portals/257/Issue_8282. The survey includes descriptions of each finalist and a map of where the realigned street section is located. The Berkeley City Council will discuss the results and choose the winning name at its March 24 meeting. Copyright 2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. South Sudan's rival leaders on Thursday announced they have agreed to form a coalition government, just two days before the latest deadline. The announcement is a major development in the country's emergence from a five-year civil war that killed nearly 400,000 people and shattered life in the world's youngest nation. The rival leaders had twice missed deadlines to form the transitional government that is expected to lead to elections in three years' time, much to the impatience of the United States and others. Opposition leader Riek Machar said in Juba he and President Salva Kiir agreed that after the government's formation they will resolve remaining outstanding issues. He said he is confident they will address them all. Kiir said the new government will be formed on Saturday, the president added, saying these changes are for the sake of peace to prevail. He said he would appoint Machar as his first vice president, or top deputy, on Friday. The president also said security arrangements, one key issue, will be resolved after the government's formation. He added that the protection of Machar and others from the opposition will be under his responsibility. And he called on the more than 2 million people who fled South Sudan during the conflict to finally come home. Search Keywords: Short link: When writing nonfiction for young readers, its never a bad idea to start with someone cutting off his arm. Its a definite grabber, and, as Candace Fleming tells us in this rich and unflinching biography, THE RISE AND FALL OF CHARLES LINDBERGH (Schwartz & Wade/Random House, 384 pp., $18.99; ages 12 and up), the scene sheds light on one of the most famous and controversial Americans of the 20th century. What happened is simple enough: In the Minnesota woods in the summer of 1861, Lindberghs grandfather, a recent immigrant from Sweden, got his arm caught in a sawmill. The wound was horrific; the mans beating heart was visible through the hole in his side. He was expected to die. But he refused. By sheer force of will, according to family lore, he was soon out of bed and back to work. Born 41 years after the incident, Charles Lindbergh grew up enthralled by the tale, coming to see himself in the story. He was born of special stock, he concluded, stronger than others, destined for greater things. Fleming calls this section The Origin Story, and thats fitting. Lindbergh developed an exaggerated confidence, as she puts it, that became a kind of superpower. Examples of Lindbergh using and misusing it run like a spine through his story. Charles was a restless kid, a loner and a terrible student, the kind of person who was only happy when obsessed with a challenge of his own choosing. He had no use for the flashy lure of the Roaring Twenties, but the budding field of aviation that was worth his time. At 25, he flew solo from New York to Paris, a feat of skill and daring that catapulted him to a level of public scrutiny beyond anything well ever see with todays crowded 24-hour news cycle. Lindbergh was badly suited to stardom. He looked the part, but was intensely private and socially awkward, and he came to resent the relentless adulation. We sympathize with his discomfort, though it hardly excuses what came next. Nothing in this story is that simple. As the title promises, this is a full-blown rise-and-fall drama, with enough plot for half a dozen novels. Fleming does a masterly job juggling story lines, from Lindberghs marriage and flying partnership with Anne Morrow, to the kidnapping of their son and the resulting media circus, to Lindberghs quest to invent machines that could prolong the right sort of human life a demented vision born of his belief in white supremacy. He began spending time in Nazi Germany, impressed with what he saw as strength and order. He parroted Nazi talking points about Germanys Jewish problem and dismissed Hitlers increasingly violent anti-Semitism as trivial. New York The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) today signed a new Memorandum of Understanding to promote business engagement in UNDPs flagship SDG Impact initiative. The new partnership aims to leverage ICCs global network to drive a transformation in how economic growth is generated by ensuring that the private sector has the necessary tools to embed sustainability in corporate decision-making. Experts and industry leaders now widely recognize that a step-change is needed in the level of private sector investment in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)with only a fraction of global assets currently invested in SDG-aligned activities and only a tiny portion of all private investments going to most developing countries. This agreement marks another milestone in uniting governments, businesses, and civil society in achieving the systemic, global change we need to achieve the SDGs, UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner said. Together, we are innovating and pushing the boundaries of whats possible in ways that help people everywhere pull themselves out of poverty and live with dignity and opportunity, while preserving the planet we all share. We see SDG Impact as a vital initiative to unlock the estimated US$12 trillion in new market opportunities created by the SDGs. We are delighted to put the full force of the ICC network behind the development and roll-out of standards to ensure that the private sector can take informed decisions on which investments can be SDG-enabling, ICC Secretary-General John Denton said. Simply put, we need a step-change in how private finance is deployed if we are to achieve our common goals for people and our planet. Ensuring integrity in SDG-linked investing is a much-needed foundation to enable this transformation. Steiner and Denton signed the agreement today at United Nations Headquarters in New York City, alongside a meeting of the SDG Impact Steering Group. Despite growing recognition that the SDGs are a key driver of long-term financial performance and business success, one key barrier to mainstreaming SDG-enabling investments is the lack of a widely accepted definition and standards for what qualifies as SDG-linked investments. Launched in September 2018, SDG Impact aims to bridge this market gap by providing investors, businesses, and others with unified standards, tools, and services required to authenticate their contributions to achieving the SDGs and to identify SDG investment opportunities in emerging economies and developing countries. Under terms of the new partnership between UNDP and ICC, the global business institution will provide support in engaging businesses and investors in developing and adopting new SDG Impact assurance standards and certification. The two organizations will also partner on the roll-out of country-specific reports mapping SDG investment opportunities. They will also work with investors and local businesses to facilitate key investments. Fantasy Island of Western New York has announced on Feb. 19 that they will be permanently closing operations. First opening in 1961, the park was most recently bought by California-based Apex Parks Group in 2016. Fantasy Island is located 13 miles north of downtown Buffalo and 9 miles south of the Niagara Falls State Park. According to WIVB.com, the theme parks director of marketing, Doug Mandell, released a statement, saying: Despite significant effort and a great deal of investment in infrastructure, rides and new themed areas, we have not seen an improvement in operating results. As such, we made the difficult decision to cease operations. This was not a decision entered into lightly." Before the announcement came that the park was closing, reports said Fantasy Island was selling off its rides. WGRZ reports that one family purchased season passes through a Black Friday sale last November. They are still awaiting word on how to receive a refund. Fantasy Island asks that anyone with questions to head to their website to fill out a contact form. Regrettably, Fantasy Island is closing and ceasing operations. We are grateful for the many years weve had together and... Posted by Fantasy Island on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 The park was home to over 40 rides, including classics like bumper cars, a small wild mouse roller coaster, a giant wooden coaster, water park, and even a kiddie land for the youngest visitors. Buffalonians have taken to social media to not only post memories, but to reach out to actor Jim Carrey, who recently mentioned going to Fantasy Island every summer as a child in an interview during promotions for Sonic the Hedgehog where he plays Dr. Ivo Robotnik. Carrey has not responded to pleas to save Fantasy Island. I really did want to ask Jim Carrey about Sonic the Hedgehog and Dr. Robotnik but he just wanted to talk about Buffalo. It starts with my explanation of why Bruce Almighty is the best Buffalo-set movie. pic.twitter.com/J1XNVZQbiw Kevin Polowy (@djkevlar) February 14, 2020 @JimCarrey save Fantasy Island amusement park! You were just talking about your childhood vacations to #Buffalo - we need you now brother! https://t.co/Z9q6PmChcM Josh Dimino (@JoshDimino) February 19, 2020 RIP Fantasy Island. Spent a decent chunk of every summer there as a kid. Ill never forget those Wild West shootouts, racing down the massive slides, or paddling those little aluminum canoes around the lake. Lots of good memories! Noah (@Noah_OnAir) February 19, 2020 Some of my earliest memories are from this place with my family. I loved the wild west shows and had to see it everytime I was there. This is a real heartbreaker here, rip fantasy island :( https://t.co/5Qh34g8zhH shake-zula (@rusty_buffalo) February 19, 2020 Fantasy Island: the early years. Courtesy the Buffalo History Museum. The amusement park has closed permanently after being in operation since 1961. Posted by 7 Eyewitness News WKBW on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 Read more Family Fun: Explore these great indoor places for kids in Upstate NY #Buffalo: 15 Instagram photos that encapsulate the Queen City 10 things you need to know about the Buffalo arts scene A teen apprentice has gone viral and praised as a "future CEO" after saving a couples Valentines Day travel plans. Daniel Thompson, 19, from Ruislip, a BA customer service agent, says he was just doing his job when he ensured City worker Piyush Patel, 53 and his wife could still go away on a romantic getaway with their friends. The group had travelled from Surrey to spend Valentines Day seeing the northern lights in Iceland, but Storm Dennis meant their flight was cancelled. Going above and beyond, Mr Thompson, who began working at Heathrow Airport in October, found all airline flights still running to cold destinations the same day. He then found out how to get the group quick visas to the United States and got them on a fantastic break to New York within hours. Piyush Patel, 53, and wife Bhavisha Patel, 51, in Times Square on their rescued Valentine's Day / Piyush Patel Mr Patel, an advisor to Londons Federation of Small Businesses, told the Standard he sat in his hotel room in the Big Apple and realised he wanted to do something to thank the apprentice, so wrote about his efforts on LinkedIn. The post said: I am typing this post up at 4.40am from The Grand Hyatt in New York reflecting back on how I enjoyed the flight here, the complimentary lounge access and thinking how proud his parents must be of him. It got more than 70,000 likes and Mr Patel could see it got millions of views from his personal profile stats. Following the online praise, Mr Thompson is now set to have a private meeting with BA CEO Alex Cruz. He will also be one of 25 employees selected from 45,000 colleagues being honoured at a company event at Heathrow Airport next week. He said he still couldnt believe it. It was one of their birthdays in a weeks time as well as a Valentines break and Times Square and New York seemed of a par with a romantic trip to Iceland," he said. People have been putting under that LinkedIn post that I am a future CEO. My family are so proud Im trying to keep my head as small as I can. At the end of the day I was technically just doing my job, but my whole plan is to go into management eventually. The apprentice said the incident proves that young people are capable, and called for more positive feedback on social media. People were so shocked someone had put something positive on social media. Especially for people at my age, its huge," he said. "I would like more feedback to be positive than negative, everyone is quick to complain and no one is quick to praise. Loading.... Mr Patel said: We watched it all unfold, getting millions of views, and it made our holiday. We were thinking 'you know what, he deserves everything he gets'. We connected on Facebook and he rang thanking me for what happened. I said: mate, you deserved it, youre a young guy and you need to inspire people of your age. If Daniel can do it, I can do it. Embattled Planning Commissioner Dennis Richards filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection on Wednesday, alleging officials revoked permits on a building he co-owns to retaliate for his criticism of the department. The lawsuit, filed in federal court, claims that DBI officials brazenly retaliated against Commissioner Richards, a business in which he was an investor, and his business partner in a transparent attempt to silence his criticism and calls for investigation into perceived corruption. The lawsuit comes five months after the city yanked nine permits on a four-unit building at 3426-3432 22nd St., a four-unit historic Italianate building that Richards and Noe Valley real estate broker Rachel Swann own. Richards and Swann purchased the building for $2.7 million in 2017 and are attempting to sell it for $7.88 million, after fixing it up and buying out longtime tenants. The lawsuit alleges DBI officials revoked the permits after Richards blasted the department during a Planning Commission meeting in August for allowing work on an 18th Street building without the proper permits. At the time, Richards stated that he had lost faith in the department. Richards has frequently criticized the building department for what hes alleged is corruption and favoritism. Rather than do what a good governmental agency should do when such claims are made investigate and take steps to reform DBI acted instead like a crook worried about being exposed, states the lawsuit. While builders generally have 30 days to come up with a plan to correct violations before permits are revoked, in Richards case the notice of violation and the permit revocation both happened Sept. 30. Only one or two permits a year are ever revoked. City Zoning Administrator Scott Sanchez, however, has said that the 22nd Street violations are serious and need to be corrected. This includes 14 windows installed in the rear of the building that dont conform to historic standards, four skylights added to the roof without permits, and exceeding parking limits. Marketing materials tout the propertys 12 parking spaces, but the city allows only six spots in the building. There are clear violations here of the planning code and the building code and other issues, Sanchez said late last year. Richards says that the violations were relatively minor and that he is being targeted because of his frequent criticism of the Department of Building Inspection. Richards is currently on leave from the Planning Commission. Critics said a planning commissioner whos in conflict with the building department couldnt effectively do the job. Others have pointed out that Richards, who regularly rails against speculators and property-flippers, is doing exactly that with his investment in the 22nd Street building. In December, Richards denied that he was engaged in property flipping. He told The Chronicle at the time that all the tenants in the 22nd Street building requested to be bought out and that he had hoped the tenants paying the lowest rent a family of Mexican immigrants paying less than $600 a month would stay, but they wanted to relocate. 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. Several members of the Board of Supervisors, including Dean Preston and Matt Haney, have called on Richards to resign. Board of Supervisors President Norman Yee said he hasnt made a decision on Richards future on the commission. When Richards asked for a leave of absence, I agreed, said Yee. This will give him an opportunity to decide whats best for the city and less whats better only for him. DBI spokesman John Murray said the department cant comment on pending litigation. John Cote, spokesman for City Attorney Dennis Herrera, said the city attorneys office will review the lawsuit once we have been served with it, and we will address this matter in court. J.K. Dineen is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jdineen@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @sfjkdineen As San Francisco public school educators, the Heather Knight column about Aptos Middle School (Chaos upends school, and district does little, Feb. 16) was difficult for us to read, and not just because it is heartbreaking to hear that our students dont feel safe, or that our colleagues dont have the resources needed to address this crisis. This is a striking reflection of what is happening at many of our middle schools. Classrooms are overcrowded, sometimes with as many as 37 students. Many of our youth come from difficult situations, dealing with poverty, homelessness, recent traumatic immigration experiences, domestic violence and community violence. This is not a one-school, one-time, tough-year type of crisis. The students at Aptos named that they need a fully staffed wellness center, more therapists and social workers, crisis training for staff, and behavior guidelines. Our youth are demanding the tools to be successful, and the community needs to respond accordingly. Public schools are the heart of our city, and educators strive to create safe, caring, inclusive and academically rigorous communities. When coupled with the right resources and funding, they can drastically improve the outcomes for San Francisco youth and families. Not only are our students telling us what they need, our experienced and talented educators are tireless in their pursuit of educating our young people. There are numerous stories of innovation and growth. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Academic Middle School began implementing the community school strategy five years ago and has seen steady academic and social-emotional growth for all students, including African American youth. Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 Community School opened a homeless shelter, the first of its kind in the nation, in the campus gym, to address the needs of their most vulnerable families. For over 10 years, Visitacion Valley Middle School has been utilizing Transcendental Meditation to help students address stress and improve focus. For years, educators requests for more training, including de-escalation and restorative practices, have been met with a lukewarm response at best, due to lack of availability, time or funding. A school without clear and consistent behavioral guidelines, or community accountability, is not a place where anyones safety can be guaranteed, let alone where restorative practices can truly take root. Its no secret that the system is broken, and how could it not be? Our community is reckoning with our discriminatory past, and the state of our schools is due to a larger system of inequities in our city, state and nation that must be rethought. Much of the movement or successes we have seen at our schools were not born out of systemic changes supporting all students, but of individuals at schools working together to address student and community needs. Educators, students and parents know what we need to feel safe and successful. We are ready to work together, but we need support, funding, and the space to have our voices as experts heard and respected, in order for broad systemic change to be realized. We appreciate that Mayor London Breed, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the San Francisco Board of Education have united with a broad group of community allies to endorse the Schools and Communities First ballot measure in November. If passed, we are looking at $12 billion a year statewide that our schools and local governments desperately need. But SCF is just one piece of the solution to this systemic issue of underfunding that has been plaguing us for decades. We look forward to discussing solutions in our active contract negotiations that began last week between the school district and our 6,500 union members who work as classroom teachers, paraprofessionals, security officers, nurses, social workers and other support personnel. But not one ballot measure or group can solve this issue on its own. We need city leaders, the school board and the school district to be working with us to solve this crisis. We all agree it takes a village to support and raise healthy, happy, successful children. San Francisco is one of the wealthiest villages in the world; its time for all families to benefit from that wealth. Leslie Hu is a social worker at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, and Cassondra Curiel is an English language arts teacher at Visitacion Valley Middle School. WASHINGTON President Donald Trump delivered a mostly standard stump speech during a rally in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Thursday night though he deviated in a few key respects. Speaking before a cheering crowd at Broadmoor World Arena, the president touted the robust U.S. economy, slammed the state for its immigration policies and touted the trade deals he has signed with Mexico, Canada and several other countries. Trump is on a four-day swing of western states, scooping up campaign cash and holding a nightly rally. Trump offered the crowd in Colorado a few new lines: He went after the Oscars, questioning why the Academy gave its Best Picture award to "Parasite," a South Korean film. He also fired back at actor Brad Pitt, calling him a little wise guy for an acceptance speech in which he joked about the Trumps impeachment trial in the Senate. Trump repeatedly suggested that Colorado, which Hillary Clinton won in 2016, was not only in play but that Republicans would win the state in a landslide. Colorado has gone Democratic in the last three presidential elections. Still, Trump campaign aides believe they have a decent shot there, depending on the Democratic nominee. Finally, the president used his rally to expand on his criticism of the Democratic presidential debate that took place the night before. He trained most of his first on former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who he described as mini Mike asserted that he was not doing well. The rally weighed in at 98 minutes. -- John Fritze Trump: Easy to be presidential President Donald Trump went off on his standard riff about being presidential but added a new twist: His suit jacket. Its easy to be presidential, Trump said, drawing a comparison between his unconventional approach to the White House with his predecessors. Never open your jacket! Trump buttoned his suit jacket and walked stiffy around on the stage in Colorado as the crowd cheered. The president added, as he often does, that if he acted presidential no one would listen to him because theyd be bored. Story continues Its great to be with the people of Colorado, Trump said in a mock politicians voice. Thank you, everybody. Good night. -- John Fritze Trump: 'It looks like Bernie, doesn't it?' It sounded like President Donald Trump predicted Thursday he will face off against Bernie Sanders in the general election this fall. "It looks like Bernie, doesn't it?" Trump said at one point during his rally in Colorado Springs, Colo. "Crazy Bernie." This could be wishful thinking on the president's part. Trump and aides have said they would love to run against Sanders, believing his "socialist agenda" would be easy to defeat. Sanders and his backers say Trump should be careful what he wishes for. They argue that Sanders' support among young people, combined with the Democratic desire to defeat Trump, will pave the way to victory. David Jackson Trump touts Cory Gardner on stage President Donald Trump brought several guests on stage during his rally, including incumbent Republican Sen. Cory Gardner. Gardner is facing a tough reelection campaign in the state this year, but the audience wouldnt know it from his remarks. We are going to win. We are going to win because we believe in Colorado, Gardner said. Gardner used his stage time to take a swing at Sen. Bernie Sanders, the presumptive front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Though Trump often feigns sympathy for Sanders and the insider forces within the Democratic Party he claims are attempting to steal the nomination from the Vermont Senator. Gardner took a different approach, telling the crowd that a dangerous shift in politics happened in 2016 when Sanders ushered in the normalization of socialism. -- John Fritze Protesters removed from rally The crowd chanted four more years as Trump walked away from the podium while protesters were being removed from the stadium. According to reporters in the stadium, seven protesters chanted lock him up. That was quick, that was quick, Trump stated after they were removed, raising his eyebrows in their direction. Seven protesters began chanting "lock him up" during Trump's rally here in Colorado Springs, Colorado. They were quickly & peacefully escorted out by campaign security Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) February 21, 2020 She goes home to mom, he joked. Her mothers a big supporter. Shell ask, 'Was that you in that big stadium?' Shell have trouble at home with mom and dad, he continued. Earlier in the night, Trump alluded that it was unsafe for protestors at his rallies. - Savannah Behrmann Trump: 'Don't believe polls' (he's behind in many of them) President Donald Trump is confident he will win re-election, though many polls show him even with and in some cases losing to most of his potential Democratic challengers. Trump's solution to that is simple. "Don't believe polls," he told supporters at his rally in Colorado Springs. At least the ones that show him trailing. Earlier in the evening, Trump recited poll after poll that showed him winning the Republican presidential debates back in 2016. Current polls that show him trailing in states like Colorado are to be discounted, Trump said. "We're leading," he said. David Jackson Trump attacks news media - including Fox As usual, President Donald Trump attacked the news media during his rally in Colorado Springs. Less usual: He attacked Fox News. "Fox doesn't treat us the way they used to," Trump told the crowd. While Trump praised individual Fox hosts like Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson, he spent a lot of time at the Colorado Springs rally attacking a Fox News segment in which a commentator criticized his debate performances back in 2016. "I won every one of them," Trump said in defending his debate performances. While he used to describe Fox as his favorite news network, Trump has increasingly attacked the network in recent months - on Twitter. It's rare to hear him attack Fox - at length - at a rally. "Again," he said, "it's not the same." Fox pushed back on Trumps criticisms, particularly his criticism of business anchor Neil Cavuto. Cavuto is a fair person, a fair guy, said Fox Business Network host Trish Regan. - David Jackson Trump slams Oscars, Brad Pitt President Donald Trump, a former reality star who often talks about lackluster television ratings, took a jab at the big screen on Thursday in a new line of attack against the Oscars. How bad were the Academy Awards?! Trump said to applause from supporters at the Broadmoor World Arena in Colorado Springs, Colo. The presidents complaint: The fact that Parasite, a South Korean black comedy thriller, was selected for Best Picture. Trump said the Academy should have chosen an American film, instead. Weve got enough problems with South Korea, Trump said, citing trade disputes with Seoul. Trump signed a new trade agreement with South Korea in 2018, but has frequently said the country needs to do more to reimburse Washington for the huge presence of U.S. military along the border with North Korea. Trump didnt hold his tongue on individual actors, either. He went after Brad Pitt in particular, who won best supporting actor this year for his role in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. During his acceptance speech, Pitt cracked a joke about the presidents impeachment trial. "They told me I only have 45 seconds up here, which is 45 seconds more than the Senate gave John Bolton this week," said Pitt, referencing the former national security adviser who was not allowed to testify by the Senate during the proceedings that acquitted Trump. Trump responded Thursday by describing Pitt as a little wise guy. -- John Fritze Trump slams performance of Democrats during debate President Trump touched on Wednesdays feisty Democratic debate during his rally Thursday. He demeaned Mini Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, for not doing well. I was going to send him a note saying, Its not easy doing what I do, is it? Bloomberg was pressed hard by his 2020 Democratic rivals over his fortune, past comments about women, and the stop-and-frisk policy in New York. "I'd like to talk about who were running against," Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren quipped at one point Wednesday. "A billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians,' and no, Im not talking about Donald Trump. Im talking about Mayor Bloomberg." Trump continued to rail against Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, declaring that she choked on the debate stage. The president continued to mimic her choking at the podium. She couldnt breathe! Trump acted out, continuing to rail against her for a tense moment with former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg. The strained exchange between Buttigieg and Klobuchar was in response to a question about Klobuchars failure to recall the name of the president of Mexico in a previous interview. She demurred it as momentary forgetfulness during Wednesdays debate. Buttigieg pushed back that Klobuchar was staking her candidacy on Washington experience and it was wrong for her to forget the name when she is literally in the part of the committee thats overseeing these things. Klobuchar defended herself, asking Buttigieg if he had called her dumb. Who would say something like that? Trump puzzled about the exchange, continuing that he thought that moment was the end of her campaign, in my book. --Savannah Behrmann Landslide? Trump talks optimistically about Colorado, but it has been a Democratic state President Donald Trump told supporters in Colorado Springs he will carry the Rocky Mountain state in November, but recent history says it will be an uphill battle. Colorado has gone Democratic in the last three presidential elections, including Hillary Clinton's 5 point victory over Trump in 2016. Still, Trump campaign aides believe they have a decent shot, depending on who the Democratic candidate is. And Trump himself, of course, exuded nothing but confidence. "We are going to win Colorado in a landslide," he told the cheering crowd. - David Jackson Trump honoring World War II vets at rally For the second night in a row, President Donald Trump is using the opening moments of his rally to honor World War II veterans. Trump noted that this week marks the 75th anniversary of the battle for Iowa Jima. It was a rough one, Trump said of the battle, before noting that three veterans of the fight were attending the rally. During his rally in Arizona on Wednesday, Trump honored a 100-year-old Navy veteran of World War II who was carried to his seat ahead of the presidents remarks. I dont know if he knows it but hes, right now, the hottest celebrity in the world," Trump said. "He might even be hotter than Trump right now, I have to say." On Feb. 19, 1945, U.S. Marines launched an amphibious invasion on Iwo Jima, Japan, kicking off one of the war's pivotal battles. Trump took the stage at 7:25 p.m., a bit behind the scheduled start time. He started speaking two minutes later. - John Fritze Trump talks Space Force with Colorado governor President Donald Trump hasnt even taken the stage for his Colorado rally, but Space Force is already in the news. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, who met with the president aboard Air Force One, said in a statement that he urged Trump to make Colorado the permanent home of U.S. Space Command headquarters. Polis, a Democrat, said noted that the state is already home to multiple space-related installations. Colorado Springs is also home to the U.S. Air Force Academy. Colorado is the perfect home for Space Command and I was excited to have the opportunity to remind President Trump why thats true, Polis said in a statement. Space Force, which Trump launched last year, generally wins large applause lines at Trumps rallies. I have achieved more than I promised, Trump told a rally crowd last month in New Jersey. I never told you about Space Force; we got Space Force! -- John Fritze and Trevor Hughes Trump touches down in Colorado Air Force One touched down at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs shortly 5 p.m. EST. He had a meeting on board the plane with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis before getting into his motorcade, the White House said. The rally is scheduled to begin at 7 p.m. EST Trump engaged in a little debate talk with supporters who greeted him at the airport. The president asked one of the assembled supporters how he thought New York Michael Bloomberg did in the debate. It wasnt pretty, Trump said. You won that debate, sir! another one shouted. -- David Jackson and John Fritze Trump adds South Carolina rally to packed schedule President Donald Trumps campaign has added another rally to his schedule: A South Carolina event that will take place on the eve of that states primary election. Underscoring the its-getting-real nature of the presidents election-year schedule, Trump scheduled three rallies this week: The Colorado event for tonight, a Phoenix rally that took place Wednesday and Las Vegas for Friday. He now has booked a rally in North Charleston, South Carolina, on Feb. 28 and Charlotte, N.C., on the night before Super Tuesday. Trump was last in the Palmetto State for a criminal justice reform event in October -- and he last took a rally stage there in 2018. - John Fritze Trump talks Stone ahead of rally Before departing for Colorado, President Donald Trump spoke to a prisoner graduation ceremony in Las Vegas and signaled he would not immediately pardon his friend and longtime ally Roger Stone. Im going to watch the process, Im going to watch it very closely, Trump said hours after Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress and obstructing the Russia investigation. And at some point I will make a determination, Trump said. Trump said that everybody has to be treated fairly. And this has not been a fair process." The presidents past remarks on Stone and his recent tweets have added to speculation that a pardon is in the works. Trump is on a campaign swing in western states this week. Id love to see Roger Stone exonerated, Trump added. - John Fritze and Michael Collins Huge crowd lines up in near-freezing temps Thousands of supporters, many in red Trump-branded shirts or hats, waited in the near-freezing temperature for the Colorado Springs rally to begin. A large screen played campaign advertisements and videos telling his supporters that only Trump can be trusted to make the right decisions for Americans. Scattered chants of lock her up and four more years broke out periodically in the hours before the president arrived, and dozens of merchants sold flags, stickers and knit Trump hats as a voter registration strike force circulated, clipboards in hand. Attendees said they came to pay respects to the president they credit with strengthening our economy and borders, and supporting the military, a popular cause in this city home to Fort Carson, the Cheyenne Mountain doomsday facility, and Peterson and Schriever Air Force bases. The economy, for sure, and security and the border, too, said Kathy Hodge, 59, a civilian security guard at one of the bases, of her support for the president. But jobs, jobs and jobs. A video repeatedly reminded attendees that as a private event, protesters are not allowed inside, and that anyone who interrupts the president should be surrounded by supporters yelling Trump, Trump, Trump. Many attendees rejected the idea that Republicans and the president are racist, instead arguing that political correctness has just gone too far. I dont care about the rhetoric. Hes doing what I put my confidence in, said Rick Bowhay, 61. I think its time for Americans to stand up and not take this pablum, puking political correctness they keep trying to slide us into. I am proud of my heritage and my country. Bowhay, who is unemployed and living in a nearby shelter, said he attended the rally to show support for the presidents actions. He said thought it was important for conservatives like him to show their support for the president at a time when he believes Democrats are trying to buy votes from African-Americans by talking about offering reparations for the countrys history of slavery. I was all for equality until the Democrats and the socialists came to me and said we have to pay them back. Its just all about the votes, he said. Theyre trying to flip the script so that we become dependent on the government. And this country was founded on freedom. - Trevor Hughes Trump headed to Colorado WASHINGTON President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence will speak at a Keep America Great rally in Colorado Springs, the home turf of evangelical Christians who make up an important part of his political base. The rally starts at 7 p.m. ET at the Broadmoor World Arena. Colorado Springs may be friendly territory for Trump, but the state is expected to once again be an important battleground in this years presidential contest. Trump lost Colorado to Democrat Hillary Clinton by 5 percentage points in 2016. Trump tales: From the Chicago cop to the crying businessman, Trumps anecdotes often change with each telling Kristie Long, resident of Fountain, sets up her tent in line to camp overnight, right, outside the Broadmoor World Arena in preparation for President Donald Trump's Colorado Springs campaign rally in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020. Trump will be joined on stage by Colorado Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican who is facing a difficult re-election. Gardner voted to acquit Trump after his Senate impeachment trial earlier this month, a decision that earned him kudos from Trump but one that Democrats will use to throttle him in his upcoming race. "Trump's Front Row Joes" group are first in line outside the Broadmoor World Arena in preparation for President Donald Trump's Colorado Springs campaign rally in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020. The Colorado Springs rally comes on the third day of a four-day swing through western states in which Trump is mixing campaign stops with official White House events. Trump tried to steal the spotlight Wednesday by staging a rally in Phoenix at the same time Democrats seeking their partys presidential nomination were debating in Las Vegas. He has scheduled another rally for Friday in Las Vegas on the eve of Nevadas presidential caucuses. What happens in Vegas...: Bloomberg attacked, Warren fights back, Sanders holds steady: How each candidate fared in a rowdy debate This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump campaign: President to rally supporters in Colorado Springs Investors are growing increasingly concerned about the rise in coronavirus cases outside China, threatening gains in riskier assets that propelled the S&P 500 Index to an all-time high this week. A spike in confirmed infections in South Korea and two more deaths in Japan jolted markets on Thursday, sending the won and Singapore dollar down as much as one per cent. Asian shares slid to a two-week low. Some money managers said theyre bracing for further losses. The transmission rate outside of China is increasing and to us that is concerning, said Ross Cameron, the head of the Japan office at Northcape Capital Ltd. The transmission rate in Japan and South Korea has picked up. The transmission rate in Singapore also suggests that the virus spread may continue even when its summer. While China reported a sharp decline in new infections, the countrys shifting reporting guidelines have raised doubts about the reliability of data from the centre of the outbreak. South Korea reported its first death from the virus Thursday while cases surged to 104, and infections in Japan shot up in the past week. In Singapore, more than 80 people have contracted the virus. Cameron questioned why the market reaction to the virus spreading has been so muted. Our sense is the way the market is trading, its probably too bullish, he said in a phone interview from Tokyo. We are definitely not out of the woods. We think people were too optimistic early on. Hugh Young, the veteran money manager at Aberdeen Standard Investments, said hes watching the virus situation in Singapore for a reliable read on its spread. If anyone can handle it and can contain it and is honest about it, I would say that is probably Singapore, Young said in an interview. So if we see how Singapore develops, that might maybe not that might be a lead indicator. But even though new cases in Singapore have been slowing, hes reluctant to interpret the data too quickly. Maybe it goes on more, becomes more widespread outside the immediate region, he said. As far as an indication that its coming to an end, I think just wait and see, Im afraid. Were just watching and seeing along with everyone else. For Young, one reason markets have been resilient is support from China. But he also points to another factor. The experience of SARS in 2003, and how its impact didnt last long in markets, is probably making people believe the same thing will happen this time, he said. The trouble is were all looking at SARS and saying, well, it was short-lived, he said. And then maybe the issue is were all rather expecting it to be a repeat experience. Not everyone is so cautious about the situation. Nader Naeimi, the head of dynamic markets at AMP Capital Investors Ltd. in Sydney, says the worst of the outbreak in China is past, and hes putting his funds money behind that assumption. Naeimi has been tracking the rate of change of new cases in the country every day and also the rate of deaths. What hes seeing, along with Chinas determination to prop up the economy in response to the crisis, gave him the confidence to pile back into risk assets just weeks after he sold them off. We have started to see a peak in progression, Naeimi said in a phone interview from Sydney earlier this week. We started to short fear, which means we are short gold, long copper, he said. Weve gone full-on back to risk-on in commodities, in global industrials, basically all areas of markets where there is exposure to economic growth. But for Northcapes Cameron, the most important data points for investors are now outside the mainland. The key one we are looking at is the transmission rate outside of China, he said. The key question is whether this is a regional epidemic or will it become a global pandemic. [February 20, 2020] General American Investors Files Certified Shareholder Report for Year Ended December 31, 2019 General American Investors Company, Inc., a closed-end investment company listed on the New York Stock Exchange (GAM), filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) its Certified Shareholder Report (Form N-CSR (News - Alert)) for the year ended December 31, 2019. The Form N-CSR, which contains the Company's 2019 Annual Report, is available at the SEC's website: www.sec.gov and the Company's website: www.generalamericaninvestors.com. The 2019 Annual Report is also available on the Company's website and the Proxy Statement, pertaining to the Company's Annual Meeting of Stockholders to be held on April 22, 2020, is also available on the website. The Annual Report indicates that as of and for the year ended: 2019 2018 Net Assets Applicable to Common Stock $1,081,697,614 $896,789,202 Per Common Share $43.70* $34.51** Net Investment Income $8,218,332 $8,173,881 Per Common Share $0.33 $0.31 Net Gain (Loss) on Investments $288,658,575 $(79,878,705) Per Common Share $11.78 $(3.03) Common Shares Outstanding 24,753,191 25,984,054 Dividends and Distributions to Common Shareholders $59,144,808 $70,424,179 Per Common Share $2.45 $2.75 Dividends and Distributions to Preferred Shareholders $11,311,972 $11,311,972 Per Common Share $0.46 $0.44 * After dividends and distributions of $2.45 per share paid in December 2019. ** After combined dividends and distributions of $2.75 per share paid in February and December 2018. The Company also reported that it purchased 1,926,695 shares of its outstanding common stock in the open market during 2019. The Board of Directors has authorized repurchasing common shares when they are trading at a discount in excess of 8%. The Company is also authorized to repurchase up to one million shares of its 5.95% Cumulative Preferred Stock, Series B (symbol GAM Pr B on NYSE) when they are trading at less than $25 per share. The aggregate liquidation value of the preferred stock is $190.1 million. The five largest stock holdings in the Company's portfolio at December 31, 2019 included: TJX Companies, Microsoft (News - Alert) Corporation, Republic Services, ASML Holding N.V., and Alphabet Inc. General American Investors was founded in 1927, has been publicly traded since its inception and has been listed on the NYSE since 1930. The objective of the Company is long-term capital appreciation through investment in companies with above average growth potential. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005512/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Bernard Kerik at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Md., on March 7, 2014. ("Bernard Kerik" by Gage Skidmore/Flickr[CC BY-SA-2.0 (ept.ms/2utDIe9)] Former NYPD Commissioner Emotional and Stunned After Trump Pardoning Former New York Police Department Commissioner Bernard Kerik revealed on Feb. 18 how he first learned President Trump was issuing him with a pardon for felony convictions that put him behind bars for three years. Kerik, who served as the NYPDs top cop under Mayor Rudy Giuliani during his tenure from 2000 to 2001, told ABC News that he was in Florida on Tuesday when he received an unexpected call around 12 p.m., telling him to standby for the president. He got on the phone and [said], As Im talking to you Im signing a full presidential pardon on your behalf,' Kerik said President Trump told him, adding, This will expunge your record.' The former NYPD commissioner said he had heard rumors that Trump might pardon him but that he had always blown them off. He thanked me for my service, told me to move on with my life, Kerik told the outlet, adding that the whole event had left him pretty emotional, kind of stunned. The former police officer said he felt great about the pardon and that a lot of people dont realize that with a federal conviction, you lose a lot of civil and constitutional rights. This president understands that, he added. Kerik, who was police commissioner during the Sept. 11 attacks, said he had always had enormous respect for Donald Trump, particularly following the devastating events of 9/11. He came down several times to the area and helped motivate the men and women who were working there. He sent people down there to help and donate. Army veteran Kerik pleaded guilty in 2009 to eight felonies, including tax fraud and lying to the White House while being vetted for the role of Homeland Security chief in 2004 under President George W. Bushs administration. Prosecutors said that between 1999 and 2000, when Kerik was commissioner of the Corrections Department, he accepted more than $255,000 in renovations to his Bronx apartment from city contractors, in exchange for speaking to city officials on their behalf. He was also charged for providing false and misleading answers related to this when questioned by White House officials after President George W. Bush nominated him for the Homeland Security job. The former police officer said he had previously applied for a pardon with the Obama administration but never heard back. He was released from federal prison in 2013 on good behavior after serving three years. The White House announced on Feb. 18 that Trump signed an Executive Grant of Clemency granting a full pardon to Kerik, who it said courageously led the New York Police Departments heroic response to the horrific attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and who embodied the strength, courage, compassion, and spirit of the people of New York and this great nation. According to the statement, Kerik has focused on improving the lives of others, including as a passionate advocate for criminal justice and prisoner reentry reform, since his conviction. His 30 years of law enforcement service and tenure as commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction have given him a unique understanding and perspective on criminal justice and prisoner reentry reform, and he remains an invaluable contributor to these endeavors. Trump also signed Executive Grants of Clemency granting full pardons to the following individuals on Tuesday: Edward DeBartolo, Jr., Michael Milken, Ariel Friedler, Paul Pogue, David Safavian, and Angela Stanton. In addition, the president signed Executive Grants of Clemency granting commutations to Rod Blagojevich, Tynice Nichole Hall, Crystal Munoz, and Judith Negron. Employee monitoring network services on a laptop The two new portfolio additions Network Intelligence and Omni Network Channel are part of Ericssons Network Services offering. They employ AI, automation, and predictive analytics to address the complex realities faced by communications service providers: exponential data growth and the continuous introduction of new technologies such as 5G, digital transformation, and scattered information sources and insights. Network Intelligence is an AI-driven preemptive support service that allows issues to be identified and resolved before they impact network performance. The service prevents critical outages and delivers the network stability needed for service continuity and optimal end-to-end performance. Ericsson research shows that Network Intelligence reduces critical incidents by up to 35 per cent by carrying out selective data collection, and automatically resolves issues within an average of five minutes from data collection. Omni Network Channel is a unified digital workspace for interaction between the communications service provider and Ericsson, providing easy navigation, self-help, and smooth collaboration. The workspace enhances network performance and consumer satisfaction through faster resolution of both the communications service provider and Ericsson operations issues. It also facilitates the adoption of new technologies such as 5G and supports communications service providers with the competence development of their personnel. Roger O Hargan, head of Service Area Networks at Ericsson, says, Our core value is Technology enhanced by people where people, framework, and technology are our main assets. These new offerings are all about putting the service provider in the centre by enabling self-help as well as smooth collaboration, co-creation, and easy access to data all of which will help secure an always-on network experience. Justin van der Lande, principal analyst at Analysys Mason, says, There is a demand among service providers for a more transparent interaction with their vendors when dealing with network issues. Ericssons intelligent workplace technology, boosted by the expertise of their people, addresses this well. This approach leverages the scale of Ericssons operations, its well-established frameworks, and its wealth of industry knowledge to bring significant benefits to the service provider. Ericssons AI-powered Network Services are now readily accessible with shared data insights that put the customer experience front and centre. Network Intelligence is built for product-near use as a natural extension of the Network Services portfolio. It is complementary to the Ericsson Operations Engine, Ericssons offering for managed operations, design, and optimisation launched in January 2019. Ericsson launches new AI-powered Energy Infrastructure Operations World technology giant Ericsson has launched AI-powered Energy Infrastructure Operations, a new energy management solution that leverages AI and advanced data analytics to optimise energy ... Global 5G subscriptions to top 2.6 billion by end-2025: Ericsson report The global number of 5G subscriptions is forecast to top 2.6 billion within the next six years, driven by sustained momentum and a rapidly developing ... If any of you have ever known or loved someone experiencing infertility problems, you at least have a clue as to how difficult this situation can be. Yet if youve never had trouble conceiving or carrying a baby to term, Im not sure anyone can possibly understand why these patients, like Oswego mom-to-be Mackenzie Lewin, who is expecting twins in March with husband Ryan, has spent her entire life ... searching for a doctor like him," she insists. The 11th Annual Diane von Furstenberg Awards were hosted in the United States capital of Washington, D.C. on Wednesday. The event honors women who have demonstrated leadership, strength and courage in their commitment to women's causes. Legendary supermodel, and event honoree, Iman and model and entrepreneur Karlie Kloss were among the high-profile people to grace the red carpet before the ceremony where Hilary Clinton took the stage. Women's night: Iman and Karlie Kloss were among the high-profile people to show off their stuff on the red carpet at the Diane von Furstenberg Awards in Washington, DC on Wednesday Iman, who was one of the four women honored with DVF awards, showed off her statuesque figure in a black and lime-green dress that hugged her world-class curves. The number's plunging design flaunted her cleavage, as she stylishly wore a matching blazer over her shoulders. The Somalia native, 64, rounded out her ensemble with black open-toed heels and wore her dark tresses long, with an array of curls, and a part in the middle. Legendary: The Legendary supermodel, 64, wore a plunging black and lime-green dress Fashionista: Iman's ensemble included a matching blazer that was worn over her shoulder Honoree: Iman was one of the four women who were honored with a DVF award; she is pictured sharing a moment with Karlie Kloss Best in the biz: Hilary posed with Diane at the star-studded benefit Kloss, 29, opted for a a more leggy piece in a black sequined mini-dress that was cinched-in at the waist with a tie-belt. The Illinois native, who was declared one of top 30 models of the 2000s by Vogue Paris when she was just 17, also donned black heels and styled her blonde tresses long and a part on the left. At one point, the two models shared the spotlight with the event's founder, Diane von Furstenberg, who wore a long black sequined dress that came down to her ankles. The legendary fashion designer, 73, matched it perfectly with black heels and her raven tresses flowing past her shoulders with some added volume. Gams on display: Kloss, 29, opted for a a more leggy piece in a black sequined mini-dress that was cinched-in at the waist with a tie-belt. Making her mark: The Chicago, Illinois native was declared one of top 30 models of the 2000s by Vogue Paris when she was just 17-years-old Female camaraderie: Iman and Kloss struck some poses with the event's namesake and founder, Diane von Furstenberg Ladies in black: Kross and von Furstenberg hammed it up on the red carpet Along with Iman, other honorees include US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg; Priti Patkar, who has worked to improve conditions of prisons in Mexico and prison reform; and Saskia Nino de Rivera, who has worked for decades on combating human trafficking. The DVF Awards were founded in 2010 by Diane von Furstenberg and the Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation to recognize and support extraordinary women who are dedicated to transforming the lives of other women, according to www.dmf.com. The Diller-von Furstenberg Family Foundation grants each honoree $50,000 for their non-profit organization in order to further their work. I'm with her: Hilary Clinton took to the stage wearing a gorgeous white coat Beautiful: The former Secretary of State looked lovely in a long jacket pair with diamond earrings and a matching necklace Friends: von Furstenberg snuggled up next to Priti Patkar, who was among the four women who were honored at the event Giving back: Diane von Furstenberg founded the DVF Awards in 2010 Making a difference: Priti Patkar and Saskia Nino de Rivera were also among the four women who received DVF Awards in 2020 Her mission honored: Saskia Nino de Rivera established Reinserta to reintegrate young offenders, provide training and services to those in prison, and improve conditions for incarcerated women and their children Making their case: Ria Tabacco Mar wore a black dress, while Lana Condor donned a jumpsuit Classy : Television journalist Norah O'Donnell looked svelte in a red suit Unique: Painter, gallery owner and entrepreneur Ashley Longshore went a black ensemble with a one-of-akind jacket with a print newspaper theme Movers and shakers: Businesswoman Jean Case and husband Steve Case posed with Diane von Furstenberg and US Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-New York) (CNN) -- A gunman suspected of killing nine people at two shisha bars in Germany is believed to have a far-right background, prosecutors said Thursday, sparking outrage across the country as it grapples with the rise of rightwing extremism. The attack took place on Wednesday night at multiple locations in the city of Hanau, near Frankfurt. Federal prosecutors are treating the mass shooting -- one of the deadliest in Germany in years -- as an act of terrorism. Authorities believe the suspect, 43, returned home after the rampage and shot himself. He was found dead in his apartment early Thursday, along with the body of his 72-year-old mother. Both died from gunshot wounds, according to the region's interior minister, Peter Beuth. Chancellor Angela Merkel said the suspect appeared to have acted out of "right-wing extremist, racist motives" and described hatred as a poison in German society. Prosecutors said the suspect did not have a criminal record but had posted xenophobic conspiracy theories online. Shooting spree at shisha bars The rampage began around 10 p.m. and appears to have centered around two shisha bars in immigrant areas of the city. After opening fire at the Midnight shisha bar, the suspect then fled by car to the Arena Bar and Cafe, where the attack continued. Shisha bars, or flavored tobacco bars, first started in the city's Turkish community, and in recent years have become popular among young German people. Kadir Koese, a 38-year businessman who runs a bar across from one of the bars that was attacked, said he heard shots being fired. "There was a guy lying on the sidewalk, shot in the head, I think. My neighbor said 'get down'. The police came quickly," he told Reuters. Can-Luca Frisenna, whose family members run one of the bars that came under attack, said he rushed to the scene after hearing about the shooting. "I heard my father was affected and my little brother, they run the kiosk," Frisenna told Reuters. "They were horrified and they were crying and everything. So everyone was shocked." Turkey called the shooting a "racist attack" and said five of its citizens were among the dead. German authorities have not yet publicly confirmed the nationalities of the victims, but prosecutors said the victims' ages ranged from 21 to 44, and that both foreign and German nationals were killed. Six others were injured in the attacks, one of them seriously. The suspect left a confession letter and a video, according to CNN affiliate RTL, citing police. His apartment was blocked off and searched by special forces, and police said there were no indications that other perpetrators were involved. Officials said the suspect's father was "met unharmed" by police, but didn't elaborate on where he was found or whether he was arrested. While the police only named the shooter as Tobias R., they also released information about his place and date of birth. Those details match what a man called Tobias Rathjen published on his personal website. Federal prosecutor Peter Frank told reporters that the website of the alleged killer contained a "kind of manifesto" that included "confused thoughts", "conspiracy theories", and displayed a "deeply racist attitude". The website has been taken down. YouTube said it shut down the account of a man named Tobias Rathjen on Thursday morning. The most recent video, which was uploaded on February 14, linked to Rathjen's personal website. The suspect had a legal gun license, Beuth said. According to Germany's national firearms register, there were 5.7 million privately-owned guns and 1.5 million gun owners as of 2015. 'Our warnings were ignored' In the wake of the shootings, Germany's Foreign Minister Heiko Maas condemned the spread of right-wing attacks. "If the suspicion is confirmed, the gruesome act in Hanau is the third extreme right-wing murder attack in Germany in a year," he said. "Right-wing terrorism has again become a threat to our country. There is absolutely nothing to put into perspective." In October, a gunman killed two people in an attack on a synagogue in Halle, while streaming the rampage live from a camera on his helmet. He later admitted to the attack and to holding anti-Semitic and far-right views. Germany's Islamic Association claimed that Muslims were the gunman's "target group." "Before this right-wing terror we had been warning and demanding for weeks and months to take a clear stand against right-wing agitation and Islamophobia," its statement said. "We had also warned that terror threatens us all -- Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Our warnings were ignored. The terror has struck. It is now the time to stand together." Merkel, who canceled a planned trip to the city of Halle in the wake of the attack, said the evidence overwhelmingly pointed to extremist motives. "It is still too early for a final evaluation. Everything is being done to clear up the background of these horrible murders to the last detail. But at present there is much evidence that the perpetrator acted out of right-wing extremist, racist motives -- out of hatred against people of other origins, other beliefs or other outward appearances," Merkel said from Berlin. "Racism is a poison, hatred is a poison," Merkel added. "I think now especially of the families and friends of the murdered. None of us can measure the suffering that the perpetrators brought upon them. I mourn with them and express my deepest sympathy." The far-right Alternative for Germany party said it was "shaken by this terrible act." "We believe that it is in the interests of the relatives of the victims if the crime and its background are clarified quickly," it added in a statement. The regional parliament in Hesse, the state where Hanau is located, suspended all sessions Thursday. A vigil for the victims in Hanau on Thursday evening turned into an impromptu protest against extremism, with some attendees carrying signs denouncing racism and xenophobia. This story was first published on CNN.com, "Nine killed at two shisha bars in Germany in suspected far-right attack" Photo credit: VICTOR HABBICK VISIONS - Getty Images From Popular Mechanics Diverting flights into a higher cruising altitude could reduce contrail climate effects by up to 60 percent. Like hole punch clouds, contrails are a reaction between particulate and freezing water vapor. At a higher cruising altitude, warmer temperatures and less humidity means far fewer contrails. A new study suggests that a few small tweaks could greatly reduce how much airplanes affect the climate via contrails. By raising the altitude of certain flights by just 2,000 feet, scientists say we could reduce climate-affective airplane exhaust by almost 60 percent. These flights would be shifted just outside the altitude range where contrails are able to form. Most long-haul passenger planes cruise at 35,000 to 36,000 feet . This is about 11 kilometers, putting these planes at the very lowermost reaches of the stratosphere. Photo credit: b44022101 - Getty Images There are major benefits to flying this high, namely much thinner air that makes for better fuel efficiency. This band of altitude is (mostly) free of clouds, which is why it feels like the plane is flying above a floor of fluffy cloud mass when you're in the sky. Air traffic controllers plan routes and tandem flights using odd and even altitudes as cues to keep planes separated. But the stratosphere isnt like Earths surface, where higher altitudes mean colder temperatures. The lowest part of the stratosphere is the coldest, because the suns UV rays heat the upper portions much more quickly. Regular planes can reach as high as about 42,000 feet safely, but after a certain point, the thin air is too thin and too warm. Climbing that high burns even more fuel for diminishing returns. Its in this lower stratospheric sweet spot that you can sometimes find naturally occurring clouds and so-called contrail cirrus clouds, NASA explains . Move just a little farther up and theres no longer any naturally occurring or incidental weather. This is where British and German scientists suggest a select group of flights choose to cruise. Story continues The climate forcing of contrails and induced-cirrus cloudiness is thought to be comparable to the cumulative impacts of aviation CO2 emissions, the researchers explain in their new paper. How does a plane generate a contrail that in turn becomes a climate trigger? Beginning at about 25,000 feet up, planes at their cruising altitudes disturb the surrounding air and make contrails. Contrails are clouds formed when water vapor condenses and freezes around small particles (aerosols) that exist in aircraft exhaust. Some of that water vapor comes from the air around the plane; and, some is added by the exhaust of the aircraft, NASA explains . The air must be both humid enough to have water vapor present and cold enough for that vapor to freeze. In a way, its a related counterpart to cloud seeding, where water vapor again coalesces around and reacts to particulate passing through. The air conditions, both temperature and humidity, determine which flights are most at risk for generating contrails. In this study, the researchers looked at flight data over Japan. The country is technically an archipelago, which, combined with its distance from any mainland, means flying is frequent and normalized within a relatively confined coverage area for researchers to study. Only 2.2 [percent] of flights contribute to 80 [percent] of the contrail [energy forcing (EF)] in this region. A small-scale strategy of selectively diverting 1.7 [percent] of the fleet could reduce the contrail EF by up to 59.3 [percent], with only a 0.014 [percent] increase in total fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, the researchers conclude. In other words, raising the flights in that contrail sweet spot just a few feet out of it could reduce contrail generation by almost 60 percent and cost very, very little in extra fuel. The corresponding tiny bump in carbon dioxide would be majorly offset by a clearer sky without climate-altering contrail coverage. You Might Also Like They are busy planning their lavish wedding, which is set to take place later this year. And on Wednesday, wildlife warrior, Bindi Irwin, 21, and her wakeboarder beau Chandler Powell, 23, beamed for an Instagram selfie. The couple wore their khaki uniforms - with Australia Zoo and their own names embroidered on it. 'My sunshine': Bindi Irwin beamed for a loved-up selfie with fiance Chandler Powell, on Wednesday Bindi looked all grown up, with her long deep blonde locks straight and makeup, including simple eyeliner and a hint of pink on her cheeks, on her visage. 'My sunshine,' she wrote in the caption - referring to her American husband-to-be. Bindi recently paid tribute to her mother Terri on the anniversary of her engagement to her late father - conservationist Steve Irwin. Wedding bells: The couple are busy planning their lavish wedding, which is set to take place later this year She shared a photo of herself with Terri, 55, holding a gorgeous bouquet of pink flowers. 'Celebrating Mamas engagement anniversary,' Bindi wrote in the caption. She added: 'My best friend and a beautiful light in this world.' 'My best friend': Bindi recently paid tribute to her mother Terri on the anniversary of her engagement to her late father - conservationist Steve Irwin Tragic: Steve was 44 when he tragically died tragically died on September 4, 2006, after a stingray attack at Batt Reef, near Port Douglas, Queensland Steve was 44 when he tragically died tragically died on September 4, 2006 after, a stingray attack at Batt Reef, near Port Douglas, Queensland. Bindi is set to wed Chandler later this year in front of family and friends at the Australia Zoo in Beerwah, Queensland. The young lovebirds met at the Irwin family's zoo back in November 2013. San Francisco startup Endless West unveiled two products Thursday, Feb. 20, the likes of which have never been sold before: synthetic wine and synthetic sake. They involve no grapes, no rice, no winery or brewery just water, ethanol and chemical compounds that give flavor, aroma, texture and more to alcoholic beverages, assembled in a Dogpatch laboratory. Endless West, which changed its name from Ava Winery in 2018, already has a synthetic or, their preferred term, molecular whiskey out in the market called Glyph that launched in late 2018. The company says its already being sold in 500 stores, restaurants and bars across six states, plus in Hong Kong, and local bars including Drexl, Dirty Habit, Bergerac and Homestead are using it in cocktails. Now, with the arrival of wine and sake, Endless West takes a big step forward in its planned molecular revolution. Of course, the company cant legally call the products wine or sake. The wine prototype, for example, is identified on its label as neutral spirits with carbonation, natural flavors, caramel color and beta carotene for color. Called Gemello (twin in Italian), it is modeled on a sweet, fizzy, 6% abv Moscato. Kazoku (family in Japanese), the sake copy, is meant to combine the style of junmai daiginjo (the highest grade of sake, which can often taste floral) with that of the unpasteurized, earthy nama genshu. The big question: Why? The obvious pitch for Endless Wests products involves sustainability. Because these lab-built beverages dont require large-scale agriculture or significant water use, theyre friendlier to the planet than wine, whiskey or sake production. By the same token, their efficiency could theoretically make them much more affordable: They can be produced relatively cheaply and quickly. The other part of Endless Wests pitch is a little more abstract. We think this is the last frontier of digitization, says co-founder and CEO Alec Lee. By digitization, Lee means making replicable copies of these elusive, plant-derived beverages. He likens it to the process of recording and preserving music. We take it for granted that digitizing music is intrinsically worthwhile, he says, and so, he believes, is digitizing alcohol. Although the technology hasnt yet advanced to be able to produce an exact facsimile of a specific product, Lee believes its inevitable that it will. The current Endless West products are like early-era musical recordings, scratchy and imperfect. But the claim is that eventually you will be able to taste a faithful copy of a rare Screaming Eagle Cabernet Sauvignon or Macallan 1926 the equivalent of todays high-resolution music files. Or you could copy a wine today so that your grandchildren, 50 years in the future, would taste exactly the same thing, unchanged over a half-century of aging. But is that something people will want? Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle When you enter Endless Wests main R&D laboratory, inside a big office building on Third Street, youre greeted by a bookshelf holding dozens of whiskey bottles, ranging from sought-after Pappy Van Winkle to ubiquitous Bulleit Rye. The lab itself smells like whiskey, which poses a perplexing question: Is the aroma from whiskey, or from lab-derived molecules that approximate it? More Information Where to find Endless West products Gemello and Kazoku are just now hitting the market, but Glyph is already available in the Bay Area. Bars: Noir Lounge, Bergerac, Westwood, Dirty Habit, Barrel Proof and Homestead in San Francisco; and Drexl and East Bay Spice Co. in Oakland. Stores: 828 Irving Market, Blackwell's Fine Wine & Spirits, Financial District Wine & Spirits, Foodhall, K&L Wine Merchants, Nabila's Natural, Reno's Liquors, The Epicurean Trader, The Whisky Shop and Wine Impression in San Francisco; Ledger Liquors in Berkeley; Palo Alto Fine Wines & Spirits in Palo Alto; and Total Wine & More in various locations. See More Collapse The process here begins with putting samples of real whiskey, wine or sake into a machine that performs a process known as gas and liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry. Essentially, the machine scans the sample and tells them what molecules it contains, but its not prescriptive, Lee says. The scan gives them an ingredient list, but they have to come up with the quantities and the actual recipe themselves. Everything starts with a base of water and neutral alcohol Everclear, basically and then they add yeast- and plant-derived molecules, the same ones that are naturally found in wines and spirits, to flavor it. In the lab, to show me examples of the molecule ingredients, Lee unscrews a small vial of ethyl butyrate, a chemical compound found in some wines that gives off a pineapple aroma. A container of a compound called whiskey lactone gives a strong waft of coconut. The element of scanning is very much science, but the creation of something new is entirely art, Lee says. The art part is where Josh Decolongon, Endless Wests resident sommelier, comes in. (His official title is co-founder and chief of product.) A prototype might look like it has the right molecular makeup on paper, but much of the actual decision making is left to Decolongons palate. Lee wants to be clear: Were not tricking anyones brain, he says. Theres no molecule in Endless Wests creations that isnt also found in the real versions. The sweetness in Gemello is produced from the same molecules that produce sweetness in Moscato, he says not the molecular equivalent of Stevia. When we sit down to taste the three products, Im pleasantly surprised to see that the Gemello (6%, $11-$14/750ml) is a much more convincing replica than an earlier prototype Id tasted in 2017, when the company was still known as Ava Winery. Granted, Moscato should be one of the easiest wines to imitate: Its flavors are obvious, not subtle. Sure enough, Gemello shows that unmistakable perfumed orange-blossom aroma that characterizes Moscato, maybe a little bit too effusively. It has a strong orange soda note on the palate. Sweetness, equivalent to 13.9% residual sugar, and carbonation help to give it a believable texture and weight. Its as clear as water, lacking any of the pale-yellow hue that a real Moscato would have. Kazoku (16%, $7-$9/375ml) is more convincing, capturing the earthy, toasty aroma and flavor that is sakes signature. Its nutty, creamy and delicately sweet. As with Gemello, the flavors feel a little too dialed-up, and it finishes hot, with a lingering kiss of alcohol burn. But its an impressive start. Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle Glyph (43%, $35-$49/750ml) passes, too. Modeled after sweeter whiskey styles, it suggests caramel, butter and cedar wood. Its not strictly molecular, Lee admits: They soak the liquid with actual pieces of American oak to impart color, flavor and texture. Like the Kazoku, its alcohol feels slightly out of balance, giving a burn similar to what you might find in vodka. Still, theres no doubt that these are compelling attempts. And these are early days yet. Is it only a matter of time, as Lee asserts, before the equivalent of Thomas Edisons phonograph evolves into seamless, crystal-clear digital music recordings? Even if Endless West can get there and even if the drinks taste pleasant theres no guarantee that people will want to drink them. For many enthusiasts, the whole appeal of wine and spirits is the human element, the stories behind the drinks, the ties to land, place and tradition. Wines taste different in each year theyre produced, according to that years weather, and they also taste different over time: They improve with age, then decline. People drink these things for their singularity for their unrepeatability. Thats been something that Endless West has had to learn the hard way. We originally thought people would embrace technological innovation, says Lee. That hasnt universally been the case. Many liquor stores and restaurants have refused to even try Endless Wests products; theyre just not interested in something that seems fake. Now, he says, we understand that our relationship to food and drink is much more complex than we realized. The Endless West team was moved by some feedback they received from a Japanese chef and sake enthusiast. He asked the team whether they were worried that their approach would exacerbate consolidation in the beverage industry. Sake consumption is declining, even in Japan, he told them; small-scale family producers are going out of business already. How could it be a good thing to replace the diversity of sake, already endangered, with this highly industrialized method? Lees answer: Theyre not trying to replace anything. We dont see this as a way for traditional winemaking to go away, he says. People still play the piano, even though they can get the same effect on a MacBook. Correction: The original version of this story misstated the nature of the chemical compounds Endless West uses in its wine and sake. They are naturally derived. Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicles wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob This day next week I'll be nearing journey's end. And what started as a bit of a wheeze of an idea many months ago will actually have come to pass. The idea was to spend a few weeks in Venice, both working and playing. Nothing unusual there, for I've done it many times over the years, spending a month or six weeks at a time there in a city I know like the back of my hand, and in the place where my husband Gerry and I spent many, many happy days and weeks, from our very first visit in 1995 right up to our last sojourn there, just a few months before his death in the summer of 2015. So when I first told friends I was planning to head off again for the month of March they looked at me quizzically, as if to say: "So what? Sure, you're always going there." "Ah," I said. "But this time I'm taking Dudley with me." Now, Dudley is not a brother or a friend. Dudley is my dog. An adorable, wire-haired dachshund, he came into my life a year ago - and has transformed it utterly. So no, I wasn't leaving him behind. But how, exactly, was I going to get Dudley to Venice? With considerable difficulty, as it turned out. I'd fly. With Aer Lingus (Ryanair only take service dogs). Well, talk about being passed from pillar to post until, finally, I landed on my feet with Kevin Kenna of K International Freight. A mine of information and practical, no-nonsense advice, Kevin couldn't have been more helpful. And so the arrangements were eventually put in place - but only after I had recovered from the shock of the 500 fare for Dudley. One way. Further investigation into the return trip via the relevant Italian freight companies threw up a fare which was almost 1,000. Just for Dudley. One way. My response? No way. So, I'd cough up the 500 all right to get him there but it was back to the drawing board in terms of bringing him home. That journey, it transpires, will now take us on an overnight train from Venice to Paris, another train from Paris to Cherbourg, an overnight stay in a dog-friendly hotel in that French port and then we'll take to the high seas with Irish Ferries for the voyage back to Dublin. Phew! All sorted? Well, no, actually, because just after Christmas I was informed that IAG (parent company of Aer Lingus, British Airways et al) had decided to suspend animal transport for the foreseeable future. Maybe it would be sorted before my flight date, but I couldn't take that chance. So, bowed but not broken, and with a firm image in my head of Dudley sitting on my knee at the front of the Number 1 waterbus as it meanders slowly down the Grand Canal, I reached for the laptop yet again. And after a few hours of googling and clicking to establish ferry and train times (and their dog policies) I got everything booked and can now present the complete itinerary for Dudley the dachshund's three-day journey from Dublin to Venice. This is it: ferry from Dublin to Holyhead; overnight with a friend; train from Chester to London Euston; train from London St Pancras to Folkestone; overnight in the dog-friendly Holiday Inn; pet taxi service (yes, that actually exists) through the Eurotunnel; train from Calais to Paris; overnight train from Paris to Venice, arriving in time for breakfast tomorrow week. My suitcase has already gone ahead (sendmybag.com - what a find!) so it's just me, my back-pack and Dudley. What could be simpler? The adventure begins The US Middle East peace plan invites us to look back and try to learn the lessons of the 120 years of the Arab-Israeli conflict since Herzl first came up with his concept of a Jewish state. The Trump deal is hardly the first attempt to resolve this conflict. Since the end of World War II, not a single US president has not dreamed of being the statesman who brought peace to the land of Jesus Christ. Trump is no exception. Truman believed he could do it by fostering the UN partition resolution in 1948. In the mid-1950s, Eisenhower saw the solution in a formula for sharing the waters of Levantine Rivers. Kennedy, in 1962, thought dialogue with Nasser would do the trick while his successor, LBJ, who was bogged down by the Vietnam War, decided to get it over with by putting his weight behind Israel in 1967. Nixon opened with the Rogers Plan in 1970 and closed with the disengagement agreements on the Syrian and Egyptian fronts in 1974. Carter initiated Camp David and concluded with the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty. Reagan put his name to an initiative in 1983 and Bush Sr kickstarted the Madrid Conference in 1991. Clinton hosted Camp David II and brokered a set of understandings in 2000, while in 2008 Bush Jr pushed a roadmap for peace at the Annapolis Naval Academy. Obama tried his best to mediate but failed because of Israeli settlement expansion. Then Trump came along to impose a new status quo regarding Jerusalem and the refugees, then designed a bargain with some economic inducements thrown in and called it the Deal of the Century. This long road of US peace-making attempts intersected with such phenomena as the US-Israeli special relationship, US-Arab relations as shaped by oil, the complexities of the Cold War and US global supremacy. Lesson one from this long history is that de facto realities have always held sway over legal and moral arguments. This helps us identify a basic difference between Jewish and Palestinian political elites in their handling of this age-old conflict. It is undeniable that the Jews not only settled and took root on a land that did not belong to them and that was already inhabited by others (the Palestinians), but they also built political, economic and social edifices on that land. In the early days, the Jews encountered major obstacles to the Zionist project, not least of which was the rise of the rabidly anti-Semitic Nazi and fascist movements in Europe, on the one hand, and the reluctance on the part many countries, including the US, to accept Jewish refugees, on the other. On the other side, the Palestinians who lived on their land and who had long and extensive cultural and civilisational relations with the rest of the Arab world, did not do much in the way of building the nucleus of a Palestinian state. This is not to suggest that there were no attempts, of course. But the difference in scale was considerable. Whether this had to do with the British occupation of Palestine, the profound underdevelopment of Arab and Palestinian societies, the continued hold of colonial powers over Palestines neighbours, or other factors, the upshot is that by the time of the Partition Resolution, the Jews had everything in place to administer a state and they were ready to fight for it, whether by building universities or building modern armies. The Palestinians were dependant on other Arab countries and these were under colonial occupation and suffered developmental problems of their own. The second lesson is that military force, however powerful, has limits. Military might, alone, cannot attain the objectives of either side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arabs failed in the wars of 1948 and 1967, but the Israelis failed in 1956 and 1973. Israeli troops also failed to suppress the first and second Palestinian Intifadas by use of force. Moreover, there were times when military victory backfired. In 1982, Israeli achieved one of its greatest victories with its invasion of Lebanon and the occupation of its capital, Beirut. But the consequence was the birth of one of the fiercest threats Israel has encountered: Hizbullah which, in turn, lured the expansion of Iranian influence up to the Mediterranean, threatening Arab and Israeli borders. Despite its military victories, Israel has not succeeded in expunging the Palestinian presence in Palestine. Some 12 million people live in the area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Half them are Israeli Jews and the other half are Palestinians. They live in close proximity in all parts of Palestine, sometimes in such tight quarters as the Haram Al-Sharif precinct where you find Al-Aqsa Mosque, the Dome of the Rock, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Wailing Wall. These demographic facts and these holy places, which epitomise history and religious passions, are also major concrete realities. Despite its victories from 1948 to 1967 and the military upper hand it has always had over the Arabs, Israel has always lacked legitimacy, not only in the Arab world but also in the broader Islamic world and among other countries in the world, as well. In this multi-layered war (state versus state, state versus liberation movement/grassroots uprising/revolutionary terrorism, conventional war and guerrilla warfare, etc), neither side has been able to achieve a definitive victory over the other. Lesson three is that the Arab-Israeli conflict has an impetus and an essential essence that has enabled it to continue even as the whole world changes and shifts from one type of global order to another. The conflict began in World War I and survived World War II with its repercussions on Jews and Arabs and Palestinians alike. It outlasted all the fluctuations of the Cold War, the reverberating collapse of the Soviet Union and the attack against the World Trade Centre in New York. Leaders and fighters adjusted to changing realities and scrambled to take advantage of new developments. The perpetuity of the conflict combined with the futility of military force brings us to the fourth lesson. Nothing has ever been able to stimulate a major change in the geopolitical context of the conflict except direct dialogue between the Arabs and the Jews and between Arab states and Israel. It was Camp David that brought the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty and the end to the Israeli occupation of Sinai in 1982. Just over a decade later, another set of face-to-face meetings led to the Jordan-Israel Peace Treaty. In-between came the Oslo Accords which established the first Palestinian national authority, creating an unprecedented Palestinian reality on the ground in Palestine. The fifth lesson is that the longer the Arab-Israeli conflict lasted, the less Arab countries were able to grapple with the challenges of development and to address strategic threats at home and abroad. As we entered the second decade of this century, the experience of that conflict combined with a diagnosis of the state of the Middle East tells us to what extent the contradictions of the Arab-Israeli conflict can lead to the rise of major problems for both sides. During the past decade, these problems have assumed the form of widespread anarchy and terrorism. The writer is chairman of the board, CEO and director of the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies. *A version of this article appears in print in the 20 February, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: Union Additional Secretary for Home Affairs Gyanesh Kumar met Jammu and Kashmir Lieutenant Governor G C Murmu here on Thursday and discussed the prevailing security scenario in the Union Territory, an official spokesman said. Kumar met Murmu at the Raj Bhavan and the two discussed wide-ranging issues related to the present security scenario in Jammu and Kashmir, the spokesman said. Senior Vice President and Group Head of Axis Bank Vivek Bimbrahw, functionaries of NBCC India Limited headed by Yogesh Sharma, and Engineering Export Promotion Council (EEPC) India's Regional Director Rakesh Suraj also called on Murmu separately, the spokesman said. Bimbrahw briefed the Lt Governor about the functioning of Axis Bank and various services being provided by the bank to its customers in J&K, the spokesman said. He said Murmu observed that the entire banking sector has a key role to play in maintaining a healthy economy and stressed on the importance of ensuring close monitoring of the fiscal health of the bank. Sharma briefed the Lt Governor about the status of work being undertaken by NBCC in the UT, the spokesman said, adding Murmu asked the NBCC functionaries to adopt innovative approach, besides ensuring the adherence to the highest standards of quality and timely delivery in all of their ongoing and future projects. He said Suraj informed the Lt Governor about various activities undertaken by EEPC for the promotion of engineering goods. He also submitted a proposal for organizing 50th EEPC India Regional Award for Export Excellence in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, the spokesman said. The Lt Governor while interacting with the Regional Director observed that the UT administration is taking several initiatives and putting a sustained focus on industrial development and investment promotion to attract the best of investment opportunity in the industry for the business expansion in J&K, the spokesman said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) More than one million cruise ship passengers are expected to visit Skagway, Alaska, this year, and the municipal government is preparing should ships dock amid a novel coronavirus outbreak either in town or on ship. "Obviously, the specific situation and how it arises and what happens, we can't predict that," said Mayor Andrew Cremata. "But what we can do [is] have protocols in place that are as comprehensive as possible so that no matter what situation we encounter, we can handle it." The only road to Skagway passes through a small portion of British Columbia before reaching Carcross, Yukon, where many cruise ship passengers visit by bus. Part of Skagway's preparations include finding out if staff members at the town's fire department, health centre, and police department are trained on how to respond to suspected cases of the COVID-19 virus. The goal is to ensure that anybody who may be infected gets proper medical treatment, while limiting the number of people they come in contact with, Cremata said. He said he's been in contact with, among others, the Cruise Line Industry Association, Holland America Line, and the company that handles train tours along the White Pass & Yukon Route. Submitted by Andrew Cremata Cremata said he guesses that the U.S. federal government would have a significant role should an outbreak occur, but he wants his community to be prepared. "Quite frankly, I think the odds of having a situation similar to what's happened in China, here are pretty slim," he said. Cremata said he hopes to have a comprehensive plan in place for the community by mid-April, with a drill around the same time. The first cruise ships of the year arrive in Skagway in early May, and the last in October. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the town's population was 1,148 last July. The town takes in thousands of visitors daily for part of the year. The New Zealand man convicted of murdering a British backpacker he met on a dating app has been sentenced to life in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 17 years. Grace Millane was strangled to death on her 22nd birthday in December 2018. She had met the man through the dating app Tinder and went out for drinks with him before returning to his hotel apartment in central Auckland, where he killed her. He stuffed her body into a suitcase, drove to a forest and buried it in a shallow grave, where police found it a week later. The name of the 28-year-old man is restricted by court order, a restriction that is sometimes imposed in the New Zealand judicial system. Defence lawyers had claimed the death was accidental after the pair engaged in consensual sex that went too far. A jury in November rejected that argument and found the man guilty. Murder typically comes with a life sentence in New Zealand, so at stake at Friday's sentencing at the Auckland High Court was the number of years the killer would serve in jail before becoming eligible for parole. Prosecutors had argued for 17 years while defence lawyers said 12 was reasonable. Judge Simon Moore ended up agreeing with prosecutors. Earlier, the victim's mother Gillian Millane told the court viavideo link that the killer had ripped a hole in her heart by stealing her daughter's life. "She died terrified and alone in a room with you," Gillian Millane said, according to the New Zealand Herald. The man in the dock kept his head bowed, rubbed his face and had his eyes closed, the newspaper reported. Grace Millane's death shocked many in New Zealand, which prides itself on welcoming tourists and where many people travel abroad themselves. Hundreds of people attended candlelight vigils after she died, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke about New Zealanders feeling "hurt and shame" that she was killed in their country. An Ikeja High Court on Thursday sentenced a former part-time lecturer in the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akin Baruwa, to 21 years impr... An Ikeja High Court on Thursday sentenced a former part-time lecturer in the University of Lagos (UNILAG), Akin Baruwa, to 21 years imprisonment for raping an 18-year-old admission seeker. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that Justice Josephine Oyefeso while sentencing Baruwa, described his action as heinous. Oyefeso held that the sentence should serve as a deterrent to others. The offence committed against this young lady was a violation of her chastity which would have left huge emotional scars from which I pray and hope she will recover. I cannot begin to imagine the physical and mental trauma she has had to endure from the man who she considered her fathers friend, a community leader who should have known better. This is a shame! This is a crime that not only offends the survivor, it offends her family, it offends the society at large, it also offends God. More painful here is that the convict gave the family the impression that he was a lecturer at UNILAG but his services were only needed on an ad-hoc basis by the university, the judge said. She said that the convict gave the impression that he could assist in giving his victim university admission whereas he could not. He used the vulnerability of this young girl to his selfish advantage. The young lady said that the encounter lasted for two to five minutes, the convict said 10 to 15 minutes. Was it worth it at the end of the day? In line with Section 258 of the Criminal Law of Lagos, 2011, Baruwa Afeez Akin is hereby sentenced to 21 years imprisonment, she held. Earlier, Oyefeso said that the prosecution proved its case beyond reasonable doubt and that the medical evidence was consistent with the testimony of the victim. It is interesting to note that all the graphic details he gave in court in his testimony were not contained in his statement at the Surulere Police Station. The difference between his statement and his evidence are like night and day. DW1 (Baruwa) has a fertile imagination and is not afraid to use it. The evidence before me overwhelmingly shows that the sexual intercourse between PW3 (complainant) and DW1 was not consensual; I so hold. The court is satisfied that the prosecution has been able to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt. I find you Baruwa Afeez Akin guilty of a one-count charge of rape contrary to Section 258(1) of the Criminal Law of Lagos, 2011, and I hereby convict you accordingly, she said Before the sentence was passed, defence counsel, Mr H. I. Omotoba, in his allocutus (plea for mercy), prayed the court to temper justice with mercy and impose a light sentence on Baruwa. The convict is broken and highly remorseful of his act. The convict is a married man with children aged 12, 10, four and two respectively. The convict also has aged parents to cater for. My lord, the convict is also a first-time offender. We urge this court to temper justice with mercy and impose a lesser punishment on the convict, Omotoba said. In his response, the Lagos State Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Mr Yhaqub Oshoala, expressed gratitude to the court. Oshoala asked the court to impose a stiff sentence on Baruwa to serve as a deterrent to lecturers who prey sexually on students. He added that Baruwa was not remorseful during his trial. I have never observed such a display of unremorsefulness in a defendant to the extent that he was calling the complainant jeun tan (a bad nickname), making it seem normal for a married person to use such an expression. Neither the state nor the society will condone such bad conduct. There are many students out there who are weak and have nobody to protect them, the DPP said. Baruwa was arraigned on Oct. 18, 2016. Four witnesses the victim, her father, a policewoman and a medical doctor testified for the prosecution while Baruwa testified solely in his defence. The complainant (victim) had told the court that her father took her to Baruwas home one morning for the purpose of helping her to gain admission into UNILAG. She said that while in his office, Baruwa told her to pick up a piece of paper from the floor and forcefully pushed her on a couch and raped her. The complainant said she was a virgin and never had a boyfriend before the rape that occurred three months away from her 19th birthday. "When we see many good Christians, with goodwill, but who confuse religion with a social concept of kindness, of friendship, when we see many clerics who say they follow Jesus, but seek honors, sumptuous lifestyles, ways of worldliness, they do not seek Jesus: they seek themselves . Vatican City (AsiaNews) - There are three stages to knowing who Jesus is: knowing, confessing, accepting the path that God has chosen for him, up to humiliation. And who is not willing to follow her, as has happened to bishops and popes, is not a Christian. Pope Francis said it today in the homily of the mass celebrated this morning at Casa Santa Marta, taking inspiration from the passage of the Gospel (Mk 8,27-33) in which Jesus asks the apostles "Who do people say I am?", "Who do you say?". During his daily Mass at the Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis reflected on two questions from the daily Gospel reading: Who do people say that I am? and Who do you say that I am? The Pope said that the Gospel teaches us the three steps that help us learn who Jesus truly is. These are to know, to confess and to accept the path that God has chosen for Him. Pope Francis said that knowing Jesus is what we all do when we read the Gospel, when we take children to catechesis to Mass. However, this, he said, is only the first step. The second is to publicly acknowledge Jesus, and in order to do so, he continued, we need the power of God, the power of the Holy Spirit. One cannot do so alone and therefore the Christian Community must always seek the power of the Holy Spirit to confess Jesus, to say that He is God, that He is the Son of God. But what is the purpose of Jesus' life, why has He come, asked the Pope. Answering this question means making the third step on the way to knowing Him. And the Pope recalled that Jesus began to teach His apostles that He had to suffer, be killed and then rise again. Confessing Jesus is confessing his death, his resurrection; it is not confessing: "You are God" and stopping there. No: "You came for us and you died for me. You are resurrected. You give us life, You promised us the Holy Spirit to guide us". Confessing Jesus means accepting the path that the Father has chosen for Him: humiliation. Paul, writing to the Philippians, says that God sent his Son, who emptied himself, taking the form of a slaveHe humbled himself, even unto death, death on a cross". If we do not accept the path of Jesus, the path of humiliation that He has chosen for redemption, not only are we not Christians: we deserve what Jesus said to Peter: "Get behind me, Satan! Pope Francis noted that Satan knows that Jesus is the Son of God, but that He refuses his confession in the same that He pushes Peter away from Him when he rejects the path chosen by Jesus. Confessing Jesus means following the path of humility and humiliation. When the Church does not follow this path, she is in error, and becomes worldly. The Pope concluded his homily with the invitation to ask for "the grace of Christian consistency", the grace to follow Jesus in His own way, even to humiliation. New Jersey Leads Multi-State Lawsuit Against Trump Admin for Failure to Address Air Pollution New Jersey has led a coalition of states and New York City in a lawsuit against the Trump administration over air pollution coming from other states. New Jerseys Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Wednesday alleging that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has failed to address the pollution that is coming from upwind states and hurting the residents in New Jersey and other state challengers. The suit claims that the pollution is coming from emissions from coal-burning power plants and other pollution sources in other states. Joining New Jersey in the suit are attorneys general in Connecticut, Delaware, New York State, Massachusetts, and City of New York. The states are asking the court to compel the EPA to take action in addressing the air pollution that they say are largely caused by nitrogen oxide emissions from power plants and other industrial sources in upwind states Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia. New Jersey and the plaintiff states say the emissions are carried by prevailing winds into the plaintiff states and recombine to form smog and prevent the plaintiff states from meeting the federal ozone standards. Some of the states are expected to show compliance with the federal standards by July 2021, the complaint (pdf) states. Under the Good Neighbor Provision of the Clean Air Act, upwind states are required to take action to control their emissions that could affect downwind states. The provision also requires the EPA to prohibit air pollution in one state that affects downwind states' ability to attain and maintain of federal air quality standards. The law requires the agency to make a formal finding that the offending states have failed to submit to complaint plans to address the emission. It also requires the agency to promulgate a federal implementation plan within two years to force offending states to comply. The EPA said in 2016 that it would reduce emissions from upwind states but in 2018, the agency issued a finalized rule that determines that the agency and states have no obligation to establish additional requirements to further reduce emissions to satisfy the good neighbor obligations. In 2019, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit vacated the 2018 EPA rule (pdf). The court subsequently sent the rule back to the EPA to be rewritten but the agency has not yet proposed any federal plans for reducing emissions from upwind states, the attorney generals office said. The new lawsuit seeks to compel the EPA to issue new plans and declare the agency in violation of the Clean Air Act for not taking action on the upwind pollution problem. Todays lawsuit is not the first time that we have called on EPA to address the ozone pollution that is harming New Jerseys children and our health, and its time for EPA to live up to its legal duty, Grewal said in a press release. We already beat EPA in court and won an order demanding the federal government tackle out-of-state pollution, and yet EPA still did not act. Enough is enough: this is a serious environmental and public health problem, and it demands a serious response from Washington. An EPA spokesperson told The Epoch Times that the agency does not comment on pending litigation. Ozone pollution can be harmful to health and trigger a variety of health problems such as chest pain, coughing, throat irritation, and airway inflammation, according to the EPA. Moreover, it can reduce lung function and harm lung tissue. People who are most at risk of breathing in air containing ozone include children, older adults, people with asthma, and people are who are active outdoors. SWANSEA A previous report of a possible attempted abduction Tuesday in Swansea has since been deemed a false report, officials said. In a news release, Swansea Police Department Chief of Police Steve Johnson stated the reported possible attempted abduction of a female juvenile was false. The teen reported that a white male and a black male in a white panel van followed her home from school before one left the van in pursuit. He explained that after using the Ring Neighborhood Community application, the department was able to use surveillance cameras from neighbors to ultimately clear the case as unfounded. Johnson said the department strives to get the information out to the community quickly, erroring on the side of caution. If we didnt give out the information we had at the time, and something bad happened later, that would not be good, the statement said. The department is currently working with the family of the female juvenile to help her, the release stated. The Intelligencer reached out to the Swansea Police Department to inquire if men in a white panel van can be confirmed of being in the neighborhood cited in the initial report. We were unable to reach an official Thursday afternoon. About the initial report: Aaron Paul has revealed he knows what happens in the remaining seasons of HBOs hit show Westworld. The actor, who recently reprised his role of Jesse Pinkman for Breaking Bad film sequel El Camino, was announced for the third season of Westworld just over a year ago. No details have been released about his character, but he can be seen starring opposite Evan Rachel Wood in the forthcoming seasons trailer. Speaking to The Independent about the series, the actor said: I sat down with [creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy] and they pitched me this character and they pitched me the broad strokes of the arc of the rest of the series. It is insane. This show is so unbelievably ambitious and I walk onto these sets and my jaw is on the floor., he continued. I feel like Im a little kid again playing cops and robbers on the biggest scale possible. The top 12 TV Westerns Show all 12 1 /12 The top 12 TV Westerns The top 12 TV Westerns 12. Alias Smith and Jones (1971-73) Cashing in on the success of, and clearly modelled on, the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy on the Sundance Kid, Alias Smith and Jones starred Pete Duel and Ben Murphy as two likable outlaws Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry trying to reform in search of an amnesty. The show was hugely popular thanks to the charm of the two leads, amusing storylines and outdoor locations, and even survived the death by suicide of Duel, after which he was replaced by the shows narrator Roger Davis. The top 12 TV Westerns 11. Hell on Wheels (2011-2016) Centring on the lawless encampment that serviced the building of the first transcontinental railroad in post-Civil War America, and the various characters that lived, worked and died there. Hell on Wheels recalls the classic era of television Westerns with its gritty portrayal of Americas westward expansion in this realistic blend of fact and fiction. The top 12 TV Westerns 10. Kung Fu (1972-75) Apposite timing ensured that this mystical East meets West(ern) rode the crest of the martial arts craze of the early 1970s. Much derided and parodied through the years, thanks to occasionally risible dialogue, Kung Fu followed the adventures of Shaolin monk Caine, perfectly played by David Carradine, as he wandered the old American West in search of his brother. Along the way, Caine helped the oppressed and needy and tried to resolve situations through peaceful means, before inevitably being called upon to demonstrate his martial arts skills in brilliantly choreographed slow motion. The top 12 TV Westerns 9. The Rifleman (1958-63) Legendary Western director Sam Peckinpah earned his spurs developing The Rifleman, which starred Chuck Connors as lone parent Lucas McCain, a New Mexico rancher. McCains skill with a rapid fire customised Winchester rifle saw him being called upon to right wrongs while upholding his strong moral values and imparting life lessons to his young son, who always seemed to eat his entire body weight in every show. The top 12 TV Westerns 8. Rawhide (1959-66) A small screen Red River, the longest cattle drive in history was notable for an impressive list of guest stars such as Claude Rains as a drunken lawyer with a fondness for quoting Robert Burns. Spending so much time on the trail and strong subject matter such as racism and prejudice lent Rawhide a gritty realism resulting in probably the most cinematic of all television Westerns. The star of the show, Eric Fleming as the tough but fair trail boss Gil Favor, is almost forgotten now, and Rawhide is more famous for Clint Eastwoods Rowdy Yates and the beloved theme song by Frankie Laine. The top 12 TV Westerns 7. Bonanza (1959-73) Second only to Gunsmoke as the longest-running Western series and broadcast in colour from the off, Bonanza followed the lives of the close-knit Cartwright family, Ben and his three sons: educated Adam, warm-hearted, loveable giant Hoss, and impulsive Little Joe. Bonanza boasted a memorable theme tune and an arresting title sequence as a map of Virginia City is engulfed in flames revealing the four men on horseback. Early episodes had the Cartwrights warring with just about anyone who wandered onto the Ponderosa, their sprawling Nevada ranch, and as Del Boy once observed in Only Fools and Horses, any woman involved with the Cartwrights usually died. However, over time they mellowed as the family frequently found themselves involved in other peoples problems, which were usually solved by Bens strong sense of justice. The top 12 TV Westerns 6. Wagon Train (1957-65) The epitome of the classic television Western from the genres golden age, Wagon Train was hugely popular on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to its mix of action and character study, plus top-notch guest stars including John Wayne and Bette Davis. Inspired by John Fords Wagon Master, Wagon Train featured Ward Bond as Major Seth Adams perennially leading settlers from Missouri to California, and Robert Horton as his scout. Bond had probably appeared in more great movies than any other actor, including Gone with the Wind, The Maltese Falcon and Its a Wonderful Life, but Wagon Train made him a huge star of the small screen as the gruff but kindly Adams. He died suddenly though, in 1960, and the show was never quite the same without him. The top 12 TV Westerns 5. Have Gun, Will Travel (1957-63) Sophisticated, educated knight-errant gun for hire Paladin, played by Richard Boone is the good guy dressed all in black who sported a white knight on his holster and carried business cards engraved with Have Gun, Will Travel. Wire Paladin, San Francisco. And when Paladin did leave his palatial hotel suite it was to seek justice on behalf of anyone willing to meet his standard fee of $1,000. But the plot would often be turned on its head as Paladin changed horses in midstream to side with the downtrodden if his client turned out to be a varmint. The top 12 TV Westerns 4. Maverick (1957-62) The series in which James Garner honed his affable laid-back persona as gambler and conman Bret Maverick. An equally suave Jack Kelly was Brets brother Bart, and later episodes featured Roger Moore as their cousin Beau. Fond of referencing his pappys cracker-barrel philosophy, Garners Maverick was a likeable rogue who would rather talk his way out of trouble than resort to gunplay. Maverick was renowned for its hilarious spoofs of other top programmes of the era including a particularly funny send up of Bonanza set at the Subrosa ranch with Joe Wheelright and his sons Henry, Moose and Small Paul. The top 12 TV Westerns 3. Deadwood (2004-06) Taking revisionism to a whole new level and winner of eight Emmys, Deadwood revitalised the television Western while scandalising purists. The antithesis of golden age Westerns blurred the lines between the good guys and the bad guys with its portrayal of real-life and fictional characters. The town of Deadwood is a cesspit of depravity and iniquity and this is reflected in the brutal action, profane dialogue, and expertly drawn characters such as town boss Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), as venal a character as ever found in the television medium, yet strangely alluring and identifiable to audiences. The top 12 TV Westerns 2. Gunsmoke (1955-75) The longest running TV Western and the first of the so called realistic Westerns, the much loved Gunsmoke starred James Arness as Matt Dillon, marshal of Dodge City in the 1880s. Arness was recommended by John Wayne for the part, and in fact Wayne introduced the first ever episode. Gunsmoke was the first TV Western to tackle adult themes, with prostitution, child abuse and other previously taboo subjects featured. No-nonsense Dillon dispensed sound advice and ruthless justice in equal measure as town marshal and protector of an extended proxy family that included saloon madam Miss Kitty, wordly-wise Doc Adams and a succession of comic-relief deputies including Dennis Weaver as the limping Chester, and a young Burt Reynolds. A remarkable 635 episodes were made and thanks to the wonders of the internet, most can still be viewed. The top 12 TV Westerns 1. Lonesome Dove (1989) Featuring an ensemble cast with all principals on top of their game, none more so than Robert Duvall in the role of a lifetime as rascally, life-is-for-living Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae, this adaption of Larry McMurtrys Pulitzer Prize novel won seven Emmys and is a breathtaking master class in conception, acting, music, direction and cinematography. Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones play two retired Texas Rangers who embark on an epic cattle drive to Montana and along the way encounter Indians, outlaws, lost loves, triumphs, failures and death. Interestingly, McMurty had originally devised the story as a film script, which fell through, with John Wayne and James Stewart in the lead roles. Paul also revealed that he was originally set to appear in the first season, but couldnt work the logistics out. We were actually trying to come up with a world where I was going to be in the first season. I was just so deep into negotiations on this other show and the logistics couldnt work out, he said. And then they approached me again for this third season and I was actually deep into negotiations on this other show, so I was reliving the same moment in my life again! I was stressing out because I had to turn Westworld down the first time around. I just watched it and thought to myself, My God, this is the perfect show. I couldnt miss out on this second opportunity. Paul didnt name which character he was approached to play, but it could have been Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), Logan Delos (Ben Barnes) or William (Jimmi Simpson). Read our full interview with Paul here. Thiruvananthapuram, Feb 20 : The conductor and driver of the ill-fated Kerala state-owned luxury bus that met with an accident near Avinashi in Tiruppur district in Tamil Nadu on Thursday were exemplary human beings, recalled the former CMD of Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC). In the accident, 20 people lost their lives which included the bus conductor V.R. Baiju and driver V.D. Gireesh. Eighteen of the 20 killed were from Kerala Senior Additional Director General of Police, Tomin Thachenkery told the media that the two were exemplary human beings, and he can vouch for that from what he had heard about them in 2018, when he was heading KSRTC. "They went out of their way to help a passenger -- a lady medical professional, (Kavitha Warrier) who was travelling to Bengaluru (in June 2018 ). She developed uneasiness enroute and the two of them turned out to be good samaritans. When I heard about it I called the two of them and awarded them for their real commitment. Each of them was given a cash award of Rs 1,000 each and a certificate of appreciation. And today when I heard about their demise, my thoughts went back to the day I met them," recalled Thachenkery who now heads the Crime branch wing of Kerala Police. After hearing about the untimely and unfortunate demise of her saviours, Warrier wrote in her Facebook page that she often fondly recalls their help, when she fell sick on the bus. "I am deeply saddened after hearing the news of their death. They had literally saved my life. They tended to me like a father and I will never ever forget the two. May their souls rest in peace," wrote Warrier. The explosions occurred every ten seconds for three hours. Shelling in east Ukraine was so intense on Tuesday (18 February) that there were 1,094 explosions in the town of Kadiivka alone between 5:35 and 8:30, international monitors have said. That amounted to an explosion every ten seconds for three hours, EUobserver reported. The "marked spike in ceasefire violations" in the Luhansk region went on for six hours and included 2,500 explosions in total, as well as "bursts" of heavy machine gun and small arms fire, the monitors, from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), also said in a report out on Wednesday. The OSCE did not say who was responsible. But the Ukrainian army said the spike came when "Russian occupation troops" shelled it with high-caliber artillery and mortars before launching a ground assault "through the frontline", resulting in one fatality on each side. The Ukrainian version was broadly corroborated by the EU's embassy in Kyiv on Tuesday. "These offensive attempts by Russia-backed armed formations go completely against the agreed ceasefire," the EU's ambassador to Ukraine, Matti Maasikas, said. "The EU expects Russia to make full and immediate use of its influence on the armed formations it backs in this regard", he added. Five EU countries also placed Russia at the scene in a statement at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in New York the same day. "We call on the sides for full compliance with the ceasefire and in particular on Russia to use its considerable influence over the armed formations it backs," Belgium, Estonia, France, Germany, and Poland said. Russia's show of force might have been meant to gain leverage in ongoing peace talks with Ukraine, France, and Germany. But whatever its political logic, for some it also highlighted the implausibility of Russia's old claim that it has no armed forces in east Ukraine. "It would be wrong to say the Kremlin is responsible for whatever happens there," the Kremlin's spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, said on Tuesday. And previous Russian denials have spawned diplomatic euphemisms over the years. The OSCE, for instance, spotted Russian-type tanks, rocket launchers, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, and armored personnel carriers in what it referred to only as "non-government controlled areas" in east Ukraine in its recent reports. Read alsoDonbas escalation: Russian occupation forces attack Ukrainian troops, try to penetrate line of contact (Video) EU diplomats also tend to speak of "Russia-backed formations" or "foreign armed forces" instead of "Russian troops" in east Ukraine. But for Ukrainian diplomats the intensity of enemy firepower gave the lie to Russian claims that the Ukrainian military was fighting local separatists. "The Russian Federation continues to supply its occupation forces [in the region] with weaponry, regular troops, and mercenaries to the extent that they now dwarf many European armies," Ukraine's UN ambassador, Serhiy Kyslytsya, said at the UNSC on Tuesday. There were some 500 Russian tanks, 1,000 armored combat vehicles, 130 rocket-launch systems, and 800 artillery systems in Russia-occupied east Ukraine, he said. "Just last year, the Russian Federation sent over 4,000 tonnes of weapons and munitions into the occupied territories in Donbas [in east Ukraine]," Kyslytsya said. "Yet another cynical Russian attack in Donbas," Ukraine's EU ambassador, Mykola Tochytskyi, added in Brussels. "We informed the EU about Russia's escalation and urged our partners to react resolutely," Tochytskyi said. And for their part, Ukrainian military officers have, in the past, agreed. "When I say the enemy, you understand this is the Russian Federation... Yesterday's miners can't find a tank in their mines and learn how to drive it without special training," a Ukrainian colonel who commanded the 93rd brigade in Luhansk last year told EUobserver at the time. MONTREAL, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ - SACO Technologies, the world leader in Solid State Led Video Lighting and Media Solutions, announced the appointment of Terry H. O'Neal as President & COO based in Montreal. He joins the company in a newly created role that positions the company for future growth. "Terry is exceptionally qualified and uniquely talented to lead SACO into the next phase of our growth", stated Fred Jalbout, SACO founder, CEO, and Chairman. "Terry's background in running businesses in the lighting industry providing innovative products and services or "solutions" for major projects around the world make him an exceptional fit for this vital position." "I am excited to join SACO and lead the company in its next growth phase. SACO is a company that I wanted to acquire in the past as I could see this company was something special. Amazingly I am here now with the privilege of leading this institution filled with talented people. I am looking forward to collaborating with our clients and partners to help them with their video lighting and media solutions. We have a substantial sales pipeline in the USA, European, and Middle Eastern markets and we will penetrate the Asia market with great speed. SACO will continue to work closely with our customers to ensure that we are executing on the visionary projects that utilize our technology and yield them substantial benefits", said Terry O'Neal. Terry's career began with Schneider Electric where he spent nineteen years in sales, marketing, corporate strategy, manufacturing, and M&A before moving into C-level positions. Mr. O'Neal held senior management positions in Singapore, France, and the USA before becoming President of EFI Electronics and later Kavlico Corporation, both subsidiaries of Schneider Electric. After leaving Schneider Electric, he held senior leadership positions within private equity held companies as CEO of Abrisa Technologies and Global VP of Fulham Company. Most recently, Mr. O'Neal was the CEO of Traxon Technologies and OSRAM's Solutions business unit based in Hong Kong. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Technology from Texas A&M University and a Master of Business Administration from Duke University. About SACO Technologies With Corporate Offices in Europe, the Middle East and North America, SACO's team boasts over 30 years of experience in the development and supply of industry-leading solid-state LED lighting and media solutions. The vast experience and expertise of the SACO team ensures that interfacing with architects, designers, tour managers, and other professionals is seamless and efficient. SACO is a pioneer company dedicated to advancing solid-state LED technology in applications with lighting and media. We combine integrated technology, design, and manufacturing to supply high-quality video lighting fixtures and media elements for commercial, retail, and specialty niche market applications. SACO is an innovative manufacturer with marketing/sales efforts throughout the world. More information can be found at www.saco.com SOURCE SACO Technologies Inc. Related Links saco.com Hero Motocorp, the undisputed leader in small displacement commuter motorcycle segment, has been eyeing the premium end of the two wheeler market for quite some time. The company is open to a partnership with global premium motorcycle brand to realize its goal. When asked by Times of India whether Hero is ready for an alliance with Harley Davidson, Chairman Pawan Munjal replied that if Harley wants to enter into a partnership, he will surely be open to it. Speaking further about a possible partnership with a premium brand, Munjal said, This is the era of partnerships and as and when the right kind of partnership comes our way, or we are able to get around to one, we would be willing to do that. While he did not confirm anything, TOI reports that the American cruiser specialist held talks with Hero Motocorp recently. Harley Davidson has previously revealed that it is looking for a partner in India with established manufacturing and distribution operations to make sub-500 cc motorcycles for the country. With TVS associated with BMW and Bajaj forming a partnership with Triumph, Hero Motocorp emerges as the logical choice for Harley Davidson to tie up with. Harley Davidson has been going through a rough patch internationally and is in the process of entering new segments and markets to keep its business sustainable. The company recently announced a partnership with China-based Qianjiang Group, the owner of Benelli brand. HD also teased a medium displacement 338 scrambler which is essentially a badge engineered version of Benelli TNT 300. A partnership between Harley Davidson and Hero Motocorp would have a lot of synergies to be explored. The Indian brands expertise in low-cost manufacturing, well established vendor network and a wide distribution network would greatly benefit Harley in optimising costs and expanding its sales volume. On the other hand, Harleys brand pull and its expertise in developing finely detailed high-end products would help Hero establish presence in the lucrative premium medium displacement motorcycle market. Hero Motocorps first attempt at partnering with an American premium motorcycle brand didnt really go as planned. Hero picked up a sizeable stake in Erik Buell Racing, a low-volume superbike maker who ended up filing for bankruptcy and shut down operations. Source CORUNNA, Mich. - A man charged in the slaying and mutilation of a man he met through the dating app Grindr was found unresponsive in his Michigan jail cell after not eating, authorities said. Shiawassee County jail officials say Mark Latunski, 50, was treated and taken to the hospital as a precaution after he was discovered on Tuesday. He was returned to his cell a short time later after an examination. Police said he hasnt been eating since being lodged, though sheriffs officials would not characterize it as a hunger strike. Latunski was charged late last year with open murder, disinterment and other charges in the killing of Kevin Bacon, 25. Latunksi is awaiting mental competency and forensic evaluations, which his attorney sought and a judge ordered. Bacons naked body was found Dec. 28 hanging from the ceiling of Latunskis Bennington Township home. Investigators allege in court records that Latunski admitted to stabbing Bacon in the back, slitting his throat and eating parts of his body. Bacons roommate, Michelle Myers, told police Bacon met Latunski on Dec. 24 after connecting with him on the dating app. His family reported him missing the next day. By PTI NEW DELHI: India on Thursday sought to downplay American President Donald Trump's remarks that New Delhi is not treating the US "very well" on the trade front, insisting that it was important to understand the context in which he made the comments. As hopes for sealing the much-anticipated trade deal during Trump's visit to India next week faded away, India said it does not want to create "artificial deadlines". On Trump's remarks that the US was not treated very well by India, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said the context for the comments was the balance of trade and that New Delhi was trying to address Washington's concerns. "It is important to understand the context under which these remarks were made. Please understand that the US is India's largest trading partner in goods and services. Also do keep in mind that there has been a consistent growth in trade between the two countries over the last few years," Kumar said at a media briefing. "I think the context was in terms of the balance of trade and in that context the remarks were made. You are also aware that in the last few years efforts have been made by India to address this particular concern," he added. Kumar said the US is India's sixth-largest source of crude oil imports and that it is purchasing a large number of civilian aircraft. "We do feel that some of these steps bridge the trade deficit that exists at this point in time." On the proposed trade deal, Kumar said India hoped to reach an understanding with an outcome that strikes the right balance for both sides. "We do not want to rush into a deal as the issues involved are complicated with many decisions potentially having real impact on people's lives and long-term economic consequences. We do not want to create artificial deadlines," he said. The MEA spokesperson said the India-US relationship is progressing from strength to strength and that trade has already been growing at more than 10 per cent per annum for the past two years. "Our trade deficit has been declining steadily. Our trade will become even more balanced with increasing imports of US oil and gas, and purchase of large numbers of civil aircraft by India over the next few years," Kumar said. "The US is now our sixth largest source of crude oil imports, while we have become the US's fourth largest customer of crude oil," he added. The US remains the top trading partner for India in terms of trade in goods and services, followed by China. While the bilateral trade between US and India is approximately 62 per cent in goods and 38 per cent in services, the bilateral trade between India and China is dominated by goods. Renowned Kannada actor Ventakesh is currently suffering from Liver failure and was unable to cover his medical expenses owing to financial vows. Colleague and former co-star Jaggesh has extended his support to the ailing actor who is currently hospitalized and is undergoing medical treatment. And now, the reigning superstar of the Kannada film industry, Darshan too has extended his help and support to Venkatesh. Jaggesh is said to have informed D boss about their industry friends ill health and monetary crisis. Jaggeshs one phone call led to Darshan sending over 1 Lakh rupees to help the veteran colleague with his medical expenses. Jaggesh took to social media to inform one and all about the Challenging stars kind and thoughtful gesture. He wrote, I made a call related to Killer Venkatesh and within one hour, for his treatment, our industry friend sends over 1 lakh rupees. The first to extend his support, your wonderful gesture has touched my heart. Stay happy for 100 years.. @dasadarshan god bless.. (sic) For the uninitiated, Venkatesh, who has acted in over 250 films is being treated at the Victoria Hospital in Bengaluru by Dr. Girish and his team. Jaggesh also thanked the medical officials and other industry friends who have extended their support to Venkatesh during the crisis. ALSO READ: No More Birthday Celebrations At Darshans House After A Cop Was Allegedly Assaulted By Fans ALSO READ: Post Birthday Celebrations, Darshan To Resume Shooting For Raja Veera Madakari Nayaka Like this years 2020 Mobile Carnival Association king, Sumner Greer Adams Jr., Queen Seline Vaughan Morrissette will wear a family train retrieved from the Mobile Carnival Museum. In her case the connection is even closer: She was there when it was made. When Morrissettes cousin Lynn Wentworth Worth Morrissette (now Worth Morrissette Hieronymus) was chosen as the MCA queen for 2011, Homer McClure designed the train and an aunt, Laura Clark, made it with a few helpers. Wed all have like family sewing parties to try to get it together in time, said Morrissette, who was in the fifth grade. By that age, her love of Carnival was firmly established. I grew up watching the parades at the Strikers den and Sumners family was always there, she recalled. Sumners a little bit older than me but my two parade buddies were actually Sumners little sister Laura and his first cousin Robin Adams. She said that as a girl on the sidelines she didnt necessarily dream of becoming Mardi Gras royalty herself, but there was no shortage of precedent in the family going back to 1930, when great-grandfather Clifton Clarke Inge Sr. reigned as king. Her father, Clifton Inge Morrissette, was a herald in the court of 1970s Queen Nancy Jean Turner and her mother, then Melissa Seline Cope, was a lady in the court of Queen Louise Shearer Brock in 1985. She can count seven aunts and cousins whove served as MCA monarchs since 1980. The St. Pauls graduate is now 21 and in her final semester at the University of Alabama, wrapping up a double major in finance and economics. Shes hopeful her royal duties wont create too much of a disruption. Im told we get a letter from the city explaining what is about to go on and they try to make it official as possible, she said. Shes heard tales of at least one royal whose out-of-state professors laughed in his face, so shes interested to see how hers react, she said. Its a huge honor, a lot of fun, she said. It was definitely a big surprise and an honor to be asked. Ive grown up watching my cousins, whether they were monarchs or just ladies and knights in the court. Its definitely a big part of our family. Its just such a good celebration of family and our city and our history. Relatives have given her advice both general and specific, she said. This is kind of a cliche, but [they say to] just soak it in, because that week rolls by fast and when Wednesday comes, its back to reality, for sure, she said. The fairytale is kind of over on Ash Wednesday, or the afternoon of Fat Tuesday. On the specific side: My cousin, when she carried that very heavy train, she wore a strapless dress and she was like, Under any circumstances make sure you have straps on that dress, Morrissette said. Once again, there have been sewing parties; once again, Homer McClure designed embellishments to update the train for her use. Morrissette and her mother bought her Amsale gown in New York and had it modified and embellished by Cristal Hall of Seams to Fit and McClure. The queen said her mother has been boss lady number one as far as making arrangement for her reign. She said that as an economics major, she cant help but look at Mardi Gras partly in terms of its economic impact on Mobile. But really, she said, its about the relationships. Mardi Gras is a great part of our city history, she said. Mumbai, Feb 20 : Actors Sharad Malhotra, Anjum Fakih and Eijaz Khan, who will star in the web series "Kashmakash", have spoken about the consequences of oversharing on social media. The show, which is an anthology, narrates five stories of modern-day crimes in India and their impact on the victims. From unwanted attention on social media to drug abuse and the menace of fake news, the show chronicles a range of fictional stories based on crimes that are becoming increasingly common. "I am aware of the price that one has to pay for being famous. With its many positives, fame also has some troubling aspects like constant attention. As an actor, I need to be extremely cautious of what information to share on social media and how much of it to share. There is always a danger of intrusion in my personal space, hence, I always think twice before posting something," Anjum said. Image Source: IANS News Sharad, who plays the admin of a WhatsApp group in an episode of the Hungama Play's show, said: "We need to be aware of how sharing fake news can impact the society. We read so many news articles across the web and without thinking twice just share it with our friends. One must cross check and ensure the information they are sharing is correct and from a reliable source to avoid unwanted confusion and chaos." Talking about cyberbullying, Eijaz said: "While social media is a great tool to connect with people, it is in our best interest to stay vigilant at all times. The digital world offers anonymity to everyone making it difficult to understand the intentions of other people. Hence, in my opinion one must exercise extreme caution while conversing with strangers online." The show also stars Abhishek Kapur, Abigail Pande, Lavina Tandon and Vahbiz Dorabjee in different stories while Anil V Kumar, Shiva Verma, Saptaraj Chakraborty and Saket N Yadav serve as directors for different episodes. -- Syndicated from IANS By West Kentucky Star Staff Feb. 19, 2020 | 05:30 PM | MCCRACKEN COUNTY Paducah police received a call from a woman saying she had received two cashier's checks that had been altered. She told officers that she received the checks from 56-year-old Tony Moore, who was attempting to buy a home and car from the woman. Moore reportedly purchased the checks from Regions Bank for $10 and $38, then allegedly altered them to $70,000 and $38,000. He was arrested and lodged in the McCracken County Jail. He is being charged with first-degree criminal possession of a forged instrument. A Paducah man was arrested Monday after allegedly altering two checks to purchase a home and car. Jeremy Corbyn hinted he would like to stay part of Labour's top team after he steps down, saying he would consider a shadow cabinet post if it was offered. The outgoing leader, who led Labour to its worst election defeat since the 1930s in December, spoke as he toured areas affected by flooding in Wales this afternoon. At the weekend Corbynista candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey said she would give Mr Corbyn a top job if she won because she 'loves' him. Asked about the offer today, Mr Corbyn told the BBC: 'I'll see what it is, I didn't know I was going to be offered anything.' The outgoing leader, who led Labour to its worst election defeat since the 1930s in December, spoke as he toured areas affected by flooding in Wales this afternoon Asked about the job offer today, Mr Corbyn told the BBC: 'I'll see what it is, I didn't know I was going to be offered anything' He added: 'I'm happy to serve the party in any capacity. 'My whole life has been about making my contribution in Parliament, holding the Government to account and for speaking up in policy areas.' Mr Corbyn made a rare appearance in public this afternoon as he met people in Pontyprydd whose homes have been badly hit by flooding. He is the first major party leader to visit affected areas, with Boris Johnson staying away so far. His willingness to stay on is in contrast to his shadow chancellor John McDonnell, who has already said he will return to the backbenches when the new leader takes charge in April. At the weekend Corbynista candidate Rebecca Long-Bailey said she would give Mr Corbyn a top job if she won because she 'loves' him But Mr Corbyn's only realistic chance of staying in Labour's top team is if Ms Long-Bailey wins. The left-wing candidate is trailing Sir Keir Starmer in Labours leadership race, and has been labelled the Continuity Corbyn candidate after she gave him ten out of ten for his leadership. It emerged at the weekend that she had told supporters in London that she would hand the failed leader a high-level brief if she was to succeed him. Asked if she would give him a job if she got into N 10, the Labour business spokesman said: Id like to but I dont know whether he wants to do it... Its up to him. I love him so. Separately, shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon, who is standing to be deputy leader, said he believed Mr Corbyn could play a valuable role on the front bench. If he was shadow foreign secretary, that would be ideal, he said. 20.02.2020 LISTEN President Akufo-Addo seems to hold contrary view regarding the fight against illegal mining activities in the country commonly known as galamsey. He said Operation Vanguards work in fighting illegal mining has chalked a lot of successes, indicating that his government, unlike the Mahama administration which gave up on the fight against galamsey, has been able to make inroads. Delivering his fourth State of the Nation Address to Parliament on Thursday, 20th February, the President said the anti-galamsey taskforce comprising police and military personnel, has been largely successful, even though problems still remain. He stated, Mining with impunity in water bodies in forest reserves has declined, over 4,000 miners have received training in sustainable mining, [and] the number of individuals dying in mining tunnels and pits in the few unauthorised locations left has reduced by more than 90 per cent. He continued, Operation Vanguard has been particularly effective in helping to restore the order, which has permitted the re-opening of the famous Obuasi mine of AngloGold Ashanti, adding: The community mining programme has been well-received by the population, noting that young men and women, who do not have the resources to acquire concessions and excavators and other mining inputs and, therefore, have to do galamsey, have moved into legal community mining. Now, 20,000 individuals are earning their income legitimately in the community mines in Akrofuom, Atwima Nwabiagya, Atwima Mponua, Adansi North, Amansi Central, Wassa Amenfi East and Wassa East Districts. Since the introduction of the community mining programme, there have been no deaths due to the collapse of tunnels and pits, the President added. According to Akufo-Addo, When we came into office in January 2017, galamsey activities were rampant in many parts of our country, our lands, forests and river bodies were being systematically degraded and polluted without any care and this had been the case for several years, and, indeed, the previous NDC administration had given up the fight against galamsey. He continued, We determined that this was an intolerable situation and we owed to generations yet-unborn to tackle the problem and save our environment. I was very much aware that the lure of gold, once it takes hold, drives away all rationality; that is not a Ghanaian characteristic, it is a human characteristic I was, therefore, not under any illusion about the size and scope of the problem we were taking on. As Ive said on countless occasions, the President noted, The battle we lost is not against mining; it would be unrealistic for anyone to suggest that there should be no mining in Ghana however, taking the minerals out should not lead to the destruction of our water bodies and forests or endanger the sustainable existence of our country. Mr Speaker, he said, The threat posed to the future of our country by galamsey is great, and we cannot shirk our responsibilities in dealing with it, adding: The government will not weaken its stance and welcomes the continuous support of the Media Coalition Against Illegal Mining. Under the auspices of this committee, the Ministry of Local Government has formulated and is implementing the alternative livelihood programme in 35 severely affected galamsey districts across the country. The Estonian Foreign Ministry has called on Russia to ensure a full ceasefire along the contact line and put an end to the occupation and interference into Ukrainian affairs, the ministrys press service reports. Six years ago, the Russian aggression in Ukraine began and the war still continues. We urge Russia to reciprocate Ukraine's efforts and implement a full, unlimited and comprehensive ceasefire; fulfill its commitments under the Minsk agreements; and end the occupation and interference, the ministry reports on Twitter. February 20 is the official date of the beginning of the temporary occupation of Crimea, which was determined by the resolution of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine "On the Statement of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine "On Countering the Armed Aggression of the Russian Federation and Overcoming its Consequences" of April 21, 2015. ish Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-21 03:06:52|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Roger Stone, U.S. President Donald Trump's longtime confidant, was sentenced on Thursday to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress and witness tampering during former special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe. It came after days of controversy surrounding the Justice Department's decision to lessen the sentence after the president tweeted about his displeasure with the gravity of the original sentence recommendation. "Mr. Stone lied," U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said in court. Stone chose not to speak when given the opportunity. Jackson sharply questioned the new attorney for the prosecution, John Crabb Jr. of the D.C. U.S. Attorney's Office, over the Trump administration's sentencing reversal. Crabb said he was not authorized to discuss internal department deliberations in open court, while praising the original prosecution team and insisting that the Justice Department is committed to doing its job without "fear or favor." In November 2019, a federal court jury found Stone guilty of lying to a House committee about his efforts to find out what WikiLeaks planned to do with hacked emails dealing with Trump's Democratic rival Hillary Clinton during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The jury concluded that Stone also urged a radio host to lie to Congress about their WikiLeaks conversations. Stone was not charged with any underlying crime of coordinating with Russia during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, although Mueller's team investigated Stone over tweets claiming to be in touch with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The sentence is sure to increase speculation that Trump will pardon Stone, a report by TheHill predicted. Since Stone's lawyers submitted a sealed motion last week seeking for a new trial, Jackson said Thursday's sentence will be delayed from going into effect until after the motion is settled. Career federal prosecutors initially recommended a prison sentence of seven to nine years last week. Hours after Trump tweeted his displeasure, however, Attorney General William Barr intervened and directed the Justice Department to submit a new court filing, saying a three-to-four-year sentence would be "more in line with the typical sentences imposed" in similar cases. Four prosecutors resigned in protest afterwards and Barr has been under fire on allegations of "misuse of the criminal justice system" since then. Almaty: The governor of a Kazakh province bordering China said on Thursday he would seek the deportation of dozens of Chinese workers to defuse the local population's fears of coronavirus, news website Dalanews.kz reported. An electron-microscope image of the COVID-19 virus. The Central Asian nation closed its border with China after the outbreak but has so far made no moves against Chinese who had arrived there earlier. Danial Akhmetov, governor of East Kazakhstan province, made the promise about deportations during a meeting with residents of the Zaisan region adjacent to China, according to Dalanews. An angry crowd gathered there in Thursday's early hours, alarmed by the sight of extra beds being delivered to a hospital amid rumours that the authorities planned to take in coronavirus patients from across the border. The NHRC team probing the police crackdown in Jamia Millia Islamia has completed its probe but is yet to submit its report to the commission's chairman, a senior official said. A seven-member team of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) was appointed to probe the alleged police excesses following their entry into the varsity campus. The team had recorded testimonies of 94 students apart from teachers, the chief proctor, librarian and staff of the library where the police had allegedly lathicharged students. "They have completed the investigation. The report has not yet come to me. We have not set a deadline for the submission of the report. It takes a lot of time to finalise a report," said NHRC chairman Justice (retd) HL Dattu. On December 15, police had used batons and teargas shells to disperse a violent mob during a protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) a few metres away from the varsity. They had entered the university campus, saying rioters had taken shelter there. However, Jamia students had denied that they were involved in the violence and had alleged police brutality on those studying in the library. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting Retreat (ADMM Retreat) officially opened in Hanoi on Wednesday morning, under the chair of Vietnamese Defence Minister Ngo Xuan Lich. Vietnamese defence minister Ngo Xuan Lich (centre) made the opening speech at the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting Retreat held in Ha Noi on Wednesday. In his opening remarks, Minister Lich thanked ASEAN member countries for supporting Viet Nam in performing its role as chair of ASEAN. He expressed his belief that the defence-military cooperation channel will continue to contribute to the building of the ASEAN Community in 2020, bringing a better life for people in ASEAN. Lich stressed that the ADMM Retreat is taking place amid developments of security challenges, especially the outbreak and rapid spread of the acute respiratory disease caused by coronavirus (COVID-19). As ASEAN Military Medicine Chair, Viet Nam proposed that member countries consider organising drills to cope with outbreaks and spread of disease in 2020, he said. He went on to say that Brunei and Australia, as co-chairs of the ADMM-Plus Experts' Working Group on Military Medicine during 2020-2023, are encouraged to include the response to disease outbreaks in field exercises during the three-year working programme. Viet Nam also called for partner countries in the ADMM Plus mechanism to enhance their cooperation in raising ASEAN countries capacity in military medicine, especially for responding to disease outbreaks, the minister said. Minister Lich expressed satisfaction at the outcome of the working session of heads of ADSOM delegations on Tuesday, which agreed to issue a joint statement on defence cooperation against disease outbreaks. He described the joint statement as specific evidence of the unity, resolve and proactiveness of ASEAN when facing common security challenges. According to the minister, the ADMM Retreat, which is the first high-level event during Viet Nams ASEAN Chairmanship Year 2020, is very important in outlining the orientation for ASEAN defence cooperation in 2020 as well as in preparing for ADMM and ADMM Plus at the end of the year. Lich urged delegates to engage in straightforward and open discussions on security challenges faced by the region and the world, particularly ASEAN, and on assessment of ADMM, ADMM+ cooperative mechanisms, as well as directions and contents for cooperation in the future. Joint statement browser not support iframe. The ASEAN defence ministers meeting later issued a joint statement on defence cooperation to deal with the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak, keeping in mind WHOs declaration of the disease to be a public health emergency of international concern that threatens the well-being of the regions people and development. The statement noted the effective efforts by ASEAN member countries as well as China in dealing with the disease, reaffirming the regions defence ministers commitments to promote defence cooperation and information sharing in line with ASEAN unity and solidarity. The defence ministers statement also praised Viet Nams thorough preparations for ASEAN 2020, including taking preventive measures against COVID-19 to make sure that the meetings could be held safely. The ministers said they would enhance practical cooperation among ASEAN defence establishments to organise information and best practice sharing activities, and with our external partners, bilaterally or multilaterally including considering to conduct a tabletop exercise within the framework of the ASEAN Centre of Military Medicine, which Viet Nam is ready to host at the earliest opportunity in dealing with COVID-19. They will make use of the Network of ASEAN Chemical, Biological and Radiological Defence Experts to enhance professional linkages, and promote scientific cooperation to manage infectious disease outbreaks. The joint statement promised proactive cooperation with other relevant sectoral bodies of ASEAN in tackling COVID-19 in the spirit of ASEANs solidarity, and with other countries in the region and the world. The defence ministers pledged to do their part for public health and social cohesion by supporting the efforts of our respective national health authorities as well as utilising ASEANs regional health mechanisms for coordination and cooperation in response to this emerging public health threat. "Impressed and appreciated" Asked for his assessment of the ASEAN defence ministers joint statement on fighting COVID-19, Secretary-General of ASEAN Lim Jock Hoi reiterated several times during an interview with local media that he was very much impressed and appreciated the leadership of Viet Nam on this very important issue. Earlier last Friday, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, as ASEAN 2020 Chairman, issued a statement on ASEANs collective response to the outbreak, stressing ASEANs solidarity and spirit of cohesive and responsive community. The ASEAN Secretary-General said he appreciated how fast the statement was developed and adopted, adding that the defence ministers joint statement serves as another indication on how the bloc can work together to address this matter of great concern to peoples health and security. Regarding Viet Nams proposed drills on fighting COVID-19 slated to be held in the near future, the diplomat said that the region has had experience dealing with the SARS outbreak in 2003, adding that all sectors of ASEAN from health to diplomacy, trade and economy to military have to work together so that our people can be looked after and our prosperity maintained. ASEAN Secretary General highlights need for unity against COVID-19 ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi meets the media ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi highlighted the need to stay united and actively respond to the outbreak of the acute respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus (COVID-19), in line with the Vietnam ASEAN Chairmanship Year 2020s theme Cohesive and Responsive, during a meeting with the media in Hanoi on February 19. The meeting took place on the sidelines of the 2020 ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM) Retreat in Hanoi the same day, which set orientations to cooperation during ASEAN Year 2020 and made preparations for ADMM and ADMM Plus later this year. Lim lauded the ASEAN Chairs Statement announced by Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and the joint statement by ASEAN defence ministers at the ADMM Retreat as evidence for regional solidarity and joint action against health-related issues, reflecting ASEANs support to ensuring healthy environment for citizens. He expressed his delight that the joint statement, under the direction of Vietnam, was adopted after two days of discussions. Based on that, he hoped that action programmes will be built, especially in health care and medicine. The armies play an important role in coping with COVID-19 outbreak, notably medical army centres, he said. About ASEAN member states proposal to hold drills in response to the epidemic, Lim said ASEAN had experience in coping with the SARS epidemic in 2003, and suggested reviewing approaches to deal with COVID-19. ASEANs ministries and agencies, including those in medical, defence, diplomatic and economic sectors, should work closely together to ensure citizens health and maintain the blocs prosperity, he said. VNS/VNA BOGOTA - Uber restarted operations in Colombia Thursday after shutting down its app for almost three weeks, saying it had found new alternatives to work legally in the Latin American country, one of several where the company has faced resistance from unions and legislators . Uber said that from now on, its app will help users in Colombia enter contracts with drivers in which they are renting the vehicles along with the drivers services. Opponents say the app competes unfairly against taxi drivers and evades some taxes. A spokeswoman for the company said the app is looking for ways to add taxi drivers to its Colombia platform. We want to offer a diversity of services that will allow traditional, and new alternatives (for transport) to coexist, read a statement from Uber. In December, Colombias Superintendency for Industry and Commerce had ordered Uber to shut down, following a lawsuit from a taxi company. The superintendency said Uber was providing transport in an unregulated fashion, and was diverting customers away from taxis that pay licensing fees. Uber complied with the ruling but argued that it went against a free trade agreement between Colombia and the United States. The company also said the ruling was discriminatory as it only told Uber to cease operations, and did not address similar apps that also operate in Colombia, including Cabify, Didi and Beat. On Thursday, taxi unions and legislators expressed skepticism that Ubers new rental approach complies with laws regulating public transport in Colombia. Its a mockery of the law, Ernesto Sandoval, general manager of Taxis Teleclub, a Bogota cab company, told Caracol radio. You cant provide public transport and say its a rental service. This just shows you how in Colombia companies with money can do whatever they desire, said Jose Orlando Herrera, a Bogota cab driver, who said that he had to pay $25,000 for his licensing fee. Herrera took a large loan to pay for his license, and says that every day he must earn around $60 to cover his debts, and have some money left for himself. He said that since Uber started to operate in Colombia, in 2013, he has had to work longer hours. Its unfair he said. But others have praised the app for providing work to people who are struggling to find employment, or are unable to work full time jobs. Eliana Quintero, a single mother who has been an Uber driver for the past two years, said she was ecstatic about the platforms return. My car is not allowed to circulate today, she said. But tomorrow I will be up at 4 a.m. driving. Quintero says Ubers flexible work hours allow her to spend more time with her son who recently recovered from lung cancer while making enough money to sustain her family. She credits Uber with giving her a new chance to enter the labour force, after being unemployed for years. I am 42 and its hard to get a new job at my age, she explained. Uber said in January that it had 88,000 affiliated drivers in Colombia, and approximately 2 million users. Legislators are currently working on a law that would regulate ride-sharing apps and make them pay social security for drivers, as well as taxes on their earnings. Uber has faced numerous lawsuits across Latin America. Mexico has regulated Uber and other apps, which now pay state taxes, while in Brazil the supreme court recently ruled Uber drivers are not employees but independent contractors who need not be paid social security. This study examines the Black Women's Renaissance (BWR) - the flowering of literary talent among African American women at the end of the 20th century. It focuses on the historical and heritage novels of the 1980s and the vexed relationship between black cultural nationalism and black feminism. It argues that when the nation seemingly fell out of fashion, black women writers sought to re-create what Renan called "a soul, a spiritual principle" for their ethnic group. BWR narratives, especially those associated with womanism, appreciated "culture bearing" mothers as cultural reproducers of the nation and transmitters of its values. In this way, the writers of the BWR gave rise to "matrifocal" cultural nationalism that superseded masculine cultural nationalism of the previous decade and made black women, instead of black men, principal agents/carriers of national identity. This monograph argues that even though matrifocal nationalism empowered women, ultimately it was a flawed project. It promoted gender and cultural essentialism, i.e. it glorified black motherhood and mother-daughter bonding and condemned other, more radical models of black female subjectivity. Moreover, the BWR, vivified by middle-class and educated black women, turned readers' attention from more contentious social issues, such as class mobility or wealth redistribution. The monograph compares the cultural nationalist novels of the 1980s with social protest novels written by the same authors in the 1970s and explains the rationale behind the change in their aesthetic and political agenda. It also contrasts novels written by womanist writers (Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor to name just a few) and by African Caribbean immigrant or second-generation writers (Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Jamaica Kincaid and Michelle Cliff) to show that, on the score of cultural nationalism, the BWR was not a monolithic phenomenon. African American and African Caribbean women writers collectively contributed to the flourishing of the BWR, but they did not share the same ideas on black identities, histories, or the question of ethnonational belonging. ### View here: https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/558171 Clark Gerstacker, of Midland, was recently awarded the title of 2020 Michigan Master Farmer by Michigan Farmer magazine. The peer-nominated honor recognizes farmers for their advocacy for agriculture as well as farm management over their lifetime. "He truly exemplifies what the Master Farmer award is all about," said Jim Zook, executive director of the Corn Marketing Program of Michigan, who nominated Gerstacker. Gerstacker operates Gerstacker Farms, a 127-year-old, 1,700-acre farm with his brother, Kirk. The farm produces corn, dried beans, soybeans and sugar beets and has been in the family for 127 years. One of Gerstacker's goals is to make sure that farming is a "viable option" for the next generation, which includes managing the chemicals in the soil and reducing nutrient runoff. "The land that we farm is our most precious resource," he said. Gerstacker is a devoted regional and national advocate for farmers. He explained how production agriculture constitutes 2% of the population. Furthermore, the U.S. is the third largest importer of sugar in the world, bringing in sugar from 31 other countries. "Our sugar industry is dependent on what happens or doesn't happen in Washington D.C.," Gerstacker said. Gerstacker has served as part of the Michigan Corn Growers Association, the Corn Marketing Program of Michigan, the National Corn Board of National Corn Growers Association and Michigan Sugar. In addition, he has hosted legislators at Gerstacker Farms to advocate agriculture's importance on the local, regional and national scale. "We do everything we can to educate them about agriculture," Gerstacker said. The Master Farmer award was also given to Kevin Winkel of Hartford. Both Gerstacker and Winkel attended an awards luncheon, hosted in conjunction with the 2020 Great Lakes Crop Summit, on Friday, Jan. 30 at the Soaring Eagle Casino and Resort in Mount Pleasant. Each also received a plaque from Michigan Farmer magazine, a Carhartt jacket and a check for $1,000. The Syrian air force has carried out strikes on the Turkish armys positions in the Idlib province, killing two troops, Turkish Presidential Spokesman Fahrettin Altun said on Twitter, TASS reports. "Our troops deployed to Idlib to ensure peace and carry out humanitarian activities came under the [Assad] regimes attack, which killed two troops and left another five wounded," the tweet reads. The Turkish Defense Ministry earlier issued a statement about an airstrike on the Turkish positions. At the same time, the ministry reported that "over 50 [Syrian] regime soldiers were killed, five tanks, two armored vehicles, a self-propelled artillery gun and two military pickups were destroyed." Turkeys Anadolu news agency informed earlier on Thursday that the so-called armed Syrian opposition had launched an operation against government forces in the Idlib province. According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), Syrian troops managed to thwart the oppositions attacks. New Delhi, Feb 20 : India hit back at China on Thursday over Beijing's hostile statement against Union Home Minister Amit Shah's visit to Arunachal Pradesh, saying it did not stand to reason and understanding of India. "Our position on Arunachal Pradesh is clear and consistent. Arunachal Pradesh is an integral and inalienable part of India. Indian leaders routinely travel to the state of Arunachal Pradesh as they do to any other state of India. Objecting to the visit of Indian leaders to a state of India does not stand to reason and understanding of the Indian people," spokesperson of Ministry of External Affairs Raveesh Kumar said at a press briefing here. Even as it is bogged down by the coronavirus epidemic, China on Thursday reopened a hostile front with India as Beijing "firmly opposed" Shah's visit to Arunachal Pradesh on its statehood day and warned India against "complicating" the border issue. Arunachal Pradesh became a full state from a Union Territory, 34 years ago on February 20. The region was part of British India in 1913-14 and formally included when the McMohan Line was established as the border between India and Tibet in 1938. Disputing India's sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told the media in Beijing that "The Chinese government has never recognised the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' and is firmly opposed to Shah's visit." China considers Arunachal Pradesh a part of southern Tibet region which it occupied in 1951. Geng said, "China's position on the eastern sector of the India-China, or the southern part of China's Tibet region, is consistent and clear." Geng said the visit "violated China's territorial sovereignty, undermined the stability of the border area, sabotaged political mutual trust, and violated relevant bilateral agreement." He asked New Delhi not to take any actions which can "further complicate the border issue". "The Chinese side urges the Indian side to take concrete actions to uphold peace and tranquillity of the border area," Geng said. (Bloomberg) -- The Trump administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject an appeal by Alphabet Inc.s Google, boosting Oracle Corp.s bid to collect more than $8 billion in royalties for Googles use of copyrighted programming code in the Android operating system. The administration weighed in on the high-stakes case on the same day that President Donald Trump attended a re-election campaign fundraiser in California hosted by Oracles co-founder, billionaire Larry Ellison. Ellison hosted a golf outing and photos with Trump. The event cost a minimum of $100,000 per couple to attend, with a higher ticket price of $250,000 for those who wanted to participate in a policy roundtable with the president, the Palm Springs Desert Sun reported. Google is challenging an appeals court ruling that it violated Oracle copyrights when it included some Oracle-owned Java programming code in Android. The dispute has split Silicon Valley, pitting developers of software code against companies that use the code to create programs. Googles verbatim copying of Oracles code into a competing product wasnt necessary to foster innovation, the U.S. Solicitor General Noel Francisco said Wednesday in a filing with the court. Francisco had asked the high court in September, on behalf of the administration, not to hear Googles appeal. The Supreme Court usually, though not always, takes the solicitor generals advice about pending appeals. In this case, the justices agreed to take the case and are scheduled to hold oral arguments on March 24. The Obama Solicitor General Don Verrilli supported Oracles position in Oracle v. Google, a position maintained by Trump Solicitor General Noel Francisco, Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger said in an email. Google contends the appeals court ruling, if not reversed, will make it harder to develop new applications. A remarkable range of consumers, developers, computer scientists, and businesses agree that open software interfaces promote innovation and that no single company should be able to monopolize creativity by blocking software tools from working together, the company said in a statement. Openness and interoperability have helped developers create a variety of new products that consumers use to communicate, work, and play across different platforms. Story continues Francisco asked the justices to give the government 10 minutes to argue its position in the case. The U.S. has substantial interest in issues regarding copyright law and the re-use of computer code at the heart of the dispute, he said in a filing. (Updates with fundraiser details in third paragraph. An earlier version of this story corrected spelling on former solicitor generals name.) --With assistance from Mark Bergen and Nico Grant. To contact the reporter on this story: Malathi Nayak in San Francisco at mnayak21@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg, Joe Schneider For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source. 2020 Bloomberg L.P. By David Ovalle, David Goodhue and Michelle Marchante | Miami Herald MIAMI Emma Afra had taken the short ferry ride from her home on the wealthy Fisher Island enclave countless times. But sources familiar with the investigation told the Miami Herald on Wednesday that they believe Afra forgot to put her Mercedes in park and hit the gas pedal by mistake when the vehicle started rolling. That working theory is based on what witnesses told Miami-Dade police: that the car accelerated suddenly through a lightweight barrier aboard the Pelican ferryboat and into Government Cut, just after the ferry departed from the island on Tuesday evening. The apparent freak accident claimed Afra, 63, and her passenger, 75-year-old Viviane Brahms, of Harrison, N.Y. Hours later, police divers found the car upside down 52 feet below the surface. It was a heart-wrenching scene: The two friends were discovered in an embrace in the back seat of the car, according to multiple sources. Afras older sister, Mary Davis, was devastated by the tragedy. Her sister was a well-known South Florida philanthropist who worked to stop child abuse and human trafficking. I cant handle this. Its so sad, Davis told the Miami Herald on Wednesday. Shes been a wonderful sister and great daughter to our mother. The bizarre incident is now casting scrutiny on safety measures aboard the Fisher Island ferry system, which for decades has moved dozens of cars and passengers safely back and forth between Miami Beachs MacArthur Causeway and an island that is home to a few hundred wealthy residents. The investigation is being spearheaded by the U.S. Coast Guard and Miami-Dade Polices homicide bureau. Around the world, between 2015 and 2019, at least 6,000 passengers have died or gone missing on ferry boats, according to a rough tally from the Worldwide Ferry Association. That includes a woman and her child who died when their car reversed off a ferry in the waters off Mombasa, Kenya. But most deaths happen overseas, where boating standards are less rigorous. The United States passenger-vessel industry is generally considered safe, especially on ferries that regularly traverse the nations waterways. In the past 20 years, ferry fatalities are very few in the United States, said Roberta Weisbrod, the executive director of the New York-based Worldwide Ferry Association. Its very rare in developed countries. Most U.S. ferry accidents involved collisions a Staten Island ferry infamously struck a dock in New York, killing 11 people in 2003. The Fisher Island ferry was involved in a fatal crash in 1997. A woman named Anne-Lynne Samole died when her familys boat collided with the Fisher Island ferryboat known as the Eagle. The ferry operators insurance company later paid out $4.15 million in a settlement. The Fisher Island ferry system is one of the few in Florida and has operated, 24 hours a day, for decades largely with few incidents. The system, run by the Fisher Island Community Association, features three boats including the Pelican. From the mainland, they depart from a dock on the MacArthur Causeway near the Coast Guard station to the island that touts itself as consistently ranked as one of the wealthiest ZIP codes in the U.S. The Pelican is a 113-foot passenger vessel built in 1981. It had an active Coast Guard certification and was last inspected on Jan. 23, according to the Coast Guard. Inspection records show few problems with the vessel in October 2018, the Coast Guard noted that the boat owner had replaced a cracked propeller and bilge piping, and removed dead-end wire from the engine room. Seven months earlier, in March 2018, the Coast Guard inspected and cleared the vessel after it was involved in a collision. Inspectors attended vessel and observed no significant damage to vessels hull, the records show. The ferry ride is less than two miles, and usually lasts between eight and 12 minutes. Passengers ease their cars into one of four numbered lanes aboard the Pelican, entering the back of the boat to exit on the opposite side at docking. A sign reminds drivers, who wait in the car, to engage the parking brake as they wait inside their vehicles. The crew places blocks, known as chocks, under the tires to keep the vehicles from rolling. Although the chocks are not required by law, the Pelicans crew is believed to have been using them that day to secure the vehicles, including the Mercedes, said Coast Guard spokesman Jonathan Lally. Investigators believe the car may have just accelerated over the chocks. But the vessel was not equipped with any video recording system that would have captured the accident, sources said. Afras 2019 Mercedes S560 was the lead car in the first lane its front just feet from a thin netting strung across the edge. Aerial footage of the boat after the incident shows the empty space where the Mercedes was, with the netting crumpled. Weisbroad, of the ferry association, said photos of the Pelicans barrier shows it was nothing more than a visual barrier to mark the edge of the vessel. As opposed to something really effective, something that would hold back a roll, she said. As a contrast, she pointed to the tiny Balboa Island ferry in Newport, Calif., which has a heavy metal gate on each end to protect or slow cars from going over the edge. John Hickey, a Miami maritime lawyer who has ridden the Fisher Island ferry several times, said the safety measures are inadequate. Other ferries that Ive seen have large steel barriers which also form the ramp, said Hickey, who handles lawsuits involving maritime accidents. The netting on the Fisher Island ferry is pretty insufficient. Its pretty flimsy. Its not going to hold anything back. Hickey said the crew members should have been knocking on windows, reminding motorists to put their cars in park and engage the parking brakes. Its not a huge time commitment, Hickey said. Its part of their job. The Fisher Island Community Association declined to answer specific questions about the incident and safety measures. It is with heavy hearts that we share the news of the tragic loss of life of Emma Afra and Vivian Brahms who perished on Tuesday, Feb. 18, when the car they were riding on the ferry ended up in the water for reasons still to be determined, Roberto Sosa, president and CEO of the association, said on Wednesday. The entire Fisher Island community mourns their loss and our hearts and prayers go out to their families and loved ones at this very difficult time. We continue to cooperate fully with the U.S. Coast Guard and other government agencies. The two dead women appeared to be longtime friends. Afra graduated from the University of Miami in May 1985 with an English degree. One of her passions was Kristi House, a nonprofit that advocates to end child abuse and child sex trafficking and also provides services to victims and their families. She became involved with the nonprofit in 2002 as a volunteer, helping to plan the nonprofits annual Touch a Heart gala dinner its primary fundraiser for more than a decade. In November 2012, she took on one of three co-chair roles for the fundraiser, which helped raise $500,000 for child victims of sexual abuse that year, according to the organization. She was very charming, lighthearted, sweet, very lively, said Lauren Harrison, a former Kristi House board member and event chair. She co-chaired the fundraiser in 2012 with Afra. Harrison says Afra had a knack for securing high-end auction items for the fundraiser. Those items would help bring in thousands of donations every year to Kristi House. Afra and her husband Siavash Sia Afra, who died several years ago, always attended the gala sometimes bringing guests along and donated more than $50,000 to the nonprofit since 2002, said a Kristi House spokeswoman. Its just awful; its just tragic, Harrison said. I have a heavy heart today. She will certainly be missed and all of the time and energy she put into Kristi House is remembered and appreciated. In December 2019, both women were photographed together by WorldRedEye.com at Glenn Ligons art lecture in the Miami Design District. They were also photographed in September 2017 at a private opening and cocktail reception for a Minimalism and Beyond gallery at the Mnuchin Gallery in New York City by BFA. The New York Post reported that Brahms lived in an exclusive Sterling Ridge neighborhood of Harrison. Its a terrible tragedy, a woman who answered the door of the Brahms home told the New York Post. I really cant say anything else right now. (Miami Herald staff writers Charles Rabin, Carli Teproff and Rebecca San Juan contributed to this report.) India has issued import licences for 1.1 million tonnes of refined palmolein from Indonesia, government and trade sources told Reuters, a move that has surprised the industry as only last month New Delhi restricted imports of the commodity. A resumption in refined palmolein buying by India, the world's biggest palm oil importer, could lift its total palm oil imports and support Malaysian palm oil futures, which have corrected a fifth from a three-year high hit in January. India put refined palm oil and palmolein on the list of restricted items on Jan. 8, a move sources said was retaliation against top supplier Malaysia after its criticism of actions in Kashmir and a new citizenship law. The move prompted traders to seek permission from the Directorate General of Foreign Trade (DGFT) to import refined palmolein, and the commerce ministry's wing received more than 100 applications for licences. The DGFT has issued import licences for 1.1 million tonnes of refined palmolein to traders based on their applications, a government official and three traders told Reuters. New Delhi has given permission to import refined palmolein only from Indonesia, a government official said. In the second week of January New Delhi privately urged palm oil importers to boycott Malaysian products after Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad criticised India's actions in Kashmir and its new citizenship law. In their application importers were required to mention "country of origin" and all specified Indonesia, said one trader who received a licence. "I don't know anyone who mentioned Malaysia as the country of origin. I know a few others who mentioned Indonesia," the trader said. HUGE VOLUME The allocation of licences surprised the industry and senior officials of the commerce ministry. "Allowing large-scale imports of refined palmolein defeats the purpose of putting the commodity in the restricted list for imports," said B.V. Mehta, executive director of trade body the Solvent Extractors' Association (SEA), which is based in Mumbai. India's edible oil industry has been seeking import curbs on refined palm oil to boost local refining. At a meeting with industry officials on Wednesday, a senior official of the commerce ministry expressed displeasure at allowing large-scale imports of refined palm oil, and asked DGFT officials not to allocate more licences, said a trader who attended. A rally in edible oil prices in the last few weeks prompted New Delhi to examine changes in the import policy, said another government official. India's commerce ministry did not respond to a request for further information. New Delhi's palm oil imports in January fell 27% from a year ago to 594,804 tonnes, partly due to the restriction on imports of refined palm oil, the SEA said in a statement. India imported 9.4 million tonnes of palm oil in the marketing year that ended on October 31, including 2.72 million tonnes of refined palm oil. Palm oil makes up nearly two-thirds of India's total imports of edible oil. It buys palm oil mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia, which are the world's top and second biggest producer of the commodity respectively. GREENWICH The Greenwich YMCA will close its Early Learning Center at St. Rochs in August and end its Hamilton Avenue afterschool program in June. The closure is part of the YMCAs effort to double-down on its programs at its facility at 50 E. Putnam Ave. The YMCA will focus its personnel and finances on offering top-notch aquatics and wellness programs, as well as meaningful programs that span all ages, Patrice Francois, the YMCAs interim CEO, said in a statement. This is not an insignificant change, but we believe deeply that all families will ultimately be better served by the Y doing what it does best; being a hub for our community, Grancois said. Officials considered moving some sections of the school program to the main Y building before making the final decision. The costs outweighed the benefits, however, because moving any program would create significant operational issues, exacerbate the traffic gridlock on Mason Street and contribute to downtown Greenwich congestion at peak rush hours, the Y said. These decisions were made after critically assessing what we offer as an organization and in what ways we offer value to our membership and the community at large, Francois said. Increased lease and maintenance costs also contributed to the decision. Francois said the Ys Early Learning Center faced significant challenges. Other childcare and after-school programs in Greenwich are better built with education in mind and equipped with sturdy resources in physical spacce, faculty, staff and financial support. We felt it critical to examine the changing landscape of childcare and after-school programs in the Greenwich area, Francois said. Greenwich is fortunate to have many options now for early learning and childcare. The Y will work with the ELC families and staff to secure placements for children with providers in the Greenwich area, including Family Centers. One new option will be a branch of the Bright Horizons Centers, which will be opening in October, joining Family Centers in supporting the Chickahominy neighborhood. Bright Horizons partners with businesses and corporations to offer child-care services for employees. The Bright Horizons Childrens Center is set to open in 13,000 square feet of former office space in a building at 75 Holly Hill Lane, and will serve about 120 children. The plan was recently reviewed and given the go-ahead by the police and fire departments. The Y will also work with the affected staff to help them find jobs with similar organizations, and connecting them with Family Centers for help writing resumes and preparing for interviews. Since its opening, the strength of the Y has lived and breathed in the landmark facility at 50 E. Putnam Ave., Francois said. As times changed over the years, so did the Y, but its core competencies of aquatics and wellness have remained steadfast, she said. At this point in the Ys history, it is important to recommit to these core competencies and to ensure they are not only maintained, but elevated. In order to accomplish this, we have taken considerable time to assess what we offer as an organization, where we thrive, and in what ways we add value to our membership and the community at large. jo.kroeker@hearstmediact.com Police officers secure an area after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt, Germany, on 20 February 20. (Kai Pfaffenbach/Reuters) German federal prosecutors are investigating possible far-right motivation behind attacks on two hookah bars in Germany on Wednesday evening, which left nine people dead. The gunman opened fire in two shisha bars at around 10pm local time in the town of Hanau, about 25km (15 miles) east of the financial hub of Frankfurt, killing nine people. After killing three in the first bar, he reportedly drove to the second bar, where he shot five people dead. Police identified the suspects address from eyewitnesses who saw his car, and stormed his apartment in Hanau hours later, where they found him dead. They also found the body of his 72-year-old mother in the apartment. Police said in a statement that the suspect shot himself and his mother at home. From what we know so far a xenophobic motive is the most likely," Peter Beuth, the interior minister for the state of Hessen, told the press on Thursday. Beuth said the man was not known to the police beforehand. The alleged attacker, named as 43-year old German Tobias R, had reportedly published an hour-long video in which he claimed that Germany was controlled by a secret service with extensive capabilities, and made negative comments about migrants from Arab countries and Turkey. The death toll from the attack remains at 11, with five more victims currently hospitalised with severe injuries. According to reports, the clientele in both shisha bars were Kurdish. READ MORE: Germany to create 600 jobs to tackle far-right extremism Germanys gun laws are extremely strict, but people with hunting licences are allowed to have firearms, if they are properly locked up at home. Wednesdays attack comes days after a person was shot dead in Berlin, outside a concert venue which was hosting a Turkish comedy night. Thoughts this morning are with the people of Hanau, in whose midst this terrible crime was committed, chancellor Angela Merkels spokesman Steffen Seibert said on Twitter. He tweeted that Merkel had cancelled her trip to Halle in eastern Germany today because of the murders. Story continues READ MORE: Merkels heir quits and wont run for chancellor after far-right debacle Germany is grappling with a growing right-wing extremist problem. Authorities saying in December that there are at least 12,000 people in the country who are classed as right-wing extremists, a number of them are potentially violent. In October, a German man with far-right motivation attacked a synagogue in the city of Halle. Failing to enter the synagogue, he shot dead two passers-by on the street. In July 2019, politician Walter Lubke was shot dead at his home by a far-right extremist, who had a criminal record and ties to far-right groups. A case of suspected Coronavirus has been detected in Ambala, Haryana. A 20-year-old Thai woman, suffering from symptoms that similar to that of the coronavirus, has been put under observation at Ambala Cantt Civil hospital on Thursday. The samples were collected and sent for screening to Pune and Delhi. The samples will also be screened for swine flu detection. The girl is currently under observation at Ambala Cantt Civil hospital. "Symptoms similar to those of the deadly Coronavirus were shown by the woman. The girl has been put under observation. The girl's condition is currently stable," Dr. Satish, SMO, Ambala Cantt Civil Hospital, told ANI on Thursday. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The issue has taken on greater urgency as hundreds of passengers disembark from the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship in Yokohama where 621 people have tested positive for the virus. Japan declared the ships two-week quarantine over, despite an uptick in cases among the passengers still onboard. Alarmed officials are rushing to learn more about how the virus is transmitted, including how many of those infected experience mild symptoms or none at all, and to what extent it can be spread by people who experience no symptoms. Virologists see two likely explanations for the spread of clusters. In one, a superspreading event, a person who has the propensity to spew more germs than others transmits the virus to a large group of people. Alternatively, people can independently catch a virus from contaminated surfaces. It is unclear how long the new coronavirus can survive on surfaces, but studies of other such viruses have found they can stay active for a week or more. On Thursday, a Japanese health ministry official said two infected passengers who were quarantined on the ship had died. The two, both Japanese, were an 87-year-old man and an 84-year-old woman, the Japanese broadcaster NHK reported. Both had underlying health issues, the broadcaster said. The authorities have said they are releasing only people who have tested negative for the virus though testing has been unreliable and are showing no symptoms. But experts on infectious diseases have pointed to deficiencies in the quarantine protocols on the ship and questioned the decision to let them go free. Authorities are searching for the suspect in the Tuesday-night holdup at a Tarrant restaurant that left an employee injured by gunfire. Police on Wednesday released surveillance footage of the suspect. The video, they said, was of poor quality but they hope someone who knows him will recognize him will come forward. The robbery happened just after 6:30 p.m. at Taco Bell in Tarrant. Sgt. Jay Jenkins said an armed black male wearing a hoodie pulled tight around his face enter the restaurant, went behind the counter and demanded cash drawers. Tarrant police are trying to identify the suspect in a robbery and shooting at Taco Bell in Tarrant. An employee handed the suspect one of the drawers and was getting another when the gunman fired his weapon. Jenkins said the worker was struck in the leg and taken to an area hospital. Police werent immediately sure whether he was hit by a bullet or shrapnel. He is expected to be OK. The suspect fled the scene on foot. Jenkins said the robbery and shooting were captured on video by the restaurants surveillance system, which detectives are in the process of reviewing. There were customers in the drive-thru at the time of the crime, but none actually inside the store. The restaurant is less than two blocks from the Tarrant Police Department. That was really bold, definitely, Jenkins said. The investigation is ongoing, and more information could be released Wednesday. Anyone with information is asked to call Tarrant police at 205-849-2811. ROME - A lawyer for the captain of a cargo ship jailed in Italy for allegedly transporting embargoed armaments to Libya contended on Thursday that there are no legal grounds for a case against his client in Italy. Lawyer Cesare Fumagalli told The Associated Press there is absolutely no proof the Lebanese-flagged Bana plied Italian waters with such arms aboard, and therefore Italy has no jurisdiction over the case. The ship never went through Italian territorial waters, Fumagalli said in a telephone interview. Italian authorities sequestered the vessel, which is used to transport vehicles between Europe, northern Africa and the Middle East, in the northern port of Genoa earlier this month. Prosecutors have alleged the Bana transported tanks, motor vehicles fitted with rocket launchers and machines guns as well as explosives from Turkey to Libya in defiance of international embargoes. They also contend Turkish soldiers accompanied the shipment. Fumagalli said his client, Capt. Youssef Tartoussi, is in a calm state of mind. Italian prosecutors contend that the ship repeatedly, and for extended periods of time, turned off its transponders, including when the ship was approaching the ports of Mersin, Turkey, and Tripoli, Libya. In seeking the captains arrest, they contend he acted together still-to-be identified other persons, indicated as Turkish soldiers, in the alleged arms trafficking. Italians started investigating what the Bana did before arriving in Genoa after the ships third officer, with the help of the shipping companys local agent, contacted border police and requested asylum. According to the judges ruling in approving the arrest order, the officer, who is Lebanese like Capt. Tartoussi, told Italian authorities that the ship left Beirut on Jan. 21, and stopped the next day in Mersin, even though the port hadnt been on the Banas navigational plan. There, it allegedly took aboard army tanks, wheeled vehicles equipped with rocket launchers and machine-guns, cross-country vehicles and some containers marked with labels indicating the presence of explosives as well as about 10 Turkish soldiers. In a bid to gain influence in the energy-rich northern African country Turkey has taken the side of one of Libyas rival governments, promising military support and sending hundreds of Syrian fighters. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan earlier this week said Turkey would continue to help the Tripoli-based government establish dominance over the entire country. Erdogan met with the prime minister of the Tripoli-based government, Fayez Sarraj, in Istanbul on Thursday. No statement was issued following the meeting. In Ankara on Thursday, the Turkish Foreign Ministry did not immediately respond to a request by AP for comment. A senior Turkish military official, asked about Italian prosecutors contentions that Turkish military members allegedly played a role in the traffficking, replied that the military had no such information. Italian authorities contend the captain violated embargoes by both the United Nations and the European Union. The Italian government considers efforts to keep weapons from reaching Libyas warring forces crucial to ending the fighting in that country. EU leaders this week decided to deploy a sea operation for embargo enforcement. Chaos and lawlessness have mainly held sway in Libya since 2011, after an uprising deposed and killed longtime strongman Moammar Gadhafi. Italian prosecutors have asked experts to see whether crew members cellphones, turned on during the voyage, will help them determine the Banas actual route. But Fumagalli, the defence lawyer, argued that sometimes cellphones at sea can pick up signals from countries near by, but that doesnt indicate a boat is in these countries waters. In her ruling on the arrest request, Judge Silvia Carpanini noted that the whistle-blower took photos of the armaments allegedly aboard. He claimed, therefore, asylum, because he was afraid of possible retaliation against him, even because, according to him, the owners brother is connected with the Hezbollah organization. The Banas Lebanese owner, Merhi Abou Merhi, has denied that the ship was used to transport armoured vehicles to Libya. He hasnt responded to an AP request for an interview. The United States in 2015 accused him of laundering money for Hezbollah, the militant group, but removed him from its list of sanctioned individuals in 2017. He has consistently denied money-laundering allegations. Genoa prosecutor Francesco Pinto earlier this week said that other crew members backed up the whistle-blowers account of arms and Turkish soldiers aboard. RADNOR, Pa., Feb. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The law firm of Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP announces that the firm has filed a securities fraud class action lawsuit against Anadarko Petroleum Corporation (NYSE: APC) ("Anadarko") on behalf of investors who purchased or acquired Anadarko common stock between February 20, 2015 and May 2, 2017, inclusive (the "Class Period"). This action, captioned Georgia Firefighters' Pension Fund v. Anadarko Petroleum Corporation, et al., Case No. 4:20-cv-00576, was filed in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division. Important Deadline Reminder: Investors who purchased or otherwise acquired Anadarko common stock during the Class Period may, no later than April 20, 2020, seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class. For additional information or to learn how to participate in this litigation please visit www.ktmc.com/anadarko-petroleum-securities-class-action. Anadarko is an energy company that develops oil and natural gas resources in the United States and worldwide. In August 2019, Anadarko became an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum Corporation ("Occidental"). Prior to Anadarko's acquisition by Occidental, Anadarko common stock traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "APC." In 2009, Anadarko discovered the "Shenandoah" oil field in the Gulf of Mexico. After drilling an initial exploratory well named Shenandoah-1, Anadarko spent the following eight years appraising the field by drilling and evaluating five appraisal wells (Shenandoah-2, Shenandoah-3, Shenandoah-4, Shenandoah-5 and Shenandoah-6). During that time, including throughout the Class Period, the defendants made repeated positive representations about the prospects and value of the Shenandoah assets. The Class Period commences on February 20, 2015, when Anadarko filed its annual report for the year ended December 31, 2014, with the SEC on a Form 10-K. In its annual report, Anadarko reported that it had "spud the Shenandoah-3 well," which had "found approximately 50% (1,470 feet) more of the same reservoir sands 1,500 feet down-dip and 2.3 miles east of the Shenandoah-2 well, which encountered over 1,000 feet of net oil pay in excellent quality Lower Tertiary-aged sands." Anadarko further stated that "[t]he Shenandoah-3 well confirmed the sand depositional environment, lateral sand continuity, excellent reservoir qualities, and down-dip thickening." Defendants continued to make additional positive representations about the Shenandoah assets and touted the progress of Shenandoah. The truth about the value of Anadarko's Shenandoah assets was partially disclosed on May 2, 2017, when Anadarko filed financial results with the SEC on a Form 10-Q, for the first quarter of 2017. In the financial results, Anadarko recorded a $467 million impairment charge and expensed $435 million in suspended exploratory well costs related to the Shenandoah project. Anadarko stated that "[g]iven the results of [Shenandoah-6] and the present commodity-price environment, [Anadarko] has currently suspended further appraisal activities," and the Shenandoah exploratory well costs could no longer be capitalized. Following this news, the price of Anadarko common stock fell $4.33 per share, or approximately 8%, from a close of $56.28 per share on May 2, 2017, to close at $51.95 per share on May 3, 2017. However, this partial disclosure did not fully inform investors about Anadarko's scheme. Indeed, investors did not learn that defendants had fraudulently overstated the value of the Shenandoah assets until November 4, 2019, when allegations in a whistleblower case against Anadarko were publicly disclosed in an opinion from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in Frye v. Anadarko Petroleum Corp., No. 18-20543 (5th Cir.). The complaint alleges that, throughout the Class Period, the defendants misrepresented and/or failed to disclose that: (1) the value of the Shenandoah assets and the success of the Shenandoah appraisal wells were overstated; (2) Anadarko lacked effective internal control over financial reporting; and (3) as a result of the foregoing, the defendants' statements about Anadarko's Shenandoah assets lacked a reasonable basis. If you wish to discuss this securities fraud class action lawsuit or have any questions concerning this notice or your rights or interests with respect to this litigation, please contact Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check (James Maro, Jr., Esq. or Adrienne Bell, Esq.) at (844) 887-9500 or (610) 6677706, or via e-mail at [email protected] . Anadarko investors may, no later than April 20, 2020 , seek to be appointed as a lead plaintiff representative of the class through Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, or other counsel, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. A lead plaintiff is a representative party who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation. In order to be appointed as a lead plaintiff, the Court must determine that the class member's claim is typical of the claims of other class members, and that the class member will adequately represent the class. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision of whether or not to serve as a lead plaintiff. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check prosecutes class actions in state and federal courts throughout the country involving securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duties and other violations of state and federal law. Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check is a driving force behind corporate governance reform, and has recovered billions of dollars on behalf of institutional and individual investors from the United States and around the world. The firm represents investors, consumers and whistleblowers (private citizens who report fraudulent practices against the government and share in the recovery of government dollars). For more information about Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, please visit www.ktmc.com . CONTACT: Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP James Maro, Jr., Esq. Adrienne Bell, Esq. 280 King of Prussia Road Radnor, PA 19087 (844) 887-9500 (610) 667-7706 [email protected] SOURCE Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check, LLP Related Links http://www.ktmc.com Nirbhaya convicts left no stone unturned to escape gallows, failed to get relief Squirmed for a bit before going still: The final moments of Nirbhayas killers Nirbhaya's convict Vinay Sharma has head injury, can't recognise mother: Lawyer India oi-Mousumi Dash New Delhi, Feb 20: Yet again the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape case takes a new turn after one of the convicts Vinay Sharma was injured after he reportedly banged his head against the wall of his cell at Tihar jail in Delhi. Sharma has reportedly urged the court for a high level medical treatment for his head injury, fracture in his right arm, mental illness and schizophrenia. According to a jail official, Sharma who along with the other three convicts in the Nirbhaya ganag rape case were to be hanged on March 3, on Sunday afternoon he had attempted to hurt himself by banging his head against a wall. Suddenly a security personnel of the jail saw him and stopped him. He has suffered some minor injuries. However, Sharma's lawyer claimed that the he has been unable to recognise people, he couldn't recognise his mother. On Monday, the court has put out a third death warrant for the four convicts in 2012 Nirbhaya gand rape case. Nirbhaya case: Vinay Sharma's lawyer moves Election Commission against Delhi govt The court directed convicts Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, and Mukesh Singh to be hanged on March 3. The four convicted in the 2012 gruesome gang-rape of a young medical student who was brutally raped, assulted and tortured, she died days later. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, February 20, 2020, 16:03 [IST] Pakistan on Thursday expressed hope that US President Donald Trump during his visit to India next week will take "some concrete practical steps" on his offer of mediation on Kashmir. Trump is scheduled to travel to India on February 24 and 25, with stops in Ahmedabad and New Delhi. At the weekly media briefing here, Foreign Office Spokesperson Aisha Farooqui hoped the offer of mediation expressed by President Trump "will be taken forward through some concrete practical steps." Farooqui made the remarks in response to questions about Trump's visit to India and situation in Kashmir. She said that four US Senators including Senator Lindsay Graham in a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo drew his attention towards the situation in Kashmir. In January, President Trump repeated his offer to "help" resolve the Kashmir issue between India and Pakistan during his meeting with Prime Minister Imran Khan on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. New Delhi maintains that there is no scope for any third-party mediation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Farooqui also said that UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres during his three-day visit to Pakistan expressed his "deep concern at the increase in tensions since last year". She also said this week was a painful reminder of the tragedy of Samjhauta Express train that occurred 13 years ago, and the "families and the loved ones of the 68 victims of that terrorist attack still await justice." "Pakistan would like to remind the Indian government of its responsibility to take serious and credible steps to bring the perpetrators of the Samjhauta Express blasts to justice at the earliest and without further delay," she said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Raj Nivas, the official residence of the Puducherry Lt Governor would be thrown open to tourists during mornings also. Kiran Bedi made the announcement on Thursday, while addressing a team of French tourists visiting the 18th century building housing office cum residence of the Lt Governor. She noted that tourists including foreigners visited the Union Territory mostly in the mornings. Bedi told the tourists after registering their views on the Union Territory that in addition to the time allotted for them to visit the imposing and palatial premises during mid day now the building maintained as a heritage structure would be open to visitors in the mornings also. "The security personnel at the entrance to the Raj Nivas would also facilitate the tourists to get into the premises in the mornings also," the former IPS officer said in a whatsapp message. Tourists and school children from outside Puducherry make a beeline to Raj Nivas, earlier called "Palais du Gouverneur", every day to have a glimpse of the historic structure. According to official records, the foundation of Raj Nivas was laid by the then French Governor Dumas in 1735. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Business Ombudsman works on proposals empowering jurors to try economic crimes cases RAPSI, Vladimir Burnov 10:26 20/02/2020 MOSCOW, February 20 (RAPSI) Russias Business Rights Commissioner Boris Titov has said at a press-conference that his office is developing amendments to the Criminal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure in line with the proposals of the Supreme Court empower jurors to examine economic crimes cases. Titov expressed hope that putting in place the respective legislative procedure was to take little time, as there were no significant legal barriers. He believed jurors, although not necessarily well versed in complex economic matters, were able to find out the motives behind defendants actions proceeding from their personal experience and knowledge of relations between people, the Business Ombudsman said addressing the audience. Nevertheless, Titov suggested that jurors should not be authorized to try all economic crimes cases. According to him, it would be feasible if the initiative was first implemented in cases over fraud, embezzlement, and abuse of authority. Earlier, the Supreme Court Chair Vyacheslav Lebedev had proposed to empower jurors to examine economic crimes cases in a statement at a judicial conference. Taking into account the fact that Russian courts have sufficient experience in examining cases tried by jury, Lebedev noted, it was possible to extend this procedure to the criminal cases over all especially serious crimes and economic crimes on condition the materials thereof contain no state secrets. Gerald Goines deceived his fellow police officers as well as judges and juries when he lied about defendants in cases he handled, authorities say. The indicted cops misconduct he now faces murder charges after a fatal drug raid he led has prompted judges to overturn two convictions this month and forced Harris County prosecutors to review hundreds of his old cases. But internal HPD audits and court documents, as well as a review of some investigations led by the former narcotics officer at the center of the fatal Harding Street raid, raise questions about the supervision Houston Police Department officers receive for dealing with confidential informants. Investigators say Goines exploited the system for handling and paying CIs to launch the 2019 raid that left two people dead and himself and four other officers injured. Red flags from the audits conducted by the departments own internal auditors and records include supervising officers signing off on incomplete paperwork to pay informants, officers exceeding withdrawal limits for confidential informants and notarizing documents that were never properly signed. While the audits from the HPD Inspections Division describe failures to follow policies and procedures rather than the illegal activities prosecutors say Goines was engaged in, experts say they point to a potentially broader problem at HPD: when officers stop following protocol or ignore small rules, they could be more likely to break the more serious ones. Such shortcomings can lead to environments that can allow a rogue officer to operate unchecked. When asked for comment, Chief Art Acevedo said he had not had enough time to review the relevant documents, and said it would be inappropriate to discuss Goines because of the pending criminal case against him. Questionable casework: Key Houston police narcotics officers at center of fatal Harding Street drug raid tallied few arrests, low-level busts The departments review of its Gang Division uncovered issues with tracking money and with the use of confidential informants across the division. HPDs review which looked at operations during October 2016 found two instances in the audit period where supervisors hadnt signed off on officers informant payment requests, documents show. And while the divisions policies require officers to submit police reports with each CI expenditure, no offense reports were submitted as part of the supporting documents. When officers filed receipts and reports, auditors wrote, they often deviated from department protocol. Issues included failing to list who issued the cash, tracking receipt numbers and failing to keep tabs on the cash they had on hand. Auditors found other problems within the division. They said that both handwritten ledgers and electronic databases used to track transaction were missing required information, including the person issuing funds, type of transaction, a receipt number and fund balance. In some cases, officers did not seek authorization from superiors to pay confidential informants, the documents show. Officers failed to follow policy by not submitting copies of offense reports to back up information for each informant payment. And the audit team from the Inspections Division reported that HPDs Office of Budget and Finance was conducting audits of the divisions CI funds every two years, instead of twice a year, as required by its own internal protocols. The documents show auditors recommended changes to policies, corrections to ledgers or internal recording documents, and additional training to correct the problems recommendations HPD leadership appear to have signed off on. In a similar review of the Vice Division in 2018 by the Inspections Division, auditors determined that sergeants approved cash draws by investigators for confidential informant payments and other casework that exceeded department rules in nearly 60 percent of the cases they reviewed, and expense affidavits failed to note which supervisors were issuing the funds. Auditors wrote they found evidence supervisors authorized multiple withdrawals a minute apart, and appear to have been done so in order to avoid violating the $250 limit. Wrong Door: Houston botched drug raid was not the first Other times, the audit found sergeants signing for funds in place of an officer before a notary public. In one incident a unit lieutenant was the notary in question, the audit notes. In another case, the sergeant signed for someone else and was also the notary who signed the expense report. Auditors found the division was using forms that didnt identify which supervisor was actually authorizing money draws and employees werent using basic records forms to document cash disbursements. They recommended supervisors institute periodic self audits to protect the integrity of the funds and to ensure department policy is being followed. While HPD audited its Vice and Gang divisions fairly recently, a Chronicle investigation in November found that auditors went almost two decades without reviewing the Narcotics Division. In response to a records request, the department produced just one audit -- from 2000. Inspectors who reviewed the divisions confidential informant files that year reported that the divisions monthly expense affidavits were supposed to be reviewed twice a year, according to internal department policies. The Office of Budget and Finance informed assessors that such an audit has never been conducted, the reports authors wrote. They also reviewed officers receipt for funds forms and CI activity sheets. In the 46 files auditors reviewed (which contained 288 CI activity sheets), they found 45 errors. The assessors found files that had outdated information or were inactive, or lacked proper identification requirements, and urged a total review of the files to bring them into compliance with department requirements. A high-ranking New York Police Department anti-drugs supervisor commented on the findings. They set those parameters for a reason, said Stephen Nasta, a former NYPD inspector who oversaw hundreds of narcotics officers and is now an adjunct lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. If you dont have controls, you can think its your money and you can do what you want with it. It can lead to problems. J. Thomas Manger, who led police departments in Maryland and Virginia for 21 years and served as president of the Major Cities Chiefs Association until 2016, declined to discuss Goines casework or the Harding Street scandal, but said maintaining close supervision on officers interactions with confidential informants and confidential informant payments is crucial for departments. Theres a big difference between willful dishonesty and violations of protocol when theyre done for reasons of expediency or laziness, he said. That doesnt make right, but its a different issue to fix. Court records in two convictions based on Goines casework also have information about supervision and oversight. The brothers in the case were both recently declared innocent. In Otis Mallets case, court records show one of Goines supervisors present the day of Mallets 2008 arrest later signed off on conflicting expense reports. Narcotics Sgt. Troy Gamble acted as surveillance late in the evening on April 29, 2008 when Goines said he bought drugs from Mallet, according to the arrest report filed in the incident. RELATED: People who served time say it was based on ex-cop Goines lies Prosecutors now say the entire Mallet transaction was a fraud, and its unclear what portions of that arrest report are accurate or if Gamble was even present that night. Just over a week after the arrest, the sergeant signed off on Goines confidential informant payment expense report from April a report that showed Goines hadnt made any payments that month, even though Mallets arrest report shows Goines said he paid Mallet $200 for a quarter of crack cocaine. Gamble later signed off on Goines May expense report form, which showed the narcotics officer paid a confidential informant $200 for information related to the case even though Goines never mentioned using an informant in any other case documents. The discrepancies in Goines case documents ultimately helped persuade a judge to declare Mallet actually innocent. His brother Steven Mallet, saw his case overturned two weeks later. Jonathan Landers, who represented Otis Mallet, said their cases revealed a lack of meaningful oversight of line officers by supervisors. Someone could have looked at that April expense report, compared it to the underlying offense report and seen something was off, he said. And then that information should have been turned over to the DAs office. Prosecutors agreed. The May expense report directly contradicts [Goines] trial testimony and the offense report in question, so it should have raised red flags, said Joshua Reiss, post-conviction chief at the Harris County DAs Office. It raises a lot of questions as to, Were these expense reports being closely watched or not? Reached by phone, Gamble said he didnt remember Mallets arrest, but said he reviewed any expenses on any case he was involved with and a situation where expense reports didnt line up with details in an arrest report would concern him. All the expenditures should add up, he said. If you spend money any money spent should be documented. Landers, meanwhile, said Mallets casework, and the audits, underscored a more fundamental problem. The policies are there for a reason, so police are held accountable, he said. Theyre enforcing the law. They ought to be following their own rules. You have to think why they have those rules to prevent situations like what happened in Otis Mallets case. st.john.smith@chron.com twitter.com/stjbs Haiti - UN : 42% increase in homicides in Haiti (2019) As part of the implementation of resolution 2476 (2019), by which the Security Council established the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) for an initial period of 12 months, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, submitted to the Security Council its periodic report (every 120 days). This report presents the main developments since the previous report on Haiti and provides an update on the establishment of the Office and describes progress made in integrating the activities of the Office and the United Nations country team. III. Community violence reduction (benchmark 2) : "[...] Haiti continues to face high and rising levels of violence, including common criminality, kidnappings, hijackings, robberies and violent attacks by heavily armed gang members. The number of reported intentional homicides increased by 42 per cent in 2019, compared with the previous year, with 910 recorded cases involving 1,081 victims (including 61 women), a ratio of 9.34 per 100,000 citizens, up from 6.67 for 2018 and 7.91 for 2017. Two thirds of those of those homicides were recorded in West Department, where criminality is traditionally more prevalent. In addition, 42 police officers were killed in 2019, a 147 per cent increase, compared with 17 in 2018, and the highest number since the inception of the Haitian National Police in 1995. Moreover, 31 of 348 police stations were vandalized countrywide (including 8 facilities set ablaze), compared with 7 recorded incidents in 2018. In most cases, the damage was caused by angry mobs in retaliation for alleged police wrongdoing. During the reporting period, 16 criminal incidents affected United Nations personnel, resulting in no casualties. In addition, one BINUH independent contractor was shot and killed on 1 December while leaving a bank in Port-au-Prince. Sexual and gender-based violence remains prevalent but underreported. In 2019, 227 cases were reported to the police, compared with 418 in 2018. This 45 per cent decrease is attributable to severe underreporting due to heightened stigma and risk of retaliation against victims, in particular in the current security and political context. To raise awareness of the situation, the United Nations supported activities organized by national counterparts in the context of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-based Violence campaign launched in November. In addition, the national police sex crimes unit is developing a database of sexual assault complaints that would improve case processing and provide easier access to countrywide statistics. The political crisis added another layer of complexity to the security situation. Between 1 September and 30 November 2019, the United Nations documented at least 1,341 demonstrations, roadblocks and barricades. At the height of the mobilization in late September, protests turned violent and the presence of heavily armed individuals was observed in the streets, especially in the urban centres of West, Artibonite, South and North Departments. Those developments led to significant restrictions on movement for the United Nations, hampering operations throughout the country. Attesting to the challenges of maintaining public order, the national police reported, during a press conference held on 19 December, having carried out 2,536 interventions to clear roads between 1 September and 30 November. [...]" Download the report : https://www.haitilibre.com/docs/S_2020_123_E.pdf HL/ HaitiLibre Chennai: 19 persons killed and 25 others injuries in Bengaluru-Ernakulam KSRTC bus accident when a speeding container truck rammed a KSRTC bus near Thirumuruganpoondi in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu in on Feb 20, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News Chennai: 19 persons killed and 25 others injuries in Bengaluru-Ernakulam KSRTC bus accident when a speeding container truck rammed a KSRTC bus near Thirumuruganpoondi in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu in on Feb 20, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News Chennai: 19 persons killed and 25 others injuries in Bengaluru-Ernakulam KSRTC bus accident when a speeding container truck rammed a KSRTC bus near Thirumuruganpoondi in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu in on Feb 20, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News Chennai: 19 persons killed and 25 others injuries in Bengaluru-Ernakulam KSRTC bus accident when a speeding container truck rammed a KSRTC bus near Thirumuruganpoondi in Coimbatore district of Tamil Nadu in on Feb 20, 2020. (Photo: IANS) Image Source: IANS News New Delhi, Feb 20 : Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday expressed anguish over a bus accident in Tamil Nadu's Avanashi town in Tiruppur district which claimed 19 lives. Taking to Twitter, the Prime Minister said, "Extremely anguished by the bus accident in Tamil Nadu's Tiruppur district. In this hour of grief, my thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved families. I hope those who are injured recover at the earliest." According to police, 19 persons died and 25 were injured when a container lorry going from Coimbatore to Salem and a passenger bus from Bengaluru to Thiruvananthapuram collided near Avinashi in Tiruppur district in Tamil Nadu in the early hours of Thursday. Soon after the road mishap, police and fire tenders rushed to the spot for rescue operations. In another road accident in Salem district in Tamil Nadu, five people died when their van collided with a bus, police added. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) met ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi on Feb. 19, 2020 in Vientiane, Laos. (Xinhua/Kaikeo Saiyasane) Public health is a common cause crossing national borders, and China is willing to enhance cooperation with ASEAN in this area, so as to inject new content to China-ASEAN relations, Wang said. VIENTIANE, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met ASEAN Secretary-General, Philippine and Singaporean foreign ministers here on Wednesday night to discuss the joint combat against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic. During his meeting with ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi, Wang said the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease to be held on Thursday will send a positive signal that China and ASEAN countries are fighting the COVID-19 epidemic together, and China-ASEAN relations will further develop. Public health is a common cause crossing national borders, and China is willing to enhance cooperation with ASEAN in this area, so as to inject new content to China-ASEAN relations, Wang said. The Chinese side hopes the ASEAN Secretariat will continue to lead and coordinate ASEAN to firmly pursue China-friendly policies, and play an active role in pushing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) to be signed as scheduled, he added. For his part, Lim said that China is an important strategic partner of ASEAN. In face of the novel coronavirus epidemic, ASEAN firmly stands with China. ASEAN is willing to work with China to strengthen cooperation on health security in the frameworks of ASEAN-China (10+1) and ASEAN-China-Japan-South Korea (10+3), he added. Next year is the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-China dialogue relations, Lim said, the ASEAN Secretariat is willing to actively push forward the docking of China's Belt and Road Initiative and the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) met Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin on Feb. 19, 2020 in Vientiane, Laos. (Xinhua/Kaikeo Saiyasane) While meeting Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Wang said the Philippine government has offered firm support to China in fighting the novel coronavirus epidemic. He believed that the friendship and trust between the peoples of the two countries will be deepened and strengthened after standing the test of the battle against the epidemic. Wang said China attaches great importance to developing ties with the Philippines and will as always support the Philippines in safeguarding its own legitimate rights and interests. Wang thanked the Philippines, which serves as a coordinating country for China-ASEAN relations, for its organizing and coordinating work for Thursday's Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease, which will send out a clear signal that China and ASEAN are joining hands to meet the common challenge, and they will explore and reach new consensus on boosting cooperation on regional health. Locsin said the Philippine government and its people speak highly of and support the effective measures China has taken to fight the epidemic. The foreign secretary said the Philippines will do its best to work for the unity and cooperation between China and ASEAN. Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) met Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, on Feb. 19, 2020 in Vientiane, Laos. (Xinhua/Kaikeo Saiyasane) During his meeting with Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, Wang said he hopes Thursday's Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease will not only explore on ways to cope with the epidemic, but also push forward the cooperation on public health in the region and promote the capacity of regional countries in meeting the challenges of public health such as this epidemic. Wang thanked the support Singapore has provided to China in fighting the disease which once again embodies the excellent tradition between the two countries of always supporting and helping each other in difficult times. Wang said the friendship between the two countries will be deepened in fighting the epidemic and the cooperation between the two countries will be widened after the epidemic. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic ties between the two sides and China is ready to maintain high-level exchanges with Singapore, Wang said. For his part, Balakrishnan said China has been dealing with the epidemic with a highly responsible manner and taking measures rarely seen in the world. China has also shared information with the international community at the first moment, thus offering valuable help to countries including Singapore. Singapore highly appreciates and respects China's arduous endeavour and sacrifice, said the Singaporean minister, adding that his country would continue to firmly support China. Singapore is willing to promote communication and cooperation with China, sparing no effort in decreasing the effects caused by the epidemic, in order to restore normal exchanges, Balakrishnan said. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic relations between Singapore and China, the Singapore side expects to frequent high-level exchanges with China, steadily push forward the construction of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, actively promote the RCEP and participate in the Belt and Road Initiative cooperation, he noted. Wang is in Vientiane, capital of Laos, for the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease and the fifth Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Thursday. Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Thursday urged the Congress Working Committee (CWC) to hold leadership elections to 'energise workers and inspire voters'. Tharoor's appeal came in support of his party colleague and former MP Sandeep Dikshit's remarks that the the biggest challenge the party faces is the 'leadership question'. Dikshit has accused senior leaders of failing to find a new president after all these months because they are 'scared who will bell the cat'. Reacting to the remarks, Tharoor tweeted, 'What Sandeep Dikshit said openly is what dozens of party leaders from across the country are saying privately, including many with responsible positions in the party. 'I renew my appeal to CWC to hold leadership elections to energise workers and inspire voters.' 'Some have asked who should vote and for what. I was referring to my earlier call eight months ago for elections among the 10,000 party workers who constitute the 'AICC plus PCC delegates' list. These should be for the elected seats in the CWC as well as for the party presidency,' Tharoor said. In an interview to PTI last year, Tharoor had said the way forward for the party could be opening up all key posts, including the CWC membership, to fresh elections which would help legitimise the incoming set of leaders. The rout in the Delhi polls has brought out the fissures within the party with several leaders openly sparring over the reasons for the party's dismal performance. Barr Raises Questions Over Whether Online Platforms Should Be Liable for User Content Attorney General William Barr recently raised questions about whether major technology companies should remain largely immune from litigation regarding its user-generated content, adding that the technological landscape has changed much in recent decades. Barr stated his concerns during a Feb. 19 Justice Department workshop on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The act, which was passed in 1996, states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider. Online companies such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter are protected by Section 230 as it largely exempts them from liability involving content posted by users of their platforms, although they can be held liable for content that violates criminal or intellectual property law. No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts; they have become titans of U.S. industry, Barr said. Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised on whether Section 230s broad immunity is still necessary, at least in its current form. Some of Barrs concerns relate to the apparent stretching of the statutes original purpose. He said the statutes immunity has since been extended to conduct such as selling illegal or faulty products to connecting terrorists to facilitating child exploitation. Online services also have invoked immunity even where they solicited or encouraged unlawful conduct, shared in illegal proceeds, or helped perpetrators hide from law enforcement, Barr said. New York attorney Barry Barnett, an antitrust law expert, told The Epoch Times that Barrs remarks about the scope of the statute indicate the administrations willingness to use a broad array of legal tools to address harms it attributes to big tech platforms. The Justice Department is concerned about the expansive reach of Section 230 Barr said, but it wont advocate for a specific position on the matter. In December 2019, the 9th Circuit held that the statute doesnt protect a firm from antitrust liability if its decisions about blocking and filtering content are driven by anticompetitive animus, according to Barnett. He said in the future, he expects the Justice Departments Antitrust Division to support rulings similar to the one made by the 9th Circuit, in light of Barrs comments. Ashley N. Baker, director of Public Policy at the Committee for Justice, meanwhile warned that any proposed government solutions to the issues with Section 230 are worse than the problem. Calling for top-down intervention by the government into social media content would give bureaucrats immense control over online speech, Baker said via email. While I understand that there is legitimate concern over how broadly the statute is applied in court, I think that we need to carefully think this through, particularly from the perspectives of government power, platform incentives, and lawsuit abuse. Baker, whose focus areas include the Supreme Court, technology, and regulatory policy, said that without the statute, platforms would have strong incentives to heavily moderate content. Companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube would be unlikely to face penalties for taking content down, but could face an avalanche of lawsuits for leaving it up, she said. Barrs comments offered insight into how regulators in Washington are reconsidering the need for incentives that once helped online companies grow but are increasingly viewed as impediments to curbing online crime, harassment, and extremism. Meanwhile, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Feb. 15 that Facebook should be viewed as somewhere in between a newspaper and a telecommunications company, in relation to content. Zuckerberg said Facebook should be regulated in that same regard and that technology companies shouldnt be compared with traditional news outlets, according to The Wall Street Journal. The interest in Section 230 came as part of a broader review of market-leading online platforms, according to Barr. In July 2019, the department announced that its antitrust division is reviewing whether and how market-leading online platforms have achieved market power and are engaging in practices that have reduced competition, stifled innovation, or otherwise harmed consumers. Big tech is facing an unprecedented number of antitrust investigations, with four major multinational technology companiesFacebook, Google, Amazon, and Applereceiving a level of scrutiny not seen in decades. A congressional committee and subcommittee are investigating all four, even as the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission are reviewing one or more of the companies. Lawmakers from both major political parties have called for Congress to change Section 230 in ways that could expose tech companies to more lawsuits or significantly increase their costs. Reuters contributed to this report. A High Court in Kaduna State on Thursday ordered that two men, who allegedly hacked their friend to death, be remanded in a Nigerian Correctional Service facility in Kaduna. The police charged Isah Yusuf, 35, and Aminu Shuaibu, 32, with two counts of conspiracy and culpable homicide. Justice Hanatu Balogun, who gave the order, adjourned the case until March 5 for hearing. Earlier, the prosecution counsel, Aisha Abdulmalik, told the court that the alleged offence was committed in November 2019. Ms Abdulmalik, alleged that the defendants on the said date conspired and killed one Shehu Abbas of Ungwan Rimi in Kaduna. READ ALSO: She alleged that the defendants inflicted grievous injuries on the deceased with an axe and a cutlass. The offence, she said, contravened the provisions of sections 59 and 190 of Kaduna State penal code laws 2017. The defendants, however, pleaded not guilty to the charges. (NAN) By Richard Adeniyi Eagle eyed officers of the Federal Operations Unit, Zone A Ikeja of Nigeria Customs Service have impounded a total of 1,393 bags of rice concealed in gas cylinders by die hard smugglers in Ogun State. In a press statement issued yesterday by the spokesman of the unit, Mr Jerry Attah the contrabands were intercepted by the FOU Zobe A anti-smuggling operatives between 5th and 17th February, 2020. The Unit also impounded a total of 625 cartons of frozen chicken, 187 jars and 66 drums of vegetable oil among many other items within the period under review. The Acting Controller of FOU Zone A, Usman Yahaya, who made disclosure attributed the breakthrough to unrelenting efforts of his men, saying it has continued to yield more result in his anti-smuggling drives. Barely two weeks after the Comptroller-General of Customs working visit to Lagos where he showcased various seizures made by FOU A worth over N10 billion, we have again intercepted 1,393 bags of smuggled foreign parboiled rice, 187 jerrycans/66 drums of foreign vegetable oil and 625 cartons of poultry products from unapproved routes within Ogun State between 5th -17th February 2020 based on surveillance and routine patrol, Yahaya said in the statement. According to him, the rice, vegetable oil and poultry products were conveyed in 12 different motor vehicles and also concealed in gas cylinders with a cumulative duty paid value of N40.14 million. This desperate act by these dare-devil smugglers concealing edible items in a gas cylinder further justifies the hard chase by operatives of Customs. DPV of each type of seized items include rice, N27.86 million; vegetable oil, N6.28 million, and frozen poultry N6 million, the controller was quoted in the statement. Yahaya, a deputy comptroller of Customs, warned smugglers to repent from their unscrupulous activities, or continue to count their losses as his unit would continue to be a source of nightmare to the economic saboteurs. He also advised legitimate traders to be compliant in their declarations as the unit is ever ready to facilitate their trade in line with world best practices. While thanking Hameed Ali, comptroller general of Customs and the entire management team of the Nigeria Customs Service for providing necessary logistics and motivation that led to this feat, Yahaya called on all meaningful Nigerians to support the services fight against smuggling activities by providing intelligence that could assist the unit achieve more monumental seizures. PV: 0 PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 23:02:03 Oyu Tolgoi to pursue international arbitration media.enquiries@riotinto.com riotinto.com Follow @RioTinto on Twitter Media Relations, United Kingdom Illtud Harri M +44 7920 503 600 David Outhwaite T +44 20 7781 1623 M +44 7787 597 493 Media Relations, Americas Matthew Klar T +1 514 608 4429 Media Relations, Asia Grant Donald T +65 6679 9290 M +65 9722 6028 Media Relations, Australia Jonathan Rose T +61 3 9283 3088 M +61 447 028 913 Matt Chambers T +61 3 9283 3087 M +61 433 525 739 Jesse Riseborough T +61 8 6211 6013 M +61 436 653 412 Investor Relations, United Kingdom Menno Sanderse T: +44 20 7781 1517 M: +44 7825 195 178 David Ovington T +44 20 7781 2051 M +44 7920 010 978 Investor Relations, Australia Natalie Worley T +61 3 9283 3063 M +61 409 210 462 Amar Jambaa T +61 3 9283 3627 M +61 472 865 94 Rio Tinto plc 6 St Jamess Square London SW1Y 4AD United Kingdom T +44 20 7781 2000 Registered in England No. 719885 Rio Tinto Limited Level 7, 360 Collins Street Melbourne 3000 Australia T +61 3 9283 3333 Registered in Australia ABN 96 004 458 404 Category: Oyu Tolgoi Rio Tinto announces that Oyu Tolgoi LLC (Oyu Tolgoi) has initiated a formal international arbitration process to seek a definitive resolution with regard to a dispute with the Mongolian Tax Authority (MTA), concerning taxes paid by Oyu Tolgoi between 2013 and 2015. The dispute resolution provisions set out in the 2009 Investment Agreement (IA) and the 2015 Underground Mine Development and Financing Plan with the Government of Mongolia call for arbitration under the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) arbitration rules, to be heard in London before a panel of three arbitrators. On 16 January, 2018, Oyu Tolgoi received a tax assessment for approximately $155 million from the MTA relating to an audit on taxes imposed and paid by Oyu Tolgoi between 2013 and 2015. In January 2018, Oyu Tolgoi paid an amount of $4.8 million to settle unpaid taxes, fines and penalties for accepted items. Arnaud Soirat, chief executive Copper & Diamonds, said We have worked diligently with the government and tax office representatives in Mongolia to find a mutually acceptable settlement and came to the conclusion that arbitration is the best way forward to resolve this issue. Under the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules, all parties agree that the arbitral award shall be final and binding on the parties and that the parties shall carry out the award immediately. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005 BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 20 By Ilkin Seyfaddini Trend: Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev met with management of leading Turkish companies and banks during his visit to Turkey, Trend reports via Uzbek media. The event was attended by heads of the Association of Chambers of Commerce and Exchanges of Turkey, Turkish Cooperation and Coordination Agency (TIKA), Gebze Industrial Zone, Ziraat Bank, such companies as Zorlu Holding, Zoshkunoz Holding, Exacibashi, Baikar, Dunyagoz, Kanymed Saglik, Bau Global, Havelsan. "Uzbekistan is not the same as before. Today, a company, entering our market, will certainly benefit. I guarantee it. The necessary legal and institutional conditions will be created for this," Mirziyoyev said. "Representatives of Turkish business circles noted that they visited Uzbekistan last year and witnessed changes in all sectors of economy, "reformist thinking" of Uzbek people. They expressed desire to enter the market of Uzbekistan and implement joint promising projects," the report said. The sides discussed issues of further strengthening ties between ministries and companies of the two countries, considered specific projects to expand the supply of products and services, organization of clinics and higher educational institutions. President of Uzbekistan approved these plans and instructed the responsible officials to start practical work as soon as possible and implement projects without bureaucratic obstacles. Recently, President of Uzbekistan Shavkat Mirziyoyev and President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan signed a joint statement following first meeting of the Strategic Cooperation Council in Ankara. --- Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini Hannah, Rowan Baxter and their three children Laianah, Aaliyah and Treythe family were involved in a fatal vehicle fire at Camp Hill in Brisbane. Image obtained on Feb. 19, 2020. (AAP Image/Facebook) Mother and Children Killed in Brisbane Car Fire Lived in Fear of the Father A relative of the Australian mother and three children killed in a car fire in Brisbane on Feb. 19 has said the childrens father who allegedly set alight their car is a monster who the family exhausted themselves trying to escape. Mother-of-three Hannah Baxter, 31, was taking her children Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3, to school in a family car when the childrens father, Rowan Baxter, 42, allegedly doused the white SUV in petrol and set it on fire. By the time police arrived at the scene on Raven St. in Brisbanes Camp Hill at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday, the children had already died inside the vehicle, and the mother was transported to a hospital but succumbed to her injuries. A tow truck operator removes a car from the scene of a car fire that claimed the lives of a man and his three children in Brisbane, Feb. 19, 2020. (AAP Image/Dan Peled) Witnesses say, Mr. Baxtera former member of Aucklands New Zealand Warriors squad in Australias National Rugby League (NRL)ambushed his family by jumping into the vehicles passenger seat. He reportedly set the car alight after emptying a gas can full of fuel. He shouted at bystanders not to help and stabbed himself to death. Emergency crews attempted to revive him, but he was pronounced dead at the scene. Baxters sister-in-law, Stacey Roberts, wrote in a Facebook fundraiser set up overnight to help cover funeral costs, that the family had been desperately trying to flee the 42-year-old. As you may be aware my beautiful sister-in-law and my nieces and nephew had their lives taken by a disgusting human being they called their father, Roberts wrote. For all those who knew Hannah or had even just met her once would know how much of a beautiful soul she was, her children were her life. All she ever wanted was happiness. Her children were only a reflection of her. Gorgeous happy kids who held a massive piece in my heart and Im sure many others cause thats exactly what they were like. We will miss them all more than anything! The slain mothers brother, Nat Clarke, described how she attempted to escape the clutches of her abusive partner Yesterday I had my sister, nephew and two nieces taken from me in the worst way possible he wrote. He said his sister had lived with parents, Lloyd and Suzanne Clarke, since Decemberwhen the pair allegedly separated. Her estranged husband remained in their former family home and the pair were reportedly in a custody battle. My sister Hannah Clarke/Baxter always tried her best to bring joy to all those around her and only ever wanted the best for her kids, he said in an emotional tribute. This was all from a great upbringing from my loving mother and father Suzanne Clarke and Lloyd Clarke, they too always do (their) best to help out others in need and have exhausted all there energy and money into trying to help my sister and her kid(s) A witness described the horrific moment the mother was dragged out of the burning car by a resident, the Courier-Mail reported. She reportedly screamed, Hes poured petrol on me! Australias Prime Minister Scott Morrison described the news as devastating on Twitter. Devastating news out of Camp Hill. My heart goes out to the families and community going through this tragic time and the emergency responders confronting what would be a shattering scene. If you or anyone you know needs support, call Lifeline on 13 11 14. https://t.co/qJDieLMRiN Scott Morrison (@ScottMorrisonMP) February 19, 2020 My heart goes out to the families and community going through this tragic time and the emergency responders confronting what would be a shattering scene, he wrote. Detectives say they are still working to establish how exactly the fire started. How the fire actually occurred has not been ascertained at the moment, so for us to call it a murder-suicide or a tragic accident, its inappropriate at this stage, said Detective Inspector Mark Thompson, SBS reported. Ive seen some horrific scenesthis is up there with some of the best of them. Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced Roger Stone, President Trumps friend and former crony, to serve three years and four months in prison for impeding a congressional investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Prosecutors originally wanted a sentence of seven to nine years. However, the Justice Department backed away from that position. In court today, the prosecution reportedly asked for a substantial period of incarceration, but did not say how long that period should be. Its far from clear that Stone will actually serve anything approaching a 40 month sentence. He wont serve any time right away because Judge Jackson wants first to consider his motion for a new trial. And even assuming she denies the motion (which seems likely), Stone might well receive a pardon or commutation. If President Trump waits until after the election to grant clemency, Stone may serve some time, but only half a year or so. I regard obstructing an investigation by lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses as a very serious matter, even if the investigation being thereby obstructed is one that shouldnt have been undertaken or has gone too far. However, Ive been persuaded by Andy McCarthy and others that a sentence of seven to nine years would clearly have been excessive. For me, the key fact is that the witness on the receiving end of Stones ostensible threat had a longstanding relationship with Stone, and said he did not feel threatened by him. Thus, it seems to me that a sentence in the range of 37 to 46 months which I understand to be what the sentencing guidelines would have prescribed absent Stones threats is appropriate. Stones sentence falls slightly on the lower side of that range. The judge reportedly made a lengthy statement before delivering the sentence. Here is part of what she said: The truth still exists, the truth still matters. Roger Stones insistence that it doesnt, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the foundations of our democracies. If it goes unpunished it will not be a victory for one political party; everyone loses. The dismay and disgust at the defendants belligerence should transcend party. Judge Jacksons characterization of Stones behavior doesnt seem unfair to me, and I agree with her conclusions. The judge also stated: The defendant isnt public enemy No. 1 but hes not a victim either. I agree with this too. That China is now a formidable global power is no longer in contention. Its global profile is much stronger than it was a decade back. Its military posture is getting more robust by the day, often at the expense of its neighbours. Its diplomatic heft is at an all-time high, making it virtually impossible to resolve global problems without China's proactive engagement. Aggressive Trump All nations want to court China today and even its worst critics have to contend with its presence in one way or another. What remains contentious is the debate if the present form of Chinese model is sustainable or not. The way the Chinese Communist Party has dealt with the outbreak of coronavirus or COVID-19 does not really inspire any confidence in the willingness of the party and its leadership to open itself to the world. Yet, for all its shortcomings, China has succeeded in making a credible claim to it being a global power. Both Germany and the US have decided to continue using the 5G network. (Photo: Reuters) One of the signs of China's emergence is the confusion it has created among those who have to respond to its rise. The West and its allies remain confused and divided even as Beijing continues to encroach on their peripheries. One of the most significant achievements of Donald Trump's presidency has been the manner in which it has shifted the Western discourse on China, where a hardnosed assessment of China's rise has become possible. There is now a growing consensus in the West that China's economic rise has been made possible by the foreign expertise and capital which it managed to acquire by forcing technology transfer, stealing intellectual property and exploitation of labour. In 2018, US vice-president Mike Pence outlined the Trump administration's thinking on China when he argued, China wants nothing less than to push the United States of America from the Western Pacific and attempt to prevent us from coming to the aid of our allies." He said, "the United States wants Beijing to pursue trade policies that are free, fair, and reciprocal" and outlined American policy responses to constrain China which included tighter rules on technology transfers, greater US military spending, and bilateral trade deals with other countries in the Indo-Pacific. While the Trump administration has vigorously pursued trade and technology restrictions vis-a-vis China and along with the Democrats in the US Congress-enhanced military spending, it has still managed to find it difficult to fully get the backing of its allies in the West. At last week's Munich Security Conference, the US secretary of defense Mark Esper warned America's allies that it was time to "wake up" to the Chinese threat and the US secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared that the West was "winning" the conflict with China. But the response of the European allies was underwhelming. Many in western Europe see the Trump administration's unilateral approach to global politics as an equally big challenge as China. This was underlined by German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier when he argued, "Our closest ally, the United States of America, under the current administration, rejects the very concept of the international community." The Huawei question Though the EU declared China a "systemic rival" in March 2019, it has found it difficult to develop a consensus on how to treat China's rise. Germany, in particular, has been reluctant to offend China by explicitly siding with the American policy towards Beijing. Rebuffing Washington's pressures on its allies to ban Huawei, the world's biggest supplier of telecom gear, from new 5G networks, Germany has decided not to ban the Chinese telecommunications giant from competing for contracts to build its 5G networks and its interior minister has made it clear that Germany can't build a 5G mobile network without Huawei. This despite the US threatening that any nation that "chooses to use an untrustworthy 5G vendor will jeopardise our ability to share intelligence and information at the highest level". A divided house Last month, even the United Kingdom (UK) decided to continue using Huawei in its 5G networks, though with some restrictions, posing a challenge to American policy. Beijing had warned the UK there could be "substantial repercussions" to other trade and investment plans in case of a complete ban on Huawei. This decision has been heavily criticised in the US with Newt Gingrich, a former speaker of the US House of Representatives, describing it as a "strategic defeat" for his country. This has also led to fissures between the UK and Australia with the deputy chair of Australia's intelligence committee comparing the UK's decision to let China build its 5G telecoms infrastructure to letting Russia construct it. With Australia and the UK both part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, this dispute can be seen as a precursor to tougher times ahead for the West in charting a coherent China policy. The China challenge is not an easy one to navigate as India too can attest. The West does not have a coherent strategy to manage China even after acknowledging the problems its rise has engendered. This is perhaps the surest sign that today China is truly a global power with an unprecedented ability to divide an alliance that managed to bring down even the mighty Soviet Union. (Courtesy of Mail Today) Also read: DailyOh! How Kapil Dev proposed to Romi, to what Golwalkar told Patel about joining Congress Credit: CC0 Public Domain A new study found an inverse association between socioeconomic status and certain kidney diseases. The findings appear in an upcoming issue of CJASN. Social deprivation is a known risk factor for chronic kidney disease in general, but its potential link to glomerular diseasesautoimmune-type diseases that damage the filtering system of the kidneysis less clear. To investigate, Mark Canney, Ph.D., Sean Barbour, MD, MSc (University of British Columbia and BC Renal), and their colleagues examined clinical and census-related information from 2000 to 2012 that pertained to all new cases of glomerular diseases called membranous nephropathy (392 cases), IgA nephropathy (818 cases), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS, 375 cases), ANCA-related glomerulonephritis (ANCA-GN, 387 cases), and lupus nephritis (389 cases) in British Columbia, Canada. "Glomerular diseases are complex conditions that require access to specialized care and expensive therapies, all of which may be more challenging for patients with a lower socioeconomic position. Also, they tend to affect people at a younger age and can thus negatively impact an individual's earning capacity," said Dr. Canney. He noted that although the underlying mechanism of disease is known for several glomerular diseases, what drives the onset of disease is poorly understood. "Therefore, an improved understanding of the potential contribution of socioeconomic position to different glomerular diseases could generate ideas for future research into factors that may directly cause glomerular disease." The team's analysis revealed that the incidence of lupus nephritis and ANCA-GN increased steadily with progressively lower income (based on area-level household income). For example, compared with those with the highest level of income, those with the lowest level of income had a 70% higher incidence of lupus nephritis and a 50% higher incidence of ANCA- GN. For ANCA-GN, the condition occurred in 71 per 10 million people per year in the highest income group and 106 per 10 million people per year in the lowest income group. For lupus nephritis, the rates were 106 per 10 million people per year in the highest income group and 181 per 10 million in the lowest income group. For FSGS, a disproportionately higher incidence of disease was seen only in the lowest income group. In contrast, no significant association was demonstrated for either IgA nephropathy or membranous nephropathy. "Our results will help future studies that are designed to identify the underlying cause of glomerular disease and that may be related to socioeconomic position," said Dr. Canney. "Our findings also emphasize the importance of identifying vulnerable populations of people who are at increased risk of developing these severe forms of kidney disease." An accompanying editorial notes that "clinicians and investigators should have a renewed focus on socioeconomic position when evaluating patients with suspected glomerular disease, determining recruitment populations for clinical trials, or designing observational studies aimed at identifying risk factors for glomerular disease onset." Explore further Researchers discover that a molecule of blood is effective against autoimmune kidney disease More information: "Socioeconomic Position and Incidence of Glomerular Diseases," CJASN, DOI: 10.2215/CJN.08060719 "Socioeconomic Position and Incidence of Glomerular Diseases," NCCD on cigarettes proposed in the Budget is a major setback to the FCV tobacco farmers who have been fighting torrential and unseasonal rainfall this year in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka New Delhi: Tobacco farmers' body FAIFA on Thursday said the hike in taxes on cigarettes announced in the Budget 2020-21 will only increase the smuggled cigarette trade which, in turn, will affect livelihoods of millions of tobacco growers and farm workers. The Federation of All India Farmer Associations (FAIFA) said it had also appealed to Finance Minister Nirmala Sithraman to have a "pragmatic approach" on cigarette taxation at a meeting on Wednesday evening. The hike in national calamity contingent duty (NCCD) on cigarettes proposed in the Budget is a major setback to the FCV tobacco farmers who have been fighting torrential and unseasonal rainfall this year in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, FAIFA said in a statement. "Indiscriminate increase of excise duty on cigarettes will result in reduction in legal cigarette production and this will reduce the tobacco purchases of domestic manufacturers, impacting market prices for farmers thereby putting more pressure on farmer's earnings and causing further stress," it said. Commenting on the hike in NCCD on cigarettes, FAIFA President Javare Gowda said, "This tax increase will provide a further boost to the smuggled cigarette trade and (lead to) decline in domestic demand, resulting in weak demand in the ensuing auctions." He further said the hike in NCCD was unexpected as several representations were made to the government to make it aware of the current situation of tobacco farmers and the ground-level realities of the struggles and losses that are being faced by them due to crop damage and also smuggled and illegal cigarette markets. In the Budget, Sitharaman had announced increasing NCCD on cigarettes, ranging from Rs 200-Rs 735 per thousand sticks, depending upon length of cigarette and on filter and non-filter basis. It was increased to 60 percent from 45 percent on smoking mixtures for pipes and cigarettes, while on other forms of smoking tobacco (other than smoking mixtures for pipes and cigarettes) and forms of chewing tobacco, it was increased to 25 percent from 10 percent. Gowda claimed that due to higher taxation, smuggled, illicit and contraband cigarettes along with WHO regulations, FCV production has come down to 210 million kg in 2019-20 from 325 million kg in 2013-14. It has resulted in "loss of more than Rs 5,000 crore (cumulative) to the FCV Tobacco Farming community", he added. In contrast, he said the market for illicit cigarettes is rising and has doubled from a level of 12.5 billion sticks in 2005 to 26.5 billion sticks in 2018 making India the fourth-largest and fastest-growing illegal cigarette market in the world. "Based on the current tax rates on cigarettes, it is estimated that the government loses Rs 13,000 crore in tax revenues per annum on account of illegal cigarette trade," Gowda claimed. Announces successful completion of pre-IND meeting with FDA In its endeavour to create first-in-class advanced therapies in India with global benchmarks, Bengaluru based Eyestem Research is delighted to announce successful completion of a pre-IND (Investigational New Drug) meeting with the FDA regarding regulatory roadmaps for its flagship product. Eyecyte-RPE, a patent-pending suspension of Retinal Pigment Epithelium cells, is designed to arrest and reverse symptoms of dry Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) an incurable cause of blindness that affects about 170 million people globally. Eyestem is among the very few companies worldwide which are racing to find a cure for this debilitating condition. Once the IND application is filed this year, the start-up plans to commence the clinical trials by next year. Commenting on the positive development, Dr. Jogin Desai, Founder and CEO, Eyestem said, We are on a mission to democratize access to cell therapy and make it available to a large section of humanity. The pre-IND meeting is aimed at creating a validated regulatory roadmap and we are delighted to obtain encouraging feedback from the FDA on our intended development path. As the only Indian company in this segment, we are determined to make the most of our exceptional pre-clinical animal results in order to find a cure for Dry AMD. We are fortunate to have a superb partner in Ora clinical, the worlds leading ophthalmology research organization for creation of the regulatory roadmap. We now look forward to starting clinical trials on the product by next year Last year, the company had raised an undisclosed amount in funding from global investors in Switzerland and South Africa. It is also ably supported through grants by BIRAC, the investment arm of the Department of Biotechnology, India and by Centre for Cellular and Molecular Platforms. The company will use this momentum to raise the next round of funds to get to the end of phase one trials. Jeanne Hecht, CEO, Ora Clinical said, As one of the top ophthalmic contract research organisations (CROs) in the world, we recognise the need to nurture ideas that can change the world. Eyestems pioneering work can halt the progression of dry AMD by using a unique composition of retinal cells to restore the health of the retina and we are incredibly excited to be partners in their journey Eyestems vision is to create a global and scalable cell therapy platform that produces consistent and quality products to treat incurable diseases. The company, founded by a top-class management team consisting of clinical trial, cell therapy and ophthalmology experts, boasts of a world-class advisory board and collaborations with pioneers and global industry leaders. Michael Brodzik, a superintendent of schools, and his wife Karen, a medical assistant, attended Shen Yun Performing Arts at the Merriam Theater, in Philadelphia, on Feb. 19, 2020. (Lily Sun/The Epoch Times) PHILADELPHIAThirteen years of world touring by Shen Yun Performing Arts, and now, seven touring groups based out of New York, has not satiated the number of theatergoers around the world who want to see the classical Chinese dance phenomenon. In fact, demand for Shen Yun tickets is at an all-time high since many who have wanted to attend for years are finally getting a chance to fulfill their wish. Michael Brodzik, a superintendent of schools in the Philadelphia area, and his wife and daughter had wanted to see Shen Yun for at least three or four years, he said. They finally did on Feb. 19, 2020, at the Merriam Theater in downtown Philadelphia. [Shen Yun] is wonderful, Brodzik said. I have wanted to see this for years and finally found the opportunity to get the tickets for my family so we are excited to be here tonight. Shen Yuns mission is to revive Chinas traditional culture, which was once almost lost, and share it with the world. The true Chinese culture has been, for all of its 5,000 years, deeply connected to the divine. In fact, China was once known as The Divine Land. Today, Shen Yun carries on this tradition by incorporating heavenly scenes, spiritual practices, and ancient legends of the Creator into its storytelling dances and song lyrics. Brodzik noticed the beauty of this spirituality. Its wonderful. They tell a great story. The costumes were beautiful. The technology is beautiful. The skill level of the dancers and everybody is wonderful. Its very impressive, he said. In an unfortunate turn of events, because Shen Yun is restoring Chinas ancient culture, they cannot perform in China where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been systematically destroying Chinas traditions since that regime came to power 70 years ago. The CCP feels traditional Chinese culture, with its emphasis on principled living and self-refinement and reverence for the divine, is a threat to its legitimacy and power. Brodzik felt glad that Shen Yun is, despite pressure from the CCP, sharing traditional Chinese culture with the world. I think they are doing a wonderful thing in terms of promoting their views and expressing those views here on stage as well. I think they did a nice job of that as well, he said. Since the acknowledgment of the divine pervaded ancient Chinese culture, so, too, it pervades Shen Yuns performances. Brodzik noticed its themes in the lyrics sung by the bel canto vocal performer of the evening. The lyrics were wonderful and its nice that there is a blend of different, not just dancing, theres singing, theres musical performances, there is comedy there is seriousness, so it has a little bit of everything. A Shen Yun performance consists of nearly 20 vignettes, some of which are set in modern-day China and depict the persecution that spiritual believers face at the hands of the CCP as part of the regimes effort to wipe out traditional Chinese culture. Brodzik had already learned about these sad current events and commented on how they were portrayed by Shen Yun. Yes, I was somewhat familiar with it. I looked up a little bit of the background of the story and all that, but I thought that it was presented tastefully. It was appropriate for the audience here and it sends a good message for people to find out more about it, and do something about it hopefully, Brodzik said. The education expert weighed in about Shen Yuns value as a teaching opportunity. Its an excellent educational tool about Chinese culture in general, certainlyvery positive message, he said. Lastly, Brodzik recommended Shen Yun to everybody and encouraged them to see it. Its an interesting experience for people to come to, adding that he didnt know if all of the audience members fully grasped the depth of the narratives in the show, but I think they are going to leave here and tell their friends about it and urge them to come, too. With reporting by Lily Sun and Brett Featherstone. 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. Donald Trump named one of his closest loyalists, ambassador to Germany Rick Grenell, as acting director of national intelligence Wednesday. 'I am pleased to announce that our highly respected Ambassador to Germany, @RichardGrenell, will become the Acting Director of National Intelligence. Rick has represented our Country exceedingly well and I look forward to working with him,' Trump tweeted just before he started a rally in Phoenix, Arizona. The appointment will make history with Grenell, 53, becoming the first openly gay cabinet secretary. It puts a hawkish pro-Trump figure in charge of the intelligence community but may not be a permanent move - Grenell replaces an acting director, Joseph Maguire, and there was no clarity on whether the ambassador would be formally nominated for the role. Maguire had until March 12 to remain as acting DNI, a role he took when Dan Coats quit as the last permanent leader of the intelligence community. Close relationship: Elevating Rick Grenell to acting director of national security and has previously tweeted pictures from the Oval Office with Donald Trump Alliance: Rick Grenell is also close to Mike Pompeo, and greeted him at Munich last week for the Munich security summit which the secretary of state was attending Key issue: Grenell used his twitter feed to issue a warning to the UK after it gave the go-ahead to Huawei building part of its 5G mobile phone network in defiance of U.S. demands to lock it out Trump tweeted that Maguire could have another role in the administration; he had previously been director of the National Counterterrorism Center after a career in the Navy as a SEAL and chief of special operations. Maguire and the wider intelligence community was thrust to the center of the news agenda by the whistleblower letter which accused Trump of wrongdoing in his relations with Ukraine. Grenell is eligible to become acting director because he is already on a Senate-confirmed role, having been voted through 56-42, and was sworn in by Mike Pence with his partner Matt Lashey at his side, becoming the highest-ranking gay official in a Republican administration. Grenell has not worked in the intelligence community before but was also floated as a possible director of national security at the White House, a job which went to Robert O'Brien after the sudden departure of John Bolton. He has already been outspoken on one intelligence issue, saying there is a need to prevent Huawei having access to 5G cell phone networks in the West. He used Twitter to issue a direct warning to the UK this week that it faces losing access to U.S. intelligence - which he will now control - after prime minister Boris Johnson allowed Huawei to be part of building the country's 5G network The move will add a seasoned foreign policy veteran with sharp elbows to Trumps inner circle. While Grenell has a reputation for sometimes being abrasive, he has been adamantly loyal to Trump at a time when the president remains skeptical about the intelligence community. Trump had a strained relationship with Coats, who had endorsed the U.S. intelligence community's assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the objective of promoting Trump over his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Trump also has objected to U.S. intelligence community analyses of major issues - from Iran's nuclear program to North Korea - that have clashed with his own assessments, tweeting to intelligence chiefs in January 2019 that they should 'go back to school' and were 'naive' for underestimating the danger from Iran. Family affair: Don Jr. spoke at a farewell party for Rick Grenell in Manhattan when he was made ambassador to Germany Also present: Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News host who left amid scandal over payouts to women, was a guest at Rick Grenell's farewell party Grenell has also led U.S. opposition to Nord Stream 2, a pipeline which was intended to increase the flow of natural gas from Russia to Germany. The U.S. opposes it on strategic grounds, and has used sanctions to try to derail the project. And the move comes at a time when the Department of Justice has a prosecutor - John Durham - carrying out a criminal investigation into the origins of the Trump-Russia probe. The focus of the probe has reported to be on the analysis which led to the conclusion that Russia had interfered in the election in favor of Trump. It has also apparently focused on the actions of Obama-appointed intelligence officials John Brennan, the CIA director, and James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, who have both been frequent Trump targets and are outspoken public critics of the president. Grenell has a long history in Republican circles. He previously served as U.S. spokesman at the United Nations in the George W. Bush administration, including under then-Ambassador John Bolton. In recent years he has developed friendships with the Trump family and inner circle, particularly with Don Jr., who hosted a 'farewell' party for him when he was confirmed as ambassador to Germany. Others at the party included Bill O'Reilly, the former Fox News host who remains close to Trump despite leaving Fox News amid a scandal over massive payouts to women who accused him of sexual misconduct. [February 20, 2020] Bitfarms Reaffirms Commitment to Blockchain Research at ETS, one of Quebec's Leading Engineering Schools Bitfarms Ltd. ("Bitfarms", or the "Company") (TSXV:BITF) is pleased to announce and reaffirm its support to the "High-Performance Blockchain Infrastructure for IoT Applications" project at the Ecole de technologie superieure, ETS Montreal, University of Quebec ("ETS"). Bitfarms is committed to supporting ETS through monetary and in-kind contributions through to 2022. ETS will also receive funding for the project from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Under the leadership of Professor Kaiwen Zhang, the group of students is focused on developing novel blockchain applications including the following: Development of an e-health blockchain platform Survey of use cases and Proof-of-Concept development for Smart Homes Technical improvements to DLT (distributed ledger technology) for IoT devices Integration of M2M (machine to machine) communication for efficient cryptocurrency mining As part of the Company's support of ETS' project, students involved with the collaboration will frequently visit our computing centres and meet with our team for technical support. Bitfarms will retain certain commercial intellectual property rights development through the project while ETS will retain the right to use intellectual property for academic purposes. "We are grateful for Bitfarms' continued commitment to ETS and the funding of blockchain research in Quebec" said Professor Zhang. Blockchain technologies have the potential to profoundly impact both the public and private sectors. Research will be instrumental in demonstrating the utility of blockchains in the IoT domain, as well as the feasibility of implementing a blockchain platform using the Company's infrastructure. The Company supports the development of blockchain technologies in Quebe and believes it will help to generate strong demand for a skilled workforce, including for the engineers trained during this collaboration. "Bitfarms is invested in the research and development of blockchain innovations to improve the usability of blockchain systems for applications beyond cryptocurrency", commented Wes Fulford, Chief Executive Officer. "This project demonstrates our support towards the growth of the high-tech industry, and our view that Quebec, a growing technology hub, can play an important role in supporting digital innovation." About Bitfarms Ltd. The Company owns and operates computing centres that power the global decentralized financial economy. Bitfarms provides computing power to cryptocurrency networks such as Bitcoin, earning fees from each network for securing and processing transactions. Powered by clean and competitively priced hydroelectricity, Bitfarms operates 5 computing centres in Quebec, Canada. Bitfarms' experienced management team includes industrial-scale data centre operators and capital markets professionals, focused on building infrastructure for the future by developing and hosting the ecosystem growing around blockchain-based technologies. To learn more about Bitfarms' events, developments and online communities: https://www.facebook.com/bitfarms/ https://twitter.com/Bitfarms_io https://www.instagram.com/bitfarms/ https://www.linkedin.com/company/bitfarms/ Website: www.bitfarms.com Cautionary Statement This news release may contain assumptions, estimates, and other forward-looking statements regarding future events. Such forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties and are subject to factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control that may cause actual results or performance to differ materially from those currently anticipated in such statements. Trading in the securities of the Company should be considered highly speculative. No stock exchange, securities commission or other regulatory authority has approved or disapproved the information contained herein. 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. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005746/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-21 03:27:55|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Kyrgyzstan's UN envoy on Thursday highlighted the work of geographical groups in helping bridge social gaps around the world on the occasion of the World Day of Social Justice. Achieving social justice is an essential condition for meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the UN member states' work within the world body should be complemented by efforts at the regional and national levels, said Mirgul Moldoisaeva, permanent representative of Kyrgyzstan to the UN, at a meeting co-organized by her mission and the International Labour Organization. The establishment of the Eurasian Economic Union in 2015 allowed Kyrgyzstan as well as Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Russia to open up new opportunities for achieving social justice, according to the envoy. "The principles of developing a single labor market in the Eurasian Economic Union, such as mutual recognition of education and qualification documents as well as providing foreign workers with access to essential social services, make necessary contribution to ensuring employment and overcoming social isolation of the population," she said. The envoy also pointed to the benefits of other regional associations established based on geographical features in this regard, including the Group of Landlocked Developing Countries and the Forum of Small States. "Each of these groups of countries faces additional challenges related to achieving social justice, and that is why my country Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous country which has no access to the sea, is active in promoting dialogue and cooperation among the member countries that make a positive contribution to the issues of social justice," she said. In 2007, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution, introduced by Kyrgyzstan, to designate Feb. 20 as the World Day of Social Justice. Supplier News 19 February 2020 As the luxury marketing landscape evolves and becomes more competitive, luxury hotel brands need to be innovative and experience-driven now more than ever, beginning with their online presence. With the average traveler spending 13% of their time online conducting travel-related activities (Think With Google), it's crucial for luxury hotels to ensure they provide the most relevant and compelling content throughout the travel planning journey. Here are five powerful strategies your luxury hotel brand can implement to create more meaningful digital experiences and drive greater success. 1. Website Personalization For luxury hotel brands, personalized service is paramount. While this is the cornerstone of every luxury hotel experience, many of these brands lack personalization throughout their website and marketing strategy. And with 74% of customers feeling frustrated when website content is not personalized (Infosys), it's key to starting customer relationships off on the right foot. It's important to focus on personalization that answers potential guests' needs and creates a seamless experience with your brand. A truly successful personalization strategy will help guide potential guests through their travel planning journey and build a deeper connection with your brand along the way. Personalization throughout your website should hone in on demographic, behavioral, and intent data points. Key data points such as loyalty status, RFM value, website pathing behavior, dates searched in the booking engine, and persona insights are just a few examples of meaningful insights that can help your brand create a more personalized experience on the website. Here are some key website personalization examples in action: Loyalty Status : If a user is logged in, welcome them back by name when they come back to the website to finish their travel planning. Capitalize on past stay history and recommend room types that they've stayed in before. You can also serve packages, experiences, and events that are relevant to the guest's interests you've captured in their profile (wellness, wine, etc.). : If a user is logged in, welcome them back by name when they come back to the website to finish their travel planning. Capitalize on past stay history and recommend room types that they've stayed in before. You can also serve packages, experiences, and events that are relevant to the guest's interests you've captured in their profile (wellness, wine, etc.). RFM Value : Aside from personalization around loyalty status, personalizing content around RFM value can be a powerful strategy. For your "frequent best guests" that spend a high amount with your brand and stay frequently, serve them upgraded room types from their previous stays to increase their share of wallet with your brand. Website Pathing Behavior: Website pathing behavior can provide powerful insight into who your potential guest is and what they need. For instance, if a website visitor goes to the family travel section of your website, they are most likely planning a family vacation. Tag the visitor as a family traveler, and the next time they visit the homepage, serve a lifestyle image of a family with homepage content personalized to the family experience, activities, and packages. Another powerful intent trigger is the number of times a potential guest has visited your website. For instance, if they've visited your website four times and are looking at the offers and rooms pages, they are lower in the booking funnel. Personalize website content to help give the final push to convert, such as book direct perks and benefits, unique selling points of different room types, and any exclusive offers. : Aside from personalization around loyalty status, personalizing content around RFM value can be a powerful strategy. For your "frequent best guests" that spend a high amount with your brand and stay frequently, serve them upgraded room types from their previous stays to increase their share of wallet with your brand. Website Pathing Behavior: Website pathing behavior can provide powerful insight into who your potential guest is and what they need. For instance, if a website visitor goes to the family travel section of your website, they are most likely planning a family vacation. Tag the visitor as a family traveler, and the next time they visit the homepage, serve a lifestyle image of a family with homepage content personalized to the family experience, activities, and packages. Another powerful intent trigger is the number of times a potential guest has visited your website. For instance, if they've visited your website four times and are looking at the offers and rooms pages, they are lower in the booking funnel. Personalize website content to help give the final push to convert, such as book direct perks and benefits, unique selling points of different room types, and any exclusive offers. Dates Searched in the Booking Engine: Oftentimes a website visitor will initiate a booking and then abandon it to explore other options or compare rates across channels. When potential guests leave to explore other options, remarket them with display creative personalized to their stay dates, and when they return to the website to continue their research, pre-populate the dates they've previously searched so they can easily go right back into the booking process. Hotel ZaZa, a boutique luxury brand in Texas, saw great results by offering consumers searching for accommodations instant access to the most accurate hotel rates, where they seamlessly click and book. This led to a 133% increase in revenue YoY, a .5% increase in conversion rate, and achieved a 30X ROI. 2. Persona-Driven Marketing Personalization Personalizing content on your website is only one part of the equation. Just as your staff is expected to help curate and thoughtfully guide guests throughout their stay, your hotel brand should guide guests throughout their travel planning journey with thoughtfully curated messaging and content. From the dreaming to the experiencing phase, meaningful and relevant messaging personalized to every phase of the travel planning journey is critical. Campaign messaging should be centered around the information potential guests are seeking in each phase of the journey to nurture guests through the booking funnel. Dreaming Phase Marketing Messaging: Destination-focused messaging with softer call-to-actions like "Explore More" Editorial Content: Destination guides, insider local tips, and destination-focused video Targeting: Destination keywords, affinity audiences, and other upper-funnel targeting strategies Travel planners typically know the type of vacation they are seeking (beach, cultural, etc.) and are still narrowing down where they want to go. Planning/Booking Phase Marketing Messaging: Hotel-focused messaging highlighting room types, packages, and unique selling points of the property Editorial Content: Articles highlighting brand and property activations, hotel-centric video and photography Targeting: Long-tail keywords, branded keywords, in-market, and other lower-funnel targeting strategies Travel planners have narrowed down their destination but are now focused on finding the right neighborhood and accommodations. Experiencing Phase Marketing Messaging: Ancillary revenue opportunities like dining and spa Editorial Content: Lifestyle content surrounding the brand experience, including art, culinary experiences, and local gems nearby Targeting: Remarketing with personalized content for guests who've completed a booking that upsells spa, dining, and activity offerings Travel planners have booked their accommodation and have now started to plan their stay. 3. Data-Driven Design Luxury hotel brands heavily invest in creating a brand aesthetic, and rightfully so. Capturing your brand lifestyle through design and bringing your brand story to life on digital is fundamental. However, this is just the foundation of a strong digital presence. Elevate your design strategy with CRM insights and conversion testing. Create an emotional connection with all guest personas. Luxury hotel brands tend to think about the science behind customer data: identifying trends across customer segments, understanding the value of guests, and building audiences to fuel content and campaigns. While this exercise is critical to success, what about the emotional context this data can provide to help you uncover the emotional connection each customer persona has with your brand? When you analyze your customer data and reviews to identify trends, focus on uncovering both the emotional and functional benefits each segment associates with your brand. This will ensure that your design and content decisions throughout your entire digital strategy will resonate with each and every guest on a deeper level, speaking to the right and left brain. Conversion testing drives creativity. Similar to A/B testing, conversion testing involves presenting different content and design to people visiting your website and then measuring the impact of the change on your website conversion rate. Not only can conversion testing dramatically increase revenue, but it can drive creativity and innovation by allowing your team to test new design, content, and layout ideas that push boundaries and set your brand apart. 4. Better Loyalty Program Integration Throughout the Website It's critical for a luxury hotel's digital strategy to go beyond winning the guest and start focusing on winning the repeat guest. While most luxury hotel brands have their loyalty sign-up prominently displayed in the main navigation, there is an opportunity to more effectively integrate loyalty sign-ups throughout the website and booking experience. For instance, when a website visitor is browsing room types, they should be prompted to enter their email address to unlock an exclusive rate or added perks to the room, such as welcome champagne. Once the email address is entered, you can trigger an email for the user to finish completing their loyalty profile and unlock an additional perk for a future stay. You can implement the same strategy for your offers and experiential packages, as well as other key areas of your website. 5. Context vs. Content and Your Website as a Concierge In luxury marketing, experience is everything. While content creates the emotional connection with your brand, your content strategy will fall flat without the right context. It's imperative to clearly communicate your brand experience and create context throughout every page of your website and across every marketing channel. View your website as a concierge for your brand, inspiring guests and helping them effortlessly plan their stay. Here are some key considerations: Primary navigation shouldn't just highlight offerings, but also unique selling points or key pillars of your brand (brand-wide activations, experiential content, etc.) to immediately introduce your brand story and what sets you apart. Your website should have clear content that speaks to every phase of the travel planning journey (dreaming, planning, booking, and experiencing) with thoughtful content taxonomy that guides visitors through their planning journey. Embrace a first-person perspective with content and videos that bring your brand experience to life through the perspective of the guest. Allow website visitors to book experiences at your property directly through your website (cabanas, welcome wine and cheese boards, bike rentals, etc.) Overall, your hotel's website and marketing should align with your luxury brand. By creating a personalized website experience, utilizing persona-based marketing, focusing on data-driven design, integrating your hotel loyalty program throughout the website, and making your website an online concierge for past, present, and future guests, your luxury brand will come to life and stand out from the competition. State-backed investment firm BGF has opened an office on Corks Lapps Quay as it eyes opportunities in Munster. BGF said it has over 250m to invest in Ireland and is backed by AIB, Bank of Ireland, and Ulster Bank along with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (Isif). The company is currently in discussions with a number of companies in the Munster region with an eye to investment. BGF typically makes equity investments of between 1m and 10m. Founded in the UK in 2011, BGF has invested 2.1bn in over 300 firms in the SME sector, generating 555m in returns. In 2007, they launched in Ireland and over the past 12 months have invested over 20m to support the growth of three Irish companies; nursing home firm Brindley Healthcare, housebuilder Winterbrook, and aerospace company Team Accessories Limited. BGF describe themselves as long-term investors taking minority positions in businesses. Stephen Welton, CEO and Founder of BGF, said: Our business in Ireland has made huge progress over the past two years and we are delighted now to open a second office here in Cork. The Munster region has some outstanding companies and we are able to support them to achieve their growth ambitions. Leo Casey, Head of BGF in Ireland their philosophy is to embed themselves in the communities in which investee companies are located. We plan to open a number of offices around the country and Cork was the perfect location for our second opening. The city embodies a sense of optimism and energy and is a hub of innovation for the next generation of Irish pioneers. We look forward to investing in some of the regions most exciting businesses. For our investments in Ireland, we are backed by, and work closely with, the main Irish banks and with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (Isif) and we believe passionately in the entrepreneurs and the businesses we are supporting. Along with three Irish banks, BGF is also funded by the Isif which is managed by the National Treasury Management Agency (NTMA). It has a statutory mandate to invest on a commercial basis in a manner designed to support economic activity and employment in Ireland. PLYMOUTH COUNTY, Iowa -- A horse rescued from a rural Plymouth County creek on Tuesday has died. The horse died about an hour after being removed from the water, according to a Plymouth County Sheriff's Office news release. The owner attributed the death to a combination of hypothermia and age. The sheriff's office said the owner was not negligent. Sheriff's deputies were called to the 1900 block of Hickory Avenue at 3 p.m. Tuesday to help rescue the horse, which had gotten stuck in the creek after apparently losing its footing while trying to get a drink and slipping into the water. Deputies called Stockton Towing, of Sioux City, to pull the horse from the creek. With help from the deputies, the tow truck operator was able to get the horse out of the water. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. MONTREALThe Crown has finished presenting evidence in the sex assault trial of former Quebec media star Eric Salvail. Salvails lawyer, Michel Massicotte, said today the defence will present at least one witness, leaving the possibility open that the accused will take the stand. The former talk show host is on trial for sexual assault, harassment and unlawful confinement. His former co-worker, Donald Duguay, claims Salvail cornered him in the bathroom at the offices of Radio-Canada in 1993, exposed himself and tried to force him into performing a sex act. A Radio-Canada employee told the court today that Duguay had told her immediately after the alleged incident that Salvail had exposed his genitals to him. The trial is scheduled to continue this afternoon. Read more about: The California Board of Parole denied medical parole last week for a Santa Rosa man who is serving 16 years to life in prison for strangling his wife in 2013. Dean Howard Eliason Jr., 72, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder during his 2015 trial in Sonoma County Superior Court. He strangled his wife of 40 years, Virginia Mary Caetano, 64, with an electric cord at their Rincon Valley home on July 24, 2013. Eliason called 911 to report he killed his wife because she was making fun of him and he went into a rage. A forensic pathologist testified at his trial that it took approximately 10 minutes for Caetano to die, the Sonoma County District Attorney's Office said. Defense attorney Kristine Burk argued Eliason suffered from acute and debilitating psychotic depression and he was overwhelmed by his wife's drug dependence. When a psychiatrist scheduled to testify for the defense failed to appear in court, Burk's motion for a mistrial was denied and Eliason pleaded guilty. Eliason did not attend his medical parole hearing at the California Health Care Facility in Stockton, but he was represented by an attorney, prosecutors said. The Board of Parole ruled Eliason did not meet the criteria for medical parole that is available for an inmate only under a very limited set of circumstances. The Board of Parole found Eliason was able to perform the activities of basic daily living and he was not medically incapacitated. The Board determined Eliason posed an unreasonable risk of harm to the community if he were to be released, according to the district attorney's office. Eliason is eligible for another parole hearing in 2027, prosecutors said. Copyright 2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The jury in Harvey Weinsteins criminal trial began its third day of deliberations on Thursday as the former movie moguls fate remained in the balance. Seven men and five women have been picked to rule on whether Weinstein should be convicted or acquitted and on which charges. All 12 will have to reach a unanimous decision in each case. Weinstein is accused of raping one woman in 2013 and performing a forcible sex act on another woman in 2006. He has pleaded not guilty and denied all allegations of non-consensual sex. More precisely, Weinstein is facing five different counts in the case. Those five counts include two counts of predatory sexual assault, one each of first-degree rape and third-degree rape, and one of criminal sex act. In order to announce their decision, the jury must fill out a verdict sheet that comes with a complex set of instructions, telling them for example that should they find the defendant not guilty on count one, then they must also find him not guilty on count three and proceed to counts two, four and five. Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Show all 50 1 /50 Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein trial in photos On January 6 the trial process began in New York. Harvey Weinstein arrived using a walking aid, looking frail Getty Images Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Actresses Rose McGowan, Rosanna Arquette and other women protested outside court after he arrived AFP via Getty Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Jury selection was completed on 21 January and the rape and sexual assualt trial began in earnest the next day Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hast points at Harvey Weinstein during his sexual assault trial as accuser Mimi Haleyi appears on the screen Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Files arrive at the rape trial AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Lawyer Damon Cheronis stands near his client Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Louis R Aidala attends the trial Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Lance Maerov testifies Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein is photographed by members of the media as leaves court with the aid of a walker AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Attorney Gloria Allred speaks to the media during the trial Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein arrives to court with the support of the members of his defense team EPA Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Actress Annabella Sciorra arrives to testify as a witness EPA Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein looks on as she is questioned by prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon on the stand Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Assistant District Attorneys Meghan Hast, left, and Joan Illuzzi leave the Harvey Weinstein rape trial during the lunch break AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Actress Ellen Barkin arrives after a lunch break to watch the case of film producer Harvey Weinstein Actress Ellen Barkin arrives after a lunch break to watch the case of film producer Harvey Weinstein Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein's attorney Donna Rotunno leaves Manhattan Supreme Court AFP via Getty Images Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Kara Young exits after testifying Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Film producer Harvey Weinstein takes notes as Dr. Barbara Ziv testifies in front of Judge James Burke as she is questioned by prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Dr. Barbara Ziv leaves court after testifying AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Actor Rosie Perez points at film producer Harvey Weinstein as she testifies Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Rosie Perez exits after testifying Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Mimi Haleyi, former production assistant, arrives to testify Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos A member of the prosecution pushes a cart loaded with files AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein looks on as Mimi Haleyi testifies Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Elizabeth Entin, right, a witness in the Harvey Weinstein rape and sexual assault trial, walks towards the courtroom with Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hast AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein smiles as he arrives for his trial Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Witness Elizabeth Entin is questioned by Assistant District Attorney Meghan Hast Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Tarale Wulff, witness in the trial, leaves the courtroom for a break Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Witness Dawn Dunning is cross-examined by defense lawyer Arthur Aidala Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Lincoln Davies, a former boyfriend of accuser Dawn Dunning, leaves court after testifying AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Weinstein looks into the camera as he leaves court on 29 January Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Dev Sen, an attorney from Boies Schiller, leaves after testifying Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Witness Monika Mikkelsen testifies Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Photos are passed around to the jury Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Hotel worker Rothschild Capulong testifies under a photo of the lobby of the DoubleTree Hotel in Midtown as Judge James Burke listens Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Playwright Warren Leight arrives to Criminal Court Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Professor Elizabeth Loftus is questioned by lawyer Diana Fabi Samson in front of Judge James Burke Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Actress Talita Maia leaves after testifying Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Nelson Lopez is questioned by defense lawyer Arthur Aidala Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Model Claudia Salinas leaves court after testifying AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein and lawyer, Donna Rotunna arrive at court smiling on 14 February EPA Harvey Weinstein trial in photos District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr watches as prosecutor Joan Illuzzi-Orbon gives her closing arguments in front of Judge James Burke on February 14 Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Weinstein departs the same day with a smile on his face Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos The press watch as Harvey Weinstein and his legal team arrive at the Criminal Court on February 18 Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Judge James Burke, left, instructs the jurors before they begin deliberating on Harvey Weinstein's rape trial. The panel of seven men and five women heard instructions in the law from the judge before going behind closed doors to consider charges Elizabeth Williams via AP Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein sits with his attorney Donna Rotunno as Judge James Burke instructs the jury on charges as they begin deliberations Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Women watch as Harvey Weinstein exits the courtroom Reuters Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Harvey Weinstein arrives to hear verdict EPA Harvey Weinstein trial in photos Weinstein sits at the defense table reading papers during jury deliberations Reuters Jurors dont have to make a decision on all counts and can, in some circumstances, skip some of the charges. The verdict sheet instructs the jury to start by reaching a verdict on the predatory sexual assault counts. Depending on what they decide on those counts, they can move on to or skip other charges. So far, jurors have focused a lot of attention on Sopranos actor Annabella Sciorras allegation that Weinstein raped her in the mid-1990s. Sciorras allegation is too old to be charged on its own because of the statute of limitations, but its a key component of the most serious charges against Weinstein. On Tuesday, signaling their interest in Sciorra, jurors sent a note seeking clarity on why Weinstein wasnt charged with other counts stemming from her allegation. They were told by the judge that they must not speculate as to any other charges that are not before you. The panel of seven men and five women finished Wednesdays round of deliberations by revisiting actress Rosie Perezs testimony about what she says Sciorra told her after the alleged rape. Each of the predatory sexual assault counts faced by Weinstein is punishable by 25 years to life in prison. The first-degree rape and criminal sex act counts each carry a maximum of 25 years. Third-degree rape carries up to four years. Should the jury find Weinstein guilty on one of the predatory sexual assault charges, a minimum sentence would keep him in prison until his early 90s. If Weinstein is convicted on any of the charges, he will be required to register as a sex offender under New York law. Weinstein faces more criminal charges in a Los Angeles case announced last month, just as the New York trial was getting underway. If the 12 jurors cant reach a unanimous decision in the New York case, there could be a hung jury. There is no fixed amount of time that must elapse before a jury is considered hung. Jurors can take several days, including a week or more, to reach a verdict. In the present case, this means a verdict could realistically come on Thursday afternoon, Friday, or the following week. Additional reporting by agencies A Chinese mother has built an anti-coronavirus tent for her daughter using bamboo strips and a plastic sheet so the girl can study outdoors safely during the epidemic. The woman's seven-year-old child has to attend online classes every day from their rural home in Hubei Province, where the outbreak started. Because the internet connection inside their house is poor, the mother decided to make the temporary 'classroom' to protect the girl when she attends lessons outside. Seven-year-old Bi Mengqi was in remote Changyang County of Hubei Province when the lockdown order was issued. Her mother built a tent so she could study outside of their home The first-grade pupil has to attend online classes while sitting outdoors every day because the internet signals inside her home are poor. All schools in China remain closed due to the virus Originating in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the new coronavirus - known as COVID-19 - has infected more than 74,000 people inside China. The Chinese government has locked down tens of millions of people in Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital city, to prevent the spread of the disease. Seven-year-old Bi Mengqi was in remote Changyang County when the lockdown order was issued. Due to the fact that the internet service in the region is not ideal, it became difficult for the first-grade pupil to study after the new school term started. Bi's mother now accompanies her daughter to study in the tent every day. The pair always ensure they wear face masks throughout the process to prevent the spread of the disease Bi's mother took her mobile phone and went around the village to test the speed of the internet. She eventually found a spot near the entrance of the village for her daughter to study. Afterwards, the woman used bamboo strips and a large plastic sheet to set up a temporary shelter for her child. The parent now accompanies her daughter to study in the tent every day. The pair always ensure they wear face masks throughout the process to avoid cross infection. A video of the woman's homemade equipment was released by state media People's Daily on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter. The novel coronavirus has killed at least 2,129 people and infected more than 75,700 globally Students across the country are now attending their lessons with the help of the internet. In the picture above, a teacher speaks with her students on her smart phone during an online class at a middle school in Donghai in China's eastern Jiangsu Province on February 17 In the picture taken on February 12 in Wuhan, the ground zero of the epidemic, a woman wears a protective mask and another makeshift device made of bubble wrap as she is out shopping Chinese citizens have step up their efforts to protect themselves from the deadly disease. A man is pictured wearing a protective mask at Beijing railway station in Beijing on February 11 Hubei, situated in central China, accounts for more than 80 per cent of the confirmed cases and 95 per cent of the deaths across the world. Overnight, the Hubei health officials reported 349 new cases out of a nationwide total of 394 and 108 of the 114 new deaths across China. The figures are the lowest daily tolls in a month and Beijing said outbreak control efforts 'are working'. Globally, the coronavirus epidemic has killed at least 2,129 people and infected more than 75,700, and has spread to at least two dozen countries. Advertisement Taking fine dining to new heights, in the spring of 2018 I ate a meal at 23,149 feet on the North Col of Mount Everest. Joining eight companions, we feasted on a mouth-watering meal prepared by two-Michelin-star super chef Sat Bains while dressed in black tie and ball gowns. The Guinness Book of World Records has now officially recognised the charity stunt as the world's highest dinner party. MailOnline Travel's Sadie Whitelocks went on an expedition with former special forces officer Neil Laughton in a bid to smash the world record for the highest dinner party. Above, the team successfully dining at 23,149 feet on Mount Everest. Sadie is seated on the right, nearest the camera One of the mountain Sherpas stood in as the chef. The food was prepared by two-Michelin star chef Sat Bains at his restaurant in Nottingham before being freeze-dried and flown to Tibet The dessert created by Sat Bains for the world's highest dinner featured caramel wrapped in chocolate Super chef Sat Bains, who has two Michelin stars It was only possible with a team of local guides who helped carry our rather unusual stash of goods. For our dinner to be an official record, there had to be a clothed dining table, dining chairs and crockery. Our expedition leader, former special forces officer Neil Laughton, spruced things up a little with the addition of candlesticks and a bunch of yellow plastic lilies. On the food front, Sat Bains had concocted a freeze-dried meal, which only required the addition of hot water to prepare. The menu featured a miso soup starter, a lamb tagine for mains and a chocolate dessert laced with caramel to finish. The world's highest dinner party took place at 6am for meteorological reasons. Above from left to right, Sherpa Nima, expedition team member Jane Chynoweth, Sadie Whitelocks and team leader Neil Laughton For the dinner to be official, there had to be a clothed dining table, dining chairs and crockery. The expedition leader, former special forces officer Neil Laughton, spruced things up a little with the addition of candlesticks and some yellow plastic lilies The dinner party team sipped on a special cocktail created by Mr Fogg's bar in London, which contained Metaxa Sadie writes: 'The summit of Mount Everest, looming 5,880ft above, was hidden from view and there was not a pinch of blue sky to be seen' You are advised not to drink alcohol at high altitude but we thought a little nip of something would do no harm. There was Mumm Champagne, Taylor's Port and a Metaxa-based cocktail rustled up by London cocktail bar Mr Fogg's to tickle our fancy. Putting the Champagne on ice certainly wasn't a problem. The day we dined, the temperature hovered around minus 25 degrees Celsius. The visibility was pretty dreadful and a thick mist shrouded our outdoor dining table. The summit of Mount Everest, looming 5,880ft above, was hidden from view and there was not a pinch of blue sky to be seen. We had hiked up to the North Col and camped there the night before, and in a bid to make it back down in time, we kicked off our dinner party at 6am on April 30. A view of Mount Everest from advanced base camp where the team stayed before climbing to the North Col The weather around Mount Everest can change wildly throughout the day, with sunshine giving way to furious blizzards To get to the world's highest dinner party, Sadie and the team had to scale a 1km-high ice wall It took the dinner party team most of the day to navigate the frigid route by fixed rope and they had to be careful of gaping crevasses as they went Sitting there with our teeth chattering as the piercing winds whipped around, we swiftly tucked into the fine fodder. After a couple of weeks of living on expedition food, which included copious volumes of Pringles and Haribo sweets, Sat Bains' food tasted extra divine. Some went in for thirds. The tipples also helped warm us up a little, although the Champagne started to freeze within seconds. 'Ch-ch-cheers!' we all chattered, toasting our mountain meal and a fellow expedition member who didn't make it due to altitude sickness. Dining on Everest was truly a meal to remember. The world's highest dinner party expedition raised funds for mountaineering charity Community Action Nepal. To donate further to the cause visit www.justgiving.com. Mountaineers seen coming down from the North Col of Mount Everest, using fixed rope to help with their descent To get to advanced base camp from the Tibetan side of Mount Everest, trekkers must navigate this icy corridor known as the 'magic highway' Sadie said the food by Sat Bains was a real treat, especially after weeks of living on expedition food, which included 'copious volumes of Pringles and Haribo sweets' A yak outside the tents at advanced base camp on Mount Everest The expedition team had a dress rehearsal dinner at Everest base camp where the weather was much sunnier The world's highest dinner party expedition raised funds for mountaineering charity Community Action Nepal Hunters Cast - Logan Lerman, Al Pacino, Kate Mulvaney, Tiffany Boone, Josh Radnor, Dylan Baker, Lena Olin Darth Vader doesnt get up every day looking to destroy the galaxy; he gets up every day believing he needs to save it. So says the very perceptive Jonah Heidelbaum in Hunters, Amazon Primes new series. The only difference between a hero and a villain, he adds, is who sells more costumes on Halloween. This is the sort of binary thinking that limits the show, in which young Jonah, an orphan, is taken under the wing of a lonely rich man the Robin to his Batman, if you will and trained to become a vigilante like him. Played by Al Pacino, Meyer Offerman is like a combination of Simon Weisenthal and Bruce Wayne, a Holocaust survivor who has dedicated his wealth and remaining time on Earth to hunt down, and systematically assassinate the hundreds of Nazis who escaped Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, and made new lives for themselves in America. Watch the Hunters trailer here: Creator David Weil drops several references to geek culture in Hunters, a show that despite its dour subject matter has the tone of a bonkers Justice League movie. You should read the Torah more, Meyer tells Jonah. It is the original comic book. This would have been fine in surer hands Quentin Tarantino achieved the impossible in his finest film, Inglourious Basterds, when he transformed the tragedy of the Holocaust into a trademark exploitation picture but on the other end of the spectrum, we have magnificently misguided misfires such as Jojo Rabbit and Life is Beautiful. In the feature length opening episode, Weil and director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon drink thirstily from Tarantinos well of bad taste. A pulpy premise is established and the performances are turned up to 11, but then, jarringly, in the episodes that follow, Hunters feels the need to be taken seriously. To earn this respect, it does the first thing that comes to its mind, and pretends that in addition to being a pulp thriller, it has the gravitas of Steven Spielbergs Schindlers List. And so we get desaturated flashbacks to Meyers time as a prisoner in a concentration camp, where he first met Jonahs grandmother, and fell in love. Not only do these scenes feel grossly out of place in a show as deliriously dumb as Hunters, they sort of negate its inherently schlocky nature. This isnt to say that it is impossible to converge comic book storytelling and the Holocaust the X-Men movies did a wonderful job of handling Magnetos backstory as a prisoner at Auschwitz but Hunters doesnt deal in superpowers. As ridiculous as some of it is, its set in a recognisably real world. Despite Gomez-Rejons splendid work in that 90-minute opener, Hunters is rarely able to sustain the goofiness at its core. In the five episodes that were provided for preview the heavily marketed first season has 10 Al Pacino revisited his Scent of a Woman brand of over-the-top acting on precisely one occasion. For the most part, he plays Meyer with an uncharacteristic reserve that reminded me of Arts father in the graphic novel Maus. But Meyer isnt the protagonist of the show. Pacino isnt even top-billed. That distinction goes to Logan Lerman, who more than holds his own opposite his illustrious co-star, as the reluctant hero Jonah. The rest of the team includes a middle-aged couple, a fading movie star, a Strong Black Woman, and others; each of them experts at particular skills. Theres an episodic quality to Hunters that somewhat dilutes its prestige ambitions every episode has a villain of the week character that must be hunted and executed but theres an overarching plot that is developed in the background. Having caught on to Meyers plans, a faction of the Nazis has put into motion a scheme that will bring about the rise of a Fourth Reich. One of the most interesting characters among the villains is an American-born youth who acts as an enforcer for his Nazi commanders. That Darth Vader reference in episode one wasnt as forced as youd imagine. Jonah is essentially Luke Skywalker and Meyer is Obi Wan; the neo-Nazi is Kylo Ren. The proposed Fourth Reich is the First Order, and Hunters is, regardless of its iffy ethics, Star Wars with the SS. Follow @htshowbiz for more The author tweets @RohanNaahar Lehigh University will get a rare opportunity to find out what will happen in South Bethlehem if it shuts down Packer Avenue to vehicles for 45 days this spring. On Tuesday night, Bethlehem City Council in a 3-2 vote narrowly approved Lehighs pitch to temporarily close Packer Avenue between Vine and Webster streets for 45 days this spring to test the impact on traffic patterns, parking and pedestrian usage. Councilwoman Grace Crampsie Smith and Dr. Paige Van Virt cast the dissenting votes. Councilwoman Olga Negron and Councilman Bryan Callahan were absent. The university expects limiting cars will make the campus more friendly to pedestrians and funnel more foot traffic off the mountain into the Southside business district. But Lehigh has promised it will terminate the study early if it causes serious problems. Lehighs pitch for a permanent closure has been met with plenty of questions and some skepticism from its own campus community as well as Southside neighbors, who fear shutting down the road will worsen the existing traffic gridlock on Third and Fourth streets. We see this as a way to further pull the core of the campus into Southside," said Brent Stringfellow, Lehigh architect and associate vice president for facilities. Council members who supported the study emphasized no decisions have been made about a permanent closure and raised many questions they want answered. Mayor Bob Donchez said his primary concern is the traffic impact on the surrounding residents. Van Wirt called it a tough decision, but said she felt unconvinced Lehigh had made the case theres a major safety issue. A 2018 traffic study found that roughly 1,200 members of the Lehigh campus and surrounding community crossed Packer Avenue each day. Lehigh University Police Chief Jason Schiffer said after years spent as a Bethlehem city bike cop he understands the traffic patterns and pedestrian concerns intimately. He advocated for rational decision making. We all get to test a theory that it will work before the plan gets final approval," Schiffer said. "Thats a rare opportunity and a fact that should not be overlooked. He likened Packer Avenue at mid-day to a road thats open during Musikfest. Currently, Lehighs Asa Packer campus has few level spots to hold large gatherings of people, but turning the road into a pedestrian-only space opens up a host of options, the chief said. I believe it can certainly become much more than an area for Lehigh-affiliated people to park their cars, Schiffer said. Van Wirt believes Lehigh ultimately wants to consolidate its campus, which is not inherently a bad thing, but if citizens are asked to give up this valuable city land they need to be confident in the process, she said. She urged Lehigh delay the pilot to the fall. I do have a vision of what this permanent closure could look like for Bethlehem and its a great vision, Van Wirt said. "I think that it could be great thing for South Bethlehem if its done correctly. And that means it has to be a slower process that has the community involved from the get go. Councilman Adam Waldron said hes not ready to support a permanent car closure amid too many unanswered questions. But he supports a pilot for data collection and to spur more conversations about breaking down the barriers between the community and Lehigh. We do have a great opportunity to see what the impact might be, Waldron said. Future conversations should focus on ways to make the area an inviting community space, Waldron said. Van Wirt suggested a playground. Crampsie Smith questioned why Lehigh isnt considering traffic-calming measures or a pedestrian bridge or a lighted crosswalk like Moravian Colleges on Elizabeth Avenue. Stringfellow said pedestrians arent crossing at just one point on Packer Avenue due to the number of buildings along the road. Future plans indicate there may be more construction activity so one crosswalk or bridge wont help, he said. We look at safety as one component of this, but not the sole reason, Stringfellow said. Southside Resident Kim Carrell-Smith, who also works at Lehigh, questioned the wisdom of undertaking a traffic study when the school is undergoing unprecedented construction thats worsening congestion. Lehighs in the midst of a historic boom as it expands, but Stringfellow warned this may be the new normal. I would anticipate a circumstance in the future there could always be a major construction program going on at Lehigh for the next five to 10 years," he said. "Maybe not with the level of intensity we have now. Waldron also raised questions about what the value of the road and what Lehigh might pay for it. Lehighs made a major push to replace cars on its campus with more feet on the street in recent years. This school year, the university instituted paid permit parking spots for employees and established a new commuter lot for employees who do not want to pay to park. The initial efforts can be traced back to the schools 2012 Campus Master Plan, which included sustainability goals of fewer cars on campus and expansion of Lehighs mass transit options. In the fall of 2018, the university revealed a Connections plan outlining a series of proposed changes to Lehighs parking and transportation systems. Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook. Vietnam has gradually developed an effective treatment plan for coronavirus patients with 15 out of 16 infected cases successfully treated, the Ministry of Health has said. On February 18, the last two patients at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases are discharged from hospital. Speaking at a conference on February 9, Dr Luong Ngoc Khue, Director of the ministrys Department of Medical Examination and Treatment and deputy head of the sub-committee on treatment at the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control, said although there is no specific drugs that kills the virus, the treatment regime applied has proved to be working. Among those successfully, many have been reported underlying diseases such as high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes and lung cancer. By February 19, nine have been discharged from hospitals. The remaining patients are in good health and will be discharged in the coming days, he said. Khue said since the early days of the epidemic, the health sector had immediately convened the professional council with leading professors to develop and update guidelines for early treatment. These guidelines have been implemented at hospitals and health clinics nationwide. After the first three patients were discharged from HCM Citys Cho Ray Hospital, Khanh Hoa Tropical Hospital in the central province of Khanh Hoa and Thanh Hoa province General Hospital in Thanh Hoa province, the committee continued to adjust their treatment regimen. Specific treatment steps, including initial reception instructions, quarantine, drug usage and emergency equipment for critically-ill patients have been updated to deal with the epidemic. No new infected cases have been reported in Vietnam since February 13. Among the 16 people that tested positive, none have become severely ill and no fatalities will be reported, he said. On February 18, the last two patients at the National Hospital of Tropical Diseases - the frontline hospital offering the COVID-19 treatment in the north and two patients at the district-level health clinic in the northern province of Vinh Phuc, which recorded the most infections, were discharged from hospital. The Vietnamese-American patient at HCM Citys Tropical Diseases Hospital has tested negative twice. The three-month-old baby at Hanoi-based National Childrens Hospital is also negative. They are both in good health, will continue the treatment and soon be discharged from hospital. The committee has asked relevant units, health experts and scientists to keep synthesising data on epidemiology, clinical treatment and treatment results to complete the treatment regime. At the conference, the committee also discussed and agreed on a number of issues on receiving foreign workers returning to Vietnam to work, issues on border control and immigration control to promote socio-economic activities. In addition, the committee has asked relevant agencies to closely monitor and complete the procedures to announce the end of the epidemic in Khanh Hoa and Thanh Hoa provinces. Vietnam has also prepared preventive measures to deal with the virus in hospitals at all levels. Patients with symptoms not considered severe will be treated at district-level hospitals. Patients in Thanh Hoa and Khanh Hoa provinces will attend local hospitals. Quarantine work must be divided into three areas. The first is for suspected people, the second is for those infected but in good health, and the final is for the patients with severe symptoms. All these areas must strictly follow the ministrys criteria on biosafety and infection control. Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam, who is also head of the National Steering Committee for COVID-19 Prevention and Control, praised military units for their efforts in the prevention and fight against the coronavirus at the online conference on February 19. He stressed the military units needed to strictly control the border, organise quarantine for citizens returning from affected areas and disseminate information about the illness in the future. Currently, Vietnam still has 34 unconfirmed cases and more than 1,530 people in close contact with people who may have the virus or those arriving from epidemic areas. All of them are under quarantine. By February 19, there are 75,203 COVID-19 infected cases worldwide and the number of deaths reached 2,010. In China alone, 74,186 cases have been reported with 2,004 deaths./.VNA More coronavirus patients recover in Vietnam More coronavirus patients would be discharged from hospital on Tuesday, with the first two being released in the morning according to the Ministry of Health. She always manages to look effortlessly chic. And Kourtney Kardashian didn't dissapoint as she headed to a taping of David Letterman's Netflix talk show in Los Angeles on Wednesday. The 40-year-old Poosh founder channeled her inner cowgirl in an all leather ensemble to watch her brother-in-law Kanye West film an interview with Letterman on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Yee-haw! KUWTK star Kourtney Kardashian channeled her inner cowgirl to attend a taping for the third season of David Letterman's Netflix talk show in Los Angeles on Wednesday Kourtney wore a black leather Western-style blouse with matching pants, purse, and white booties selected by stylist Dani Michelle. After the taping, Kardashian drove to Glendale where she dined on Middle-Eastern fare at Carousel Restaurant with her family. The Calabasas socialite was joined for dinner by her momager Kris Jenner and younger sisters Khloe Kardashian and Kim Kardashian West. Not-so-basic black: The Poosh founder, 40, wore a black leather Western-style blouse with matching pants, purse, and white booties Kourtney spent last weekend relaxing up North in Montecito, which is located near Santa Barbara. Kardashian - who boasts 127M followers - shared vacation snaps of her seven-year-old daughter Penelope Scotland Disick and her long-haired five-year-old son Reign Aston Disick. Not pictured in the half-Armenian beauty's Instagram post was her 10-year-old son Mason from her nine-year on/off relationship with Talentless CEO Scott Disick. In the driver's seat: After the taping, Kardashian drove to Glendale where she dined on Middle-Eastern fare at Carousel Restaurant with her family Squad: The Calabasas socialite was joined for dinner by (from L-R) her momager Kris Jenner and younger sisters Khloe Kardashian and Kim Kardashian West Kourtney finally split with her 36-year-old babydaddy in 2015 after he was caught on camera canoodling stylist Chloe Bartoli in the South of France. On November 7, Kardashian teased quitting her E! reality show after 13 years, telling ET: 'I've just decided to spend more time as a mom and put more of my energy there, but I'm not saying goodbye.' However, the University of Arizona grad has since been photographed in Long Beach on December 19 filming scenes for the 18th season of KUWTK. Beach bum: Kourtney spent last weekend relaxing up North in Montecito, which is located near Santa Barbara Doting: Kardashian shared vacation snaps of her seven-year-old daughter Penelope Scotland Disick (L) and her long-haired five-year-old son Reign Aston Disick (R) 'My best friend': Not pictured in the half-Armenian beauty's post was her 10-year-old son Mason (R) from her nine-year on/off relationship with Scott Disick (L, pictured December 31) 'No, well, first of all, not necessarily [is Kourtney leaving the show]. I think Kourtney kind of has boundaries, which is totally understandable,' Kourt's half-sister Kendall Jenner said on the January 31st episode of The Ellen Show. 'I've always kind of not let my personal life entirely on the show so it's just kind of always been a thing for me, but then with Kourtney, she did at one point let her personal life be on the show and so now it's a bit more shift, I guess, for everyone to understand. 'But no, I don't think she's fully confirmed to not be on the show. Let's just say it gets a little crazier before it gets any better, and there's some pretty crazy things that happen.' Tease: On November 7, Kourtney teased quitting her E! reality show, telling ET: 'I've just decided to spend more time as a mom and put more of my energy there, but I'm not saying goodbye' COLUMBUS, OhioGuion Bluford, an Air Force fighter pilot who became the first African-American in space, received Ohios highest non-combat award on Thursday. In a Statehouse ceremony, Gov. Mike DeWine awarded the Ohio Distinguished Service Medal to Bluford, a Westlake resident and retired U.S. Air Force colonel. Its the first time DeWine has presented the medal since the Greene County Republican took office last year. "Your commitment and dedication over the course of your career in aviation are a tremendous inspiration to generations of Ohioans," DeWine said at the presentation, according to a release. "As NASA prepares for future missions to space, the next generation of astronauts will be looking to follow in your footsteps." Bluford, 77, flew 144 combat missions in South Vietnam before earning a master's degree and doctorate in aerospace engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton. In 1978, Bluford was one of 35 people selected from more than 8,000 applicants to become NASA astronauts. Five years later, he was launched into space on the space shuttle Challenger. Bluford flew three additional shuttle missions, logging a total of nearly 700 hours in space, according to the National Air and Space Museum. Read more cleveland.com stories: Poll shows mixed results for Donald Trump, Democrats in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania Proposed ballot issue expanding Ohio voting access laws clears initial hurdle Rep. Jim Jordan visits Israel and tours Temple Mount with former Knesset member who is later arrested Ohios controversial facial-recognition database to get $21.4 million update, AG Dave Yost says Constitutional amendment targeting Ohio legislative term limits could appear on November ballot The Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors reached Shaheen Bagh on Thursday to initiate the second round of discussion, but they insisted that the media should not be present during the talks with protestors. New Delhi: The Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors met Shaheen Bagh protestors on Thursday in their second visit to the site where people have been on a sit-in since the last two months against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). Advocates Sanjay Hedge and Sadhana Ramachandran, the appointed interlocutors, were not willing to start the discussion in the presence of the media. The protestors said that they wanted to present their issues before the media, but journalists were asked to leave. Delhi: Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran mediators appointed by Supreme Court reach Shaheen Bagh. They are here for talks with the protesters for the second day. pic.twitter.com/sXoSoy2Mwm ANI (@ANI) February 20, 2020 Ramachandran began addressing the protestors saying, "Aapne bulaya hum chale aaye (You called us and we are here)". "We have to think over it and talk in detail. We are thankful that yesterday we received blessings from all dadis (the elderly ladies protesting at the site)," she said. The two interlocutors on Wednesday visited Shaheen Bagh to initiate talks with the protesters, asserting that the top court has upheld their right to protest but it should not affect the rights of other citizens. On Monday, the Supreme Court observed that the blockade of the road at Shaheen Bagh was "troubling" and suggested the protesters go to another site where no public place would be blocked. It, however, upheld their right to protest. The apex court also asked Hegde to "play a constructive role as an interlocutor" to persuade the protesters to move to an alternative site. It said the interlocutors could seek former bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah's assistance. Hegde said the apex court has recognised their right to protest. "When Shaheen Bagh has become become an example of protests in India, let us set an example of a protest that does not disturb anybody. You all must be rest assured that we are here to fight for you. Don't think if you change your spot, your fight will die down," Hegde told the protestors. The senior lawyer said, "We have seen many prime ministers come and go. Whoever comes in power and runs the country, sometimes some could be right and some could be wrong. Whatever you are saying the whole country is listening and also the prime minister ." The protestors have been demanding repeal of the Citizenship Amendment Act. Ramchandran said she was "really waiting" for that day when the "country's atmosphere will change". An elderly man also expressed his fear about his children's security. "I am very scared... I am very scared for my children. Madam save me," he said. When Ramchandran asked him more about his fear, the man replied, "I am a single father. I will die and go but my children should get to live here with authority. My girls go to school where they are being told that you will go out of the country." Ramchandran told protestors not to cry and speak openly. Another man, while talking to the interlocutors, said, "I have a national flag on my bicycle. We love this country and stop calling us traitors." His daughter told mediators, "I am a young girl and I want a beautiful India". 14 States, 5 Jewish Groups File Briefs in Support of Cross on Florida Public Property Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A cross on display at a Florida city's public park that was recently labeled unconstitutional is getting support from two briefs, one filed by 14 states and another by five Jewish organizations. Earlier this year, a federal judge ruled that the cross at Bayview Park in Pensacola violated the Establishment Clause and should be taken down. The friend-of-the-court briefs, both filed Tuesday, urged the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider the lower court ruling. The Jewish organizations involved in the brief included the groups Jews for Religious Liberty, Agudath Israel of America, the Coalition for Jewish Values, the Rabbinical Council of America, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America. "Offended observers, however, frequently take aim at these acknowledgments of religious minorities. ... Indeed, these challenges disproportionately affect unfamiliar (and hence conspicuous) symbols of minority religions," read their brief in part. "Offended-observer standing threatens to short-circuit this democratic process. It allows bystanders to threaten officials with litigation for offering help to religious minorities." In their brief, the 14 states argued in part that "the mere presence of a Latin cross on public property does not violate the Establishment Clause, especially when the cross has stood for decades without any legal challenge or complaint." "States, counties, and municipalities have historically included, or allowed private parties to include, religious texts and symbols on monuments and other displays on public property," stated the brief. "The amici states have an interest in maintaining that practice, consistent with a proper understanding of the Establishment Clause." The 14 states involved in the brief include: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Utah. Known as Kondrat'yev, et al v. City of Pensacola, the case centers on a large cross that has stood at Bayview Park since 1969, replacing an older cross put up in 1941. Amanda Kondrat'yev, Andreiy Kondrat'yev, David Suhor, and Andre Ryland, filed the lawsuit against Pensacola in May 2016 over the presence of the cross. The plaintiffs received were represented by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, which claims to be the nation's largest atheist group, and the American Humanist Association. "Pensacola's cross is a clear violation of the separation of state and church," said FFRF legal fellow Madeline Ziegler in a statement last year. "We're thankful to be working with courageous Pensacola residents to end the city's unconstitutional religious favoritism." In June, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson ruled against the cross, concluding that it violated the judicial precedent of the Lemon Test, which says the state-supported religious entities must fulfill a secular purpose. Despite the favorable ruling for the secularist groups and their clients, Judge Vinson also wrote that he believed the founders of the United States "would have most likely found this lawsuit absurd." "And if I were deciding this case on a blank slate, I would agree and grant the plaintiffs no relief. But, alas, that is not what we have here," wrote Vinson. "I am aware that there is a lot of support in Pensacola to keep the cross as is, and I understand and respect that point of view. But, the law is the law." Pensacola is being represented by Becket, a law firm based in Washington, D.C. that specializes in religious liberty litigation. Luke Goodrich, deputy general counsel at Becket, said in a statement released Wednesday that the "public square can and should reflect the important role that religion plays in our history and culture." "We don't have to censor our history and culture just because part of it is religious," added Goodrich. RED WING The Goodhue County Board is dotting its I's and crossing its T's in expectation of taking its final few steps to enter the state's closed landfill program. As part of the process, the county is required to hold a public hearing on the solid waste designation ordinance and it did so in January 2019. But due to a clerical error, that public hearing did not meet the state's requirements for the ordinance, so the county held another public hearing Tuesday night. "We're starting over on the designation process at this point," said Public Works Director Greg Isakson. Isakson told the board and those in attendance that the vast majority of the county's solid municipal waste now goes to landfills. However, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has a hierarchy for solid waste, and placing waste in a landfill is the least desirable option. A better option, according to the MPCA, is to use solid waste to create energy. That option is used in other locations, such as the Olmsted County Waste-to-Energy facility. A similar facility exists in Red Wing, and Goodhue County's solid waste ordinance would funnel all municipal solid waste in the county to that facility, operated by Xcel Energy, to burn the waste and lower the impact on landfills. ADVERTISEMENT Additionally, the county will be able to enter Red Wing's Bench Street Landfill into the closed landfill program, limiting the liability to Goodhue County taxpayers should contaminants from the landfill leech into nearby wells. "Right now, the county spends about $65,000 a year to monitor wells," Isakson told the county board. However, cleaning up a landfill could cost as much as $10 million. "A similar landfill in Winona is costing the PCA about a half million a year to treat the leeching." The county and the city of Red Wing have been working on the project for several years, and Board Chairman Paul Drotos said getting the solid waste ordinance across the finish line is a goal of his for this year. In response to a question from the public, Commissioner Brad Anderson, who has served on the committee for the solid waste ordinance, said the last landfill accepted into the program was in 1998. The Bench Street Landfill is one of the few in the state that is eligible to be added to the program that all taxpayers pay into but some counties see no benefit from. Anderson said not entering the closed landfill program then having the Bench Street Landfill become an environmental problem would be financially devastating to the county. Two members of the public wondered if the county, in its agreement with the city, had an out clause should the city not hold up its end of the deal, especially with its solid waste processing facility where all the county's solid waste will be brought for sorting before it's sent to the Xcel power plant. Anderson said the city and the county both have performance measurements that must be met in the deal. But making changes to the agreement that has been reviewed by the city, the county and the MPCA would be difficult at best at this point. The next step, Anderson said, is the county has 90 days to negotiate with trash haulers across the county. Since all municipal solid waste in the county must come to the sorting facility in Red Wing, that means haulers as far away as Pine Island, Cannon Falls and Kenyon must bring their trash to Red Wing. ADVERTISEMENT Once that is done, the county will submit the ordinance to the MPCA for final review. Once it's approved by the MPCA, the county board will vote to approve and enact the ordinance, likely this summer. [February 20, 2020] Canada and Quebec are investing in improved access to renewable energy in northern Quebec JAMES BAY, QC, Feb. 20, 2020 /CNW/ - Making strategic investments in infrastructure projects that meet the specific needs of rural and northern communities is key to building stronger, more inclusive communities where everyone can succeed. The Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development, and Jonatan Julien, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources and Minister Responsible for the Cote-Nord Region, today announced a joint investment to connect the road stop at km 381 of the James Bay Road to the Hydro-Quebec electrical distribution network with a power line approximately 41 kilometres long. Use of this road stop is crucial, as it is the only one on James Bay Road, which is 620 kilometres long. The road stop serves a population of more than 11,000 people, including several Cree Nation communities, by offering food, lodging, fuel distribution and a mechanical service station. The site is currently powered by diesel generators. The work will provide access to a more efficient and reliable source of energy, which will reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The total cost of the project is more than $4.8 million. The Government of Canada is investing more than $2.2 million in this project under the Rural and Northern Communities stream of the Investing in Canada plan. The Government of Quebec is contributing more than $2.6 million from the EcoPerformance Program, and other financing from the Societe de developpement de la Baie-James (SDBJ). Quotes "I am very pleased to recognize our contribution to this important project that will help protect the environment and create an economy focused on green growth. By reducing its dependence on fossil fuels, this road stop will be able to reduce its carbon footprint. We have big plans to develop our regions because they are the driving force behind our country's success. Thus, we are ensuring that they receive their fair share of infrastructure funding to stimulate the local economy and create good jobs that will strengthen the middle class across Canada." The Honourable Maryam Monsef, Minister for Women and Gender Equality and Rural Economic Development "I am delighted with our government's involvement in this infrastructure project, which will have a positive impact on the environment, as well as on the safety of people who use the James Bay Road. More than 530,000 litres of diesel will cease to be delivered and consumed annually at the km 381 road stop. We firmly believe that the Nord-du-Quebec region will continue its development thanks to investments in strategic projects like this one." Jonatan Julien, Minister of Energy and Natural Resources and Minister Responsible for the Cote-Nord Region "Developing renewable energy is a priority for our government. The communities of northern Quebec, themselves, are interested in capitalizing on clean energy for their own social and economic development projects. Thanks to thes investments, many of our communities, our workforce and tourists to the region will benefit from this energy transition." Pierre Dufour, Minister of Forests, Wildlife and Parks and Minister Responsible for the Abitibi-Temiscamingue Region and the Nord-du-Quebec Region "For the district of Ungava, this is amazing news. This announcement addresses a genuine need for this part of our region. We'll have a complete and greener infrastructure that will also help tackle the needs of people travelling through this region." Denis Lamothe, Member for Ungava "This investment clearly demonstrates the willingness of our governments to make a significant commitment to encourage and support the development of northern Quebec. Over time, this project will allow us to save on operating costs for the road stop at km 381 and provide better service to our customers." Alain Coulombe, Chief Executive Officer of the Societe de developpement de la Baie-James Quick facts Through the Investing in Canada plan, the Government of Canada is investing more than $180 billion over 12 years in green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, public transit projects, and Canada's rural and northern communities. plan, the Government of is investing more than $180 billion over 12 years in green infrastructure, social infrastructure, trade and transportation routes, public transit projects, and rural and northern communities. $2 billion of this funding is supporting infrastructure projects that meet the specific needs of rural and northern communities, such as projects for facilities to ensure food security, local road safety and enhanced broadband connectivity. The EcoPerformance Program seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in organizations by funding projects or measures connected with energy use and production, as well as with process improvement. It is financed by the Green Fund, as part of the implementation of the 2013-2020 Climate Change Action Plan, and by the share collected from energy distributors. The James Bay Region Development Act, which created the SDBJ, was adopted by the Quebec National Assembly in 1971. As a result, the SDBJ has been in existence for more than 45 years. Its mission is to promote, from a sustainable development perspective, economic development, improvement and exploitation of natural resources other than hydroelectric resources under Hydro-Quebec's mandate, in the James Bay territory. It may, in particular, encourage, support and participate in the implementation of projects toward these ends. Associated links Investing in Canada Plan Project Map: https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/gmap-gcarte/index-eng.html Infrastructure Canada investments Quebec: https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/investments-2002-investissements/qc-eng.html Investing in Canada, Canada's long-term infrastructure plan: https://www.infrastructure.gc.ca/plan/about-invest-apropos-eng.html EcoPerformance Program: https://transitionenergetique.gouv.qc.ca/en/ 2013-2020 Climate Change Action Plan: http://www.environnement.gouv.qc.ca/changementsclimatiques/plan-action-fonds-vert-en.asp Government of Quebec 2030 Energy Policy: https://politiqueenergetique.gouv.qc.ca/ Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Website: Infrastructure Canada SOURCE Infrastructure Canada [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] PHILADELPHIA A federal judge has prescribed prison time for a former East Norriton doctor who admitted to illegally distributing opioid drugs. Spiro Y. Kassis, 66, of Plymouth Township, was sentenced in U.S. District Court to four years in prison and two years supervised release and fined $25,000 after he pleaded guilty to 14 counts of distributing controlled substances outside the course of professional practice and without a legitimate medical purpose. The sentence was imposed by U.S. District Court Judge Gene E.K. Pratter. As a physician, he was well aware of the inherently dangerous nature of the drugs he cavalierly handed out. Nevertheless, he took advantage of vulnerable people struggling with addiction, all the while sitting comfortably behind a desk, watching the money pile up, said U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain, referring to Kassis. Kassis, who represented himself as a specialist in psychiatry and addiction medicine, operated medical offices along West Germantown Pike in East Norriton and in Scranton, Pa., according to federal authorities. With the charges, federal prosecutors alleged Kassis used his medical offices to operate a prescription pill mill whereby he sold medically unnecessary prescriptions for opioid drugs such as oxycodone and burprenorphine, as well as other controlled substances. Kassis sold prescriptions for dangerous and addictive drugs for approximately $200 cash, federal prosecutors alleged. Prosecutors alleged that Kassis, at the East Norriton office, saw approximately 45 patients per day, who lined up outside a back room where Kassis sat behind a desk. As each patient filed in, Kassis collected $200 cash, counted the money and placed it in a safe and then issued the requested prescriptions electronically to the patients pharmacy, according to federal prosecutors. Often, Kassis issued dangerous cocktails that included oxycodone, methadone, and buprenorphine, all to the same patient, prosecutors alleged. My office is committed to stopping drug dealing doctors like Kassis, McSwain said. The investigation reportedly began in summer 2017 when a concerned citizen reported that the doctor was prescribing narcotic painkillers to opioid addicts. The case was investigated by the Drug Enforcement Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General and the Montgomery County Detective Bureaus Narcotics Enforcement Team. The case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney M. Beth Leahy and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney James Price, a Montgomery County prosecutor who is cross-designated to assist with such prosecutions in federal court. Separately, in a related civil case which reached settlement in November 2019, Kassis agreed to pay $1.4 million, representing the money he made from his illegal activities while improperly prescribing opioids to patients between July 1, 2014 and Feb. 14, 2017. In addition to the $1.4 million payment, Kassis committed to never obtaining a controlled substance registration and consented to a 15-year exclusion from Medicare and Medicaid, prosecutors previously revealed. At the time of the civil settlement last November, Maureen R. Dixon, Special Agent in Charge for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General, explained, Settlements like these are critical to ensure that doctors writing improper opioid prescriptions reimbursed by Medicare and Medicaid are held responsible for their misconduct and barred from participating in these programs for a substantial number of years. The related civil action was handled by Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Scicchitano. The second season of critically acclaimed web series Delhi Crime will have a real life IAS officer essay himself on the small screen. Abhishek Singh has held key positions in the administrative departments of the country and will now be seen in the Netflix series. Currently posted as Deputy Commissioner in Delhi, he is known for his exemplary work in education and healthcare. Abhishek has led several demolition campaigns against illegal constructions in the capital. Delhis popular Odd-Even Traffic Scheme was also conducted under his supervision. Also read: Javed Akhtar threatened Kangana Ranaut, asked her to apologise to Hrithik: Rangoli Chandels latest claim Abhishek, who is also a passionate biker and an avid reader, received a call from noted casting director Mukesh Chhabra who he knew socially. Knowing Abhishek I was convinced that he would do justice to the role. He would bring in the finer nuances from his own experience as an officer which an actor will find it difficult to portray. I persuaded Abhishek to do the role and when the creative team saw him on camera, they were surprised by the onscreen confidence and finesse considering that he has had minimal acting experience till now. We instantly finalised him for the part, casting director Mukesh Chhabra said in a press statement. He added, My job is to look for the best talent, be it inside or outside the industry. Let the show release, the audience and industry will be amazed to see him on screen. I have given the industry a new talent. Abhishek then sought permission from the Chief Secretary of Delhi Mr Vijay Dev, who encouraged him to make use of the opportunity. The first season of the show was widely appreciated. It starred Shefali Shah, Rasika Duggal, Adil Hussain, Denzil Smith, Rajesh Tailang and Akash Dahiya and chronicled the story of the December 16, 2012 rape case in Delhi, told from the perspective of policemen and women working to catching the culprits. Follow @htshowbiz for more At least 2,500 people and 300 exhibitors are expected at the 2020 Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck. The event is the largest oil and gas conference focused on the Williston Basin and the Bakken oil patch. It rotates between North Dakota and Saskatchewan in Canada, and was last held in Bismarck in 2018, when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke was the keynote speaker. This year's main speaker has yet to be announced, but the North Dakota Petroleum Council on Wednesday released the agenda for the conference May 19-21 at the Bismarck Event Center. The WBPC is one of the top oil conferences in the country and we have an incredible lineup of speakers, Council President Ron Ness said. We are excited to feature the latest technologies that have helped turn the Bakken into a world-class resource and discuss the way forward to help take the Bakken and Williston Basin to the next level. North Dakota oil production set a record last November, at slightly more than 1.5 million barrels per day. The state trails only Texas in production. There are more than 50 rigs and about 16,000 producing wells in the western oil patch. The conference will feature more than 70 speakers and presenters, discussing issues impacting oil and natural gas development and what the future holds for the Williston Basin. They will include Mike Sommers, president and CEO of API; Doug Suttles, CEO of Ovintiv; Bob Phillips, CEO of Crestwood Midstream; Chris Kendall, CEO of Denbury Resources; Wendy King, vice president of ConocoPhillips Great Plains Business Unit; and Staale Gjervik, senior vice president of ExxonMobil Unconventional and president of XTO Energy. Panelists and speakers will discuss enhanced oil recovery and gas capture improvements. Attendees also will hear from Crusoe Energy, a company capturing gas at the well site to power computer processors. Other panel topics include smart pipelines, Bakken technology and women in energy leadership. Featured keynote speakers and panelists will be announced in coming weeks. The conference is sponsored by the Petroleum Council, North Dakota Department of Mineral Resources, Government of Saskatchewan Ministry of the Economy and the Petroleum Technology Research Centre. For more information or to register, go to www.wbpcnd.org. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 ANN ARBOR--A new study from University of Michigan biologists presents the first genetic evidence of resistance in some bats to white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that has decimated some North American bat populations. The study involved northern Michigan populations of the little brown bat, one of the most common bats in eastern North America prior to the arrival of white-nose syndrome in 2006. Since then, some populations of the small, insect-eating bat have experienced declines of more than 90%. U-M researchers collected tissue samples from wild little brown bats that survived the disease, as well as individuals killed by the fungal pathogen. They compared the genetic makeup of the two groups and found differences in genes associated with regulating arousal from hibernation, the breakdown of fats and echolocation. "Because we found differences in genes associated with regulating hibernation and breakdown of fats, it could be that bats that are genetically predisposed to be a little bit fatter or to sleep more deeply are less susceptible to the disease," said U-M's Giorgia Auteri, first author of a paper scheduled for publication Feb. 20 in the journal Scientific Reports. "Changes at these genes are suggestive of evolutionary adaptation, given that white-nose syndrome causes bats to arouse with unusual frequency from winter hibernation, contributing to premature depletion of fat reserves," said Auteri, a doctoral student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who conducted the study for her dissertation. The other author of the Scientific Reports paper is U-M biologist Lacey Knowles, Auteri's faculty adviser. While the study was small--involving tissue samples from 25 little brown bats killed by white-nose syndrome and nine bats that survived the disease--the authors say their sample size is large enough to detect genetic changes driven by natural selection. A larger follow-up study is underway, expanding both the number of bats and the areas affected by the disease, to develop a fuller picture of adaptive change that may be key to the species' survival. The fungal pathogen that causes white-nose syndrome was inadvertently introduced in the northeastern United States in 2006 and is currently spreading across the continent. Thirteen species of North American bats are currently affected, with some populations experiencing losses of 90-100%. The disease is named for a distinctive fungal growth around the muzzles and on the wings of hibernating bats. The U-M team's study area is Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula and Upper Peninsula. White-nose syndrome fungus was first detected there in 2014, and its arrival allowed the researchers to study the pathogen's initial evolutionary impact. For the study, the U-M researchers collected tissue samples from dead little brown bats found in or near hibernation sites during the winter. The hibernation sites were concentrated in the western Upper Peninsula and primarily consisted of abandoned iron and copper mines. During the summer, they also collected small tissue samples from survivors that emerged successfully from hibernation despite exposure to the disease. Surviving bats had healing wing lesions or scars from the fungus. In the laboratory, DNA was extracted from the tissues and sequenced, and the sequences were mapped to a previously generated reference genome for the species. A genome scan was conducted to test for evidence of evolutionary changes in response to white-nose syndrome. The researchers found significant differences in three genes associated with arousal from hibernation (GABARB1), breakdown of fats (cGMP-PK1) and echolocation (FOXP2), as well as a fourth gene (PLA2G7) that regulates the release of histamines from mast cells. "The function of one gene we identified hints that summer activities such as hunting via echolocation may be an important determinant of which individuals survive the winter infection period," Auteri said. "This suggests that conservation of summer foraging habitat--not just winter hibernation sites--may promote population recovery in bats affected by white-nose syndrome." The observed genetic differences are suggestive of very rapid--though not unprecedented--evolutionary adaptation driven by natural selection, according to Auteri and Knowles. "This apparent adaptation occurred very quickly, involves genes with a variety of functions which likely act across seasons in order to contribute to survivorship, and has taken place despite an observable reduction in genetic diversity associated with population declines," said Knowles, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator at the U-M Museum of Zoology. Auteri and Knowles said it's too soon to say how the evolutionary changes they uncovered are likely to affect the little brown bat's prospects. After all, these bats have suffered dramatic population declines, and low population sizes inherently make a species more vulnerable to further perturbations. "But we're finding the hint that there could be these genetic changes that are occurring that might provide some type of survival in the future," Knowles said. "So as these variants increase, there's some hope that these bats are not all going to die from the disease itself." Because little brown bats only have one pup per year, recovery of the species would likely take a long time, according to Auteri and Knowles. Due to population losses, little brown bats have been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and by the federal government of Canada, with a similar decision by the U.S. government pending. ### Funding for the study was provided by the U-M Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. The U-M Museum of Zoology also supported the project through financial contributions to make the research open-access, and by housing bats found dead from white-nose syndrome that were collected for the study. As permanent specimens stored in the collection, these bats may contribute to future studies. The researchers complied with all relevant ethical regulations and guidelines for this work, including IACUC protocol PRO00008524, approved by the University of Michigan Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Giorgia Auteri Lacey Knowles Photos: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1K8_jxLlifdwOR8Yx2ldACroRdz82tFFj Video: https://youtu.be/wg1Dy4DfB_s A remarkable image captures the moment the International Space Station (ISS) passes in front of the moon with Mars making a spectacular backdrop. The photograph was taken on February 18 in New Mexico and charts the progress of the ISS across the night sky. The waning crescent Moon is framed by a glowing red dot to the right which is Mars. Several snapshots of the ISS's location, taken just milliseconds apart, were merged together to create a single spectacular photo. Scroll down for video The photograph was taken on February 18 in New Mexico and charts the progress of the ISS through the night sky. The waning crescent Moon is framed by a glowing red dot to the right which is Mars (pictured) Photographer Paul Schmit and his father Gary, snapped the stunning image. 'I've been planning this shot for about a month, keeping my fingers crossed that some of the complicating factors that could have spoiled this shot wouldn't lead to a missed opportunity,' Mr Schmidt said, the Sun reports. 'At 6:25am local time above the skies of northern New Mexico, the ISS was catching its first glimpses of the early-morning sunlight hundreds of miles above the Earth's surface. The ISS orbits Earth at around 250 miles around Earth. It passes in front of the moon in less than a second and the final version of the image is various images merged together that were taken milliseconds apart 'While Mars slowly receded away from the Moon's dark side.' The ISS orbits Earth at around 250 miles above the surface. It passes in front of the moon in less than a second and the final version of the image is various photographs merged together. 'Clouds were an issue in my area, forcing me to plan multiple observing sites across a ~100-mile region and use satellite data and weather simulations the morning of the shoot to pick a final spot,' Mr Schmidt continues. 'Luckily, everything seemed to work out. 'And at 6:25am my father and I sat under clear skies on an isolated piece of highway north of Albuquerque watching the faint, radiating 'dot' of the ISS pierce the centre of the moon in the early morning glow. 'Just moments after watching Mars suddenly reappear from behind the lunar disk.' By Express News Service SALEM: Six tourists from Nepal including two women were killed in an accident after an Omnibus collided with the tourist bus here on Thursday. According to Omalur police, on Wednesday, the tourist bus from Nepal carrying more than 25 tourists was headed towards Rajasthan from Kanyakumari. They had planned to stay at a temple hall at Chinnanadupatti in Salem district. While they reached Chinnanadupatti Piruvu near Omalur in Salem-Bengaluru National Highway around 1 AM, the tourist bus driver turned the bus to the right side to cross the road. At that time, an Omni bus headed towards Kerala from Bengaluru collided with the tourist bus. In the accident, six Nepal tourists including two women were killed on the spot and around 20 tourists sustained injuries and admitted in Salem Government Hospital and nearby private hospital. On receiving information, District Superintendent of Police S Deepa Ganiger came to the spot and inquired about the incident. The Omalur police have inquired about the details of the victims. Due to the accident, traffic in the area has been affected in the area for more than an hour. FRANKFORT, Ky. - Responding to an outcry over some of the previous governors pardons, a Kentucky legislative panel gave initial approval to a proposal to put limits on the pardon powers of his successors. The measure cleared the Senate State and Local Government Committee on Wednesday. It would amend the states Constitution to strip a governor of pardon powers for the month leading up to a gubernatorial election and for the time between the election and inauguration. The action stems from a flurry of last-minute pardons by former Gov. Matt Bevin, including the pardon of a man who was convicted of raping a child. Republican Sen. Chris McDaniel said his proposal would impose a small limitation on a governors pardon powers but would bring greater accountability. If a governor believes strongly enough in a pardon, he or she can stand in front of the voters, or have their party stand in front of the voters, to decide their opinion of those actions, McDaniel said. There will be no more hiding in the darkness of the last minutes of an administration, he added. There will be no more allowing the rich and the powerful to influence the scales of justice without recourse from the citizens of the commonwealth. The proposed constitutional amendment heads to the Senate next. If it clears the GOP-dominated legislature, it would have to be ratified by the states voters to be added to the states Constitution. Bevin, a Republican, issued hundreds of pardons between his electoral defeat in November and his final day in office in December. Several stirred outrage from victims or their families, prosecutors and lawmakers, and Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron asked the FBI to investigate. Among the Bevin pardons that sparked outrage involved Patrick Baker, who had served about two years of a 19-year sentence for reckless homicide and robbery in the slaying of a Knox County man in front of his family. Bakers brother held a campaign fundraiser for Bevin in 2018. Many of the former governors pardons drew praise from some as a show of compassion and righting injustices, including for hundreds of nonviolent drug offenders. The Senate committee approved another proposal Wednesday that would add multiple protections for crime victims to the states Constitution. The ballot proposal, known as Marsys Law, also heads to the full Senate. The measure is a reprise of a 2018 crime victims rights constitutional amendment that easily cleared the legislature and was approved by Kentucky voters. The amendment was voided when the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that the question posed to voters was too vague. The new proposal will remedy those concerns, its supporters say. One addition to the new measure is a response to Bevins pardons. The new provision seeks to ensure crime victims have the right to be notified and heard when a governor considers granting a pardon or sentence commutation to their assailants. Kentuckys version of Marsys Law would guarantee crime victims have a series of constitutional rights, including the right to timely notification of all court proceedings, the right to be present for those hearings and the right to be heard in any hearing involving a release, plea or sentencing. A man who was initially charged with two counts of sexual intercourse without consent agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge of criminal endangerment and received a four-year deferred sentence Wednesday in Lewis and Clark County District Court. Tucker John Reisbeck was accused of having sex with a 14-year-old girl and a 15-year-old girl on multiple occasions in 2016, when he was 20. While one of the victims told authorities she was a voluntary participant, people under age 16 cannot legally consent to sexual activity in Montana. In addition to the two charges of sexual intercourse without consent, Reisbeck was also charged with sexual abuse of children for allegedly photographing, filming or videotaping a child engaging in sexual conduct, actual or simulated. The original affidavit filed by the state in May 2018 alleged that Reisbeck was using his cellphone to record one of the victims and 17-year-old Zachary Craig Shanholtzer having sex, and that the victim "told him to delete the footage but discovered weeks later that a relative of Reisbeck's had seen it in addition to a friend of his." In an interview Wednesday afternoon following Reisbeck's sentencing, Deputy County Attorney Jeremy Gersovitz, who prosecuted the case, said that despite following many leads, he could not locate the video. The felony count of sexual abuse of children was subsequently dismissed. One of the two felony counts of sexual intercourse without consent was also dropped after Reisbeck agreed to plead guilty to the amended charge. Gersovitz said in the interview that such a plea agreement is "not at all unusual." "A case goes on for a long time, and it changes posture as it goes forward," he said. "Many cases -- many, many cases -- that start off as a sexual intercourse without consent, but as the case progresses and plea negotiations begin, you plead an awful lot of people to criminal endangerment." District Court Judge Mike Menahan said during the sentencing that criminal law in particular "probably raises more questions than answers, particularly when matters in the courthouse are covered in the local media." "As a judge, I know very little about the criminal cases in front of me," Menahan told the court. "Whether or not the defendant is guilty is a question for a jury to consider." He went on to note that charging documents are drafted by the county attorney's office. In the case of Reisbeck, who declined to speak with investigators, the documents do not contain his side of the story. "The public sometimes when they see an affidavit, they think that all the facts therein are absolutely true and uncontested and somehow have been proved before the court," Menahan said. "That's not the case. It's an allegation." He went further to say that plea agreements are negotiated between the prosecution and the defense and that as a judge, he does not play a role in it. "I'm neutral," he said. "I have to make decisions regarding legal matters if heard during the course of a trial, and then ultimately, if a defendant goes to trial and are convicted, I'm the one that makes the sentencing decision." The judge does have the final say on whether or not to accept a defendant's plea, but in this case he said sending it to a trial by jury could be "a hugely traumatic incident" for the victim who would most likely be required to testify. "Do I force that victim to be retraumatized by rejecting the plea agreement?," Menahan asked rhetorically. "No. I'll accept the plea agreement." Gersovitz said in the interview that one never knows what verdict a jury will return and it only takes one unsure juror to result in jury nullification. "From my point of view, I get the certainty of a plea," he said. "So the guy's under supervision and getting sex offender therapy. From the defendant's point of view, he's getting the certainty of a plea, which with criminal endangerment, typically doesn't involve incarceration time." Reisbeck admitted Wednesday to meeting up with the young girls in Murdoch's parking lot, located at 3050 N. Montana Ave., providing them with alcohol, driving them to East Helena and engaging in sexual intercourse with them. Reisbeck was accompanied by Shanholtzer, who took the same plea deal and received the same sentence during his hearing last month. Reisbeck does not have to register as a sex offender as long as he follows through with the standard conditions applied to his sentence, including any recommended treatment and after care. Reisbeck is also prohibited from having contact with individuals under the age of 18 or entering any area minors could reasonably be without prior approval from his probation officer. The mother of Reisbeck's victim read a statement to the court on behalf of her daughter, who did not want to appear. "Prior to these events, she was confident and ready to take on life and its challenges," the mother said. "Now she has a hard time going to public places and events because she never knows if the defendants and/or family and associates will be there." In the last four years, the mother said her daughter has attended four different high schools, and the family has moved three times. The mother also said the "onslaught of victim shaming" on social media has taken a toll on her daughter and were "horrifying." The mother added that her daughter's friends have abandoned her, citing the Reisbeck family's "far-reaching" influence. Resibeck's defense attorney Wendy Holton said during the trial that she and her client were in favor of the state's recommended sentence of four years' probation. "If he messes up, he'll be back in court, and you can sentence him then," Holton said. Holton further argued that Reisbeck "has been humiliated" and struggled to find work until his father gave him a job operating heavy equipment. Reisbeck was permitted the opportunity to make a statement to the court. "I'm just very sorry for what happened," he said. "I apologize for my actions." Love 10 Funny 4 Wow 0 Sad 5 Angry 61 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. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 16:05:15|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close Bounnhang Vorachith (L), general secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee and president of Laos, meets with Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Vientiane, Laos, Feb. 20, 2020. (Photo by Kaikeo Saiyasane/Xinhua) VIENTIANE, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Bounnhang Vorachith, general secretary of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party Central Committee and president of Laos, expressed here Thursday his confidence in China's fight against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and voiced his strong support for China. Bounnhang said in his meeting with visiting Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi that he strongly believes that under the strong leadership of President Xi Jinping, the Chinese people will definitely defeat the COVID-19 soon. He is also confident that China's economy will maintain rapid growth and the livelihood of the Chinese people will continue to improve when the epidemic is over. Besides visiting Laos, Wang is also here for the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease and the fifth Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting. Bounnhang expressed his belief that the two foreign ministers' meetings will achieve success and would further enhance the mutual trust and cooperation between the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and China. On the Laos-China relations, he said that the Lao People's Revolutionary Party and the Lao government highly values the friendship between Laos and China and appreciates the long-term support from the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Chinese government to Lao economic and social development. Major projects such as the construction of the Laos-China Railway are making smooth progress and have brought substantial benefits to the people of Laos, said Bounnhang. The Lao People's Revolutionary Party and the Lao government will firmly adhere to the one-China policy and strengthen the exchanges and cooperation with China in all fields with sincerity so as to build a community of shared future jointly with China, Bounnhang added. For his part, Wang briefed Bounnhang on China's effective measures to control the epidemic and updated on the current situation. Wang said that under the strong leadership of the CPC Central Committee with Xi Jinping at the core, advantages of the socialist system and with extensive experience of public health response, China will prevail over the coronavirus at an early date. After the outbreak of the COVID-19, Wang noted that Laos took prompt actions and offered help to China. Bounnhang in person called on Laos to tide over this difficult time with China, which is all profoundly moving, said Wang. Wang expressed his sincere gratitude to Laos, saying the reactions of Laos once again demonstrated the close and unbreakable friendship between the two countries and showcased the essence of building the China-Laos community with shared future. When the epidemic is over, the Chinese people will become more united, China's economy will rebound strongly and grow more sustainably, and the leadership of the CPC will win stronger support from all walks of life in China, he said. Wang also said the friendship and mutual trust between China and Laos have been deepened in the joint fight against the epidemic and believed the mutually beneficial cooperation between the two countries in all fields will continue to move forward. China is willing to work with Laos to continue to press forward the construction of the China-Laos Railway and the China-Laos Economic Corridor, help Laos improve self-development capacity and accelerate the country's industrialization so as to make the China-Laos community with shared future benefit the Lao people, Wang added. Congress on Wednesday alleged that the statement by US President Donald Trump ahead of his visit is an insult to the dignity of the country and asked the government to respond to it. "The president of the United States, ahead of his visit for the first time to India, said that India has not treated us fairly. I think it is an insult and affront to the dignity of the country and the Ministry of External Affairs should respond to it and not sweep it under the carpet," Congress spokesperson Manish Tewari told reporters here. "We welcome our guests. It is in Indian tradition. But no guest has the right to insult India. I think that comment was totally uncalled for," he said. The Congress leader said that Trump's remark undermines "all the progress in the visit or in Indo-US relations, which has been made since the steps in the strategic partnership were initiated by late prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a process which was then carried forward for 10 years under the able leadership of prime minister Manmohan Singh". President Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump will be visiting India on February 24 and 25. Trump is slated to address a mammoth crowd of more than 100,000 people which is expected to turn up for an event at the Motera Stadium in Ahmedabad on the lines of the 'Howdy Modi' function that was addressed by the US President and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Houston in September last year. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) 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. OFX Daily Market News Posted by OFX AUD Australian Dollar The Australian dollar is weaker this morning when valued against the Greenback, falling to an overnight low of 0.6665 the lowest since February 9. The Aussie dollar has now fallen for a fifth consecutive day amid US dollar strength and continued coronavirus headlines. On the data front yesterday we saw the release of Westpac Leading Index which came in at 0.05% in January, slightly better than the previous 0.01%. The last six months annualised growth rate fell from -0.28% in December to -0.46% in January. We also saw the release of Q4 Wage Price Index which saw wages continue to grow at an unimpressive pace, as expected, rising just 0.5% q/q in Q4 19. On a y/y basis wage growth remained at 2.2%, taking average 2019 wage growth to 2.28%. Looking ahead today and we will see the release of the latest employment figures which is expected to have added 10,000 new jobs in January, after adding 28,900 in the previous month. The unemployment rate is expected to rise to 5.2% from 5.1% while the participation rate is seen steady at 66%. From a technical perspective, the AUD/USD pair is currently trading at 0.6678. We continue to expect support to hold on moves approaching 0.6660 while now any upward push will likely meet resistance around 0.6730. Key Movers The US Dollar Index (DXY) which measures a basket of major currencies against the greenback continued its rampant moves overnight hitting three-year highs. Improved risk appetite in markets and strong domestic data out of the United States saw movements out of traditional safe haven currencies such as the Japanese Yen, falling to nine-month lows and a 1.35% drop on the days trade. The Federal Reserve released their monthly meeting minutes a couple of hours ago and noted that the current stance of monetary policy is appropriate. Holding rates between a range of 1.5% and 1.75% will give Chairman Jerome Powell time to analyse the current impact of the coronavirus for the local economy. Story continues Core United States Producer Price Index for the year rose to 1.7% from 1.1% and rose 0.5% on a monthly basis, continuing the recent theme of positive economic data for the start of 2020. The same could not be said for the EUR as it lost further ground, hitting lows yesterday of 1.0782 following a sharp decline in economic sentiment in Germany. A number of data releases will dictate any further decline for the common currency as ECB Monetary Policy Meeting accounts are due for release this evening. Expected Ranges AUD/USD: 0.6640 0.6710 GBP/AUD: 1.9100 1.9520 AUD/NZD: 1.0420 1.0490 AUD/EUR: 0.6150 0.6210 AUD/CAD: 0.8800 0.8870 Posted by OFX The post Aussie dollar nears multi year lows appeared first on . Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) New York, United States Thu, February 20, 2020 22:06 691 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad2065b3ce1 2 People Neil-Young,Donald-Trump,Bernie-Sanders,united-states,music Free Newly minted American citizen Neil Young is using his platform to rail against Donald Trump, calling the US president "a disgrace to my country" while endorsing Bernie Sanders. In an open letter on his website, Young said Trump's "mindless destruction of our shared natural resources, our environment and our relationships with friends around the world is unforgivable." "I don't blame the people who voted for you. I support their right to express themselves, although they have been lied to, and in many cases believed the lies, they are true Americans. I have their back," he continued. The prolific rocker became a US citizen earlier this year, having lived in California for decades, and also retains his Canadian citizenship. In his letter, Young voiced praise for Sanders, who is currently leading the Democratic primary pack, saying the leftist has "the answers I like". "He is aiming at preserving our children's future directly. He is not popular with the democratic establishment because unlike all the other candidates, he is not pandering to the industries accelerating Earth's Climate Disaster, the end of the world as we know it. He is truly fighting for the USA," Young wrote. "His initials are BS. Not his policies." Read also: On Neil Young's new 'Colorado' album, amped up rage -- and hope Young voiced disdain for Trump's use of the classic hit "Rockin' in the Free World" at his rallies, which the artist has asked him to stop while acknowledging that he can't actually prevent the song's use. "Every time 'Rockin' in the Free World' or one of my songs is played at your rallies, I hope you hear my voice," he wrote. "Remember it is the voice of a tax-paying US citizen who does not support you. Me." Trump has appeared in the past to be a fan of Young, telling Rolling Stone in 2008 that the 74-year-old superstar has "got something very special". "I've listened to his music for years," Trump said at the time. "He's performed for me at my casinos over the years and he just brings it down. I've met him on occasions and hes a terrific guy." Asked if he had a preferred Young work, Trump was vague: "It's sort of all favorite." A longtime environmental crusader, Young's most recent album Colorado centered on climate, as did his 2015 album The Monsanto Years, which saw the artist attack the agricultural corporate titan over its genetically modified seeds. Amid debates and lawsuits, natural gas bans keep gaining momentum as Bay Area cities encourage people to rely more on electricity for home appliances and less on fossil fuels. On Thursday, the California Energy Commission unanimously approved new municipal building codes which include strict policies for natural gas use in new homes in Berkeley, Santa Rosa, Healdsburg, Windsor, Palo Alto, Los Gatos, Milpitas, Mountain View and Brisbane. The policies take effect immediately. We fully support and welcome and encourage local government leadership to decarbonize the building sector. Its been absolutely essential, Energy Commission Chairman David Hochschild said at Thursdays meeting. He said the commission approved the laws because they save more energy than state requirements, and have proved cost-effective. Constructing homes with only electric appliances can save money up front, according to a representative of the California Building Industry Association who spoke Thursday, but utility bills can be higher. The movement against gas appliances has set off a complicated and contentious debate. While supporters of gas bans say that relying more on electricity is necessary to reach ambitious climate change goals, opponents point out that electricity is an unreliable source with the prospect of more public safety power shut-offs. Roughly two-fifths of Californias electricity comes from renewable sources, including big dams, according to 2018 data. Ironically, from the perspective of gas bans, natural gas accounts for 35% of the states electricity. Buildings account for about a quarter of the states emissions. Of the new laws, Mountain View is the only city to require all new buildings to use only electric, rather than natural gas, appliances. Santa Rosa, Palo Alto, Windsor, and Los Gatos require new low-rise homes to be all-electric. Brisbane and Healdsburg require all-electric appliances except for stoves and fireplaces. Berkeley already banned gas in new low-rise buildings, but expanded its policies Thursday to require higher energy efficiency in new high-rise homes and nonresidential buildings including steps to ensure that its easy to wire up electric appliances. Milpitas provides incentives for the construction of all-electric homes by requiring those that use gas to meet stricter energy efficiency standards than the state code. Six cities also require more rooftop solar than the new state building requirements. Others push wiring for electric cars or battery storage. The Energy Commission said that more than 20 environmental groups, as well as some energy companies including Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Sacramento Municipal Utility District supported going electric. PG&E welcomes the opportunity to avoid investments in new gas assets that might later prove underutilized, a company spokeswoman said at Thursdays meeting. San Jose, Menlo Park and San Mateo had already received approval to ban or limit gas in new homes. San Francisco prohibited gas in new city-owned buildings and wants to expand it to private construction as well. In January, the California Public Utilities Commission began drafting rules to manage the states transition away from natural gas-fueled technologies while ensuring safety and keeping rates steady, the agency said in a filing. The common theme is electrification, the state is going in that direction, and we want to be a party to that, Bob Raymer with the California Building Industry Association said Thursday. He encouraged incentives that have helped the industry make relatively balanced changes in the past. Kevin Messner with the Association for Home Appliance Manufacturers, whose members make both electric and gas appliances, cautioned the commission. He said gas dryers could be more efficient on a large scale than electric ones; alternatives to natural gas could be in the offing; and demand for gas stoves remains high. Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes There is consumer interest in having a choice and having both, Messner said. Lawsuits filed against Bay Area gas bans are making their way through the courts. Last year, the California Restaurant Association sued Berkeley, and a developer filed suit against Windsor and Santa Rosa. His lawyer asked the commission to deny the new codes based on pending legal actions, but the commission did not heed the request and the codes took effect. The restaurant trade group argued in its most recent court filing on Feb. 10 that Berkeleys ban affects restaurant owners and chefs who rely on natural gas for their manner and speed of food preparation and for an affordable and reliable energy source. Berkeley banned natural gas in all new single-family homes, townhomes and small apartment buildings; it plans to include commercial buildings. This ban will prevent members from occupying new restaurant buildings, since many restaurants cannot prepare their unique dishes without using gas, or will force them to alter their food preparation and bear higher costs, the filing said. Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter:@mallorymoench Guwahati, Feb 20 : A high-level panel formed to review and suggest measures for implementation of Clause six of 1985 Assam accord has handed over its report in a sealed cover to state Chief Secretary Sanjay Krishna through the Assam Accord Implementation Department, a committee member said on Thursday. Clause 6 of the 1985 Assam Accord pledges to provide constitutional, legislative and administrative safeguards to protect, preserve and promote the cultural, social and linguistic identity and heritage of the Assamese people. "We have submitted the final report to the state chief secretary through an officer of the state's Assam Accord Implementation Department, which is closely involved in the whole process," All Assam Students Union (AASU) General Secretary Lurinjyoti Gogoi told IANS. Gogoi, along with the organisation's president Dipanka Kumar Nath and Chief Advisor Samujjal Bhattacharya figure in the 14-member panel chaired by retired judge of Gauhati High Court Biplab Kumar Sharma. The AASU leader said the decision followed a direction from the Ministry of Home Affairs that the report be given to the Chief Secretary of Assam. And through him, it will go to the MHA. "Earlier, the committee had been directed to hand over the report to Home Minister (Amit Shah) in the presence of the Chief Minister (Sarbananda Sonowal). That was not done. So now it has been sealed and given to the Chief Secretary through the Assam Accord Implementation Department," said Gogoi. He said after completing the final report on February 10, the committee had written to the MHA thrice to know the mechanism for submitting it. "But Joint Secretary (north east) of the ministry Satyendra Garg sent a message that the Home Minister is very busy because of the impending visit of US President Donald Trump and the report will be accepted after February 18. But despite the communications through email and letter, the committee chairman did not get any type of clear confirmation from the Home Ministry on it receiving the report," said Gogoi. The committee has proposed 1951 as the cut-off year for implementing the Inner Line Permit (ILP) in the state. The ILP, a mechanism to control the entry of outsiders into the state, has been implemented in the states of Nagaland, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh. It was also introduced in Manipur in the wake of protests over the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act that was introduced recently. According to sources, the high-level committee has recommended that those residing in Assam since 1951, and their descendants, are to be considered as the indigenous people of the state. The Union Home Ministry set up the panel to examine the effectiveness of actions taken since 1985 to implement Clause 6 of the Assam Accord, and suggest measures. The Union Home Ministry had in January last year announced formation of the high-level committee headed by retired Union Secretary M.P. Bezbaruah, but the move came a cropper with six of the nine members refusing to take part. The Centre then reconstituted the panel with 14 members in July last year, naming Sharma as the chairman. According to ministry sources, apart from 67 per cent reservation for indigenous people of the state, the 13-member committee has also suggested reservation in terms of legislative and Lok Sabha seats for them. The Assam Accord of 1985 was signed after the north-eastern state witnessed a six-year-long violent movement from 1979 to 1985 seeking detection and deportation of illegal Bangladeshis. The movement finally led to the accord between the Centre and leaders of the agitation belonging to the All Assam Students Union and the All Assam Gana Sangram Parishad in the presence of then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 20, ARMENPRESS. The representatives of Turkey, Russia and Iran are working on coordinating the date for the trilateral summit on the Syrian settlement process, the Turkish foreign ministry told TASS. The parties are working to agree on the date for the summit. As soon as an agreement between the three countries is reached, the date of the summit will be announced to the public, the ministry said. Russian Presidential Envoy for the Middle East and Africa and Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov earlier told TASS that a trilateral Russian-Iranian-Turkish summit could be held in Tehran in early March, if the Turkish leadership agreed. The previous, the fifth in a row, trilateral meeting between the presidents of the countries acting as guarantors of the Astana process to promote a peaceful settlement in Syria took place in Ankara in September 2019. CHICAGO Calling himself a Trumpocrat and freed political prisoner, disgraced ex-Gov. Rod Blagojevich used his first full day of freedom Wednesday to thank President Donald Trump for commuting his prison sentence and take the first shot at redefining his legacy. A now silver-haired Blagojevich, 63, walked outside his Northwest Side home dressed in a blue sweater and jeans. He was joined by his two daughters and wife, Patti, who joked that the news conference started late because Blagojevich couldnt find his own socks after being away for so long. As Blagojevich shook hands and hugged well-wishers, he repeatedly dabbed at his chin with a white handkerchief and explained that he nicked himself while shaving with a real razor blade for the first time in nearly eight years. The cut bled for the entire news conference. Its been a long, long journey, he said. Im bruised and Im battered and bloody. In a so-called homecoming address that sounded more like a campaign speech, Blagojevich painted himself as a public servant persecuted by the swamp in Springfield for trying to help people. He spoke of granting free public transportation to seniors and health care to uninsured children, but made no mention of the childrens hospital he was convicted of pressuring for a donation. The 20-minute soliloquy included some of the loquacious Blagojevichs greatest hits: he recited British poetry, he told the story of his immigrant parents and he compared himself to a boxer. He quoted Martin Luther King and repeatedly insisted he did nothing wrong. He also spoke a little Spanish, one of his go-to moves on the campaign trail. Im returning home today from a long exile a freed political prisoner, he said. I want to say again to the people of Illinois who twice elected me governor: I didnt let you down. I would have let you down if I gave into this. But resistance to tyrants is obedience to God. Occasionally choking back tears, Blagojevich said the length of his incarceration could be measured by milestones his daughters marked while he was away. Amy, now 23, graduated from high school and Northwestern University before earning a masters degree in marketing last year. Annie, 16, was in grade school when her father left and now has a drivers license. He described, in his trademark purple prose, the 6-foot-by-8-foot prison cell in which he spent most of his incarceration. From the top bunk, Blagojevich said, he would look out a small, barred window and dream of holding his wifes hand again. He urged anyone facing hardship he called them his fellow underdogs to think of their own families as they deal with their struggles. Dont give up. Dont give up. Think of the people you love. Think of the people you love, he said. Youll find your purpose. Blagojevich thanked Trump for commuting his sentence five times in the first 10 minutes, calling him kind, smart and courageous. He said his daughters always will consider the commutation the kindest gift theyve ever received. He also referred to himself as a former Democratic governor, suggesting he no longer aligns himself with the party that helped elect him to the states top office. Im a Trumpocrat, Blagojevich said to cheers from onlookers. If I have the ability to vote, Im gonna vote for him. In a more stunning moment, Blagojevich also thanked his father-in-law, former Chicago Alderman Dick Mell, for supporting his wife and daughters while he was in prison. It was a public olive branch from the ex-governor, who had long blamed Mell for sparking the federal investigation against him nearly two decades ago. Despite their financial hardships after Blagojevichs arrest, the Blagojevich family was able to keep their house and send the girls to private school, in part, because of Mells financial help. His gratitude list also included the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who lobbied for his release, and Jesse Jackson Jr., whom he referred to as a friend. During Blagojevichs criminal trial, a jury found that Blagojevich attempted to sell then-President-elect Barack Obamas vacant U.S. Senate seat to Jackson Jr. in exchange for some of Jacksons supporters making a large contribution to the governors campaign. Blagojevich arrived at his Ravenswood Manor home in the early morning hours Wednesday, greeted by a throng of reporters, supporters, neighbors and protesters after pulling up in a white SUV. The former governor was able to catch a late-night flight after being released from a federal prison near Denver late Tuesday, arriving at OHare International Airport just before midnight. Blagojevichs 14-year prison term was commuted by Trump in a wave of clemency moves. The long-awaited decision sent Blagojevich home from prison more than four years early, much to the relief and delight of his wife and daughters. As Blagojevich spoke, the president tweeted about the commutation, again repeating an inaccurate allegation that former FBI Director James Comey helped convict Blagojevich. Comey was U.S. deputy attorney general when the investigation into Blagojevichs administration began, but he moved to the private sector in 2005 and played no role in Blagojevichs arrest in 2008. The president also misstated the reason for Blagojevichs conviction. The governor was charged with conspiring to sell the Senate seat along with shaking down a childrens hospital and suburban racetrack and was arrested before he appointed someone to Obamas vacant U.S. Senate seat. Rod Blagojevich did not sell the Senate seat, Trump wrote. He served 8 years in prison, with many remaining. He paid a big price. Another Comey and gang deal! Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 on the corruption charges. Trump has said he believed the 40th Illinois governor was treated unfairly when a federal judge in Chicago sentenced him to 14 years in federal prison. Hell be able to go back home with his family, Trump said Tuesday. That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion. Blagojevich had been scheduled to be released in March 2024. Instead, he found himself sleeping in his own house Tuesday night and learning how to use a real razor again the next morning. How do you properly thank someone who has given back the freedom that was stolen from you? He didnt have to do this, Blagojevich said. President Trump is tough and outspoken, but he also has a kind heart. This is an act of kindness and I also believe its the beginning of a process to actually turn an injustice into a justice. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence has seized 12.6 kg gold worth Rs 5.44 crore from 18 passengers who arrived here from various countries, officials said on Thursday. The DRI Chennai zonal unit picked up 18 passengers and two customs officials from the airport for questioning for allegedly having abetted the smuggling of the contraband. These passengers had arrived from Malaysia, Colombo and Dubai on Wednesday, a press release said. The officers also searched a residential premise of a former Customs department tax assistant who was allegedly involved in coordinating the smuggling of gold, it said. The DRI said as it was trying to take the passengers from the airport for questioning around 50 unidentified people started gathering and hurled abuses at the officials inside the airport. "When the officers tried to escort the passengers into a bus, the mob started attacking the officers and during the melee two DRI officers were manhandled," the release said. A complaint was filed at Airport police. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Three of the women president Donald Trump granted clemency to this week had one thing in common: they were all in prison with Alice Johnson, the former drug dealer whose sentence Mr Trump commuted (lessened the penalty for) two years ago. Crystal Munoz was Johnsons adopted daughter in federal prison. Tynice Hall and Johnson prayed together. And Judith Negron performed with Johnson in dance productions. When Mr Trump freed Johnson in 2018, the three hoped their own appeals for clemency would one day also be granted. That day came on Tuesday, when Mr Trump cut short their sentences, in part based on Johnsons recommendations. In interviews on Wednesday, the women said they had not spoken with Johnson in years and were only vaguely aware of her efforts. I knew I would always be in her heart, but I never knew she would advocate so hard for me, Hall said. Shes my secret angel. The relief granted to the three women is the latest example of the unorthodox ways that Mr Trump chooses to exercise his clemency powers, having sidelined the traditional pardon bureaucracy administered by the Justice Department. The women stand in contrast to the well-connected public figures who were also granted clemency on Tuesday: convicted junk-bond king Michael Milken, former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik and billionaire Edward DeBartolo Jr. The men had members of congress, wealthy campaign donors and celebrities vouching for them. The women had their former prison mate who was freed after her case was championed by reality-television star Kim Kardashian West. Every time I think about it, my eyes fill and the tears just flow, Johnson said in a telephone interview on Wednesday, speaking of the release of her friends. Amy Povah, founder of a pro-clemency group called CAN-DO, said she and other criminal-justice advocates submitted a list of about a dozen meritorious female offenders directly to the White House late last year. When it boiled down to only three, its not surprising that the White House put value on the ones Alice served time with and knew their character, said Povah, who was incarcerated for nine years for drug crimes before receiving a commutation in 2000. You know who those diamonds are in there who are so deserving, and you know who the people are that are still engaging in shenanigans. For decades, offenders have filed petitions seeking clemency with the office of the pardon attorney in the Justice Department. That office vets the requests and sends recommendations to the deputy attorney general, who forwards final recommendations to the White House. Clemency advocates have long argued that the Justice Department, traditionally led by tough-on-crime former prosecutors, opposes too many offenders who are deserving of leniency. Im not trying to be the pardon office or to say people have to go through me, but I am trying to offer a little help, said Johnson, a 64-year-old great-grandmother who served about 22 years of a life sentence for cocaine trafficking. Despite Johnsons role as an informal adviser to the president and her appearance in a Super Bowl ad for the Trump campaign, federal prosecutors in the western district of Tennessee have opposed her request to cut short her five years of supervised release. Motivated now by continued greed for money, fame and celebrity, the defendant seeks to throw off the pesky burden of supervised release, US attorney Michael Dunavant, a Trump appointee, said in a court filing in July. Uninformed members of the public continue to celebrate her criminality. Johnson said it was absolutely crazy to cast her as a risk to public safety. She now lives with her daughter in Arizona, giving speeches about criminal justice reform and promoting a memoir. Johnsons application to end supervised release is now pending. Johnson was held at several different prisons, including Federal Medical Centre Carswell in Texas, where she met Munoz, and at Federal Correctional Institution Aliceville in Alabama, where she befriended Hall and Negron. Munoz, who spent 12 years in prison for her role in a marijuana smuggling ring, described Johnson as a surrogate mother. Munoz was separated from her two baby daughters when she was imprisoned. Alice was a light in a dark place, said Munoz, 40. To know that she had a life sentence and to see the strength and motivation that she gave to everyone around her, it helped me have hope. The White House cited Munozs mentoring of other inmates, volunteer work with a hospice program and extraordinary commitment to rehabilitation. Hall said she and Johnson commiserated during president Barack Obamas second term when they were not among a record-setting number of about 1,700 commutations. She kind of talked me through it and gave me moral support, said Hall who served about 14 years of an 18-year sentence for drug crimes. Hall completed apprenticeships, took college classes and taught prison educational programs, the White House said. Negron, who had completed eight years of a 35-year sentence for healthcare fraud, said she had never praise-danced before she met Johnson in prison. She made this beautiful choreography, and I wanted to be part of that, Negron said by phone from her home in Miami. It kind of helped us do our time. Negron was convicted of aiding a $200m (156m) fraud that was one of the largest mental-health billing scams in the country. Every day, I am trying to compensate and repair the damage, she said. I am grateful I have been given an opportunity, and I will continue to pay my dues to society. Johnsons role in the clemency process dates to October, more than a year after her release, when Mr Trump invited her to a criminal justice speech in South Carolina. In the middle of his remarks, he called on Johnson to help him find other inmates worthy of clemency. You know some great people that are going to be there for many, many years, Alice. Right? Mr Trump asked. And youre going to give me some names, all right? Johnson told The Washington Post that she heard an alarm go off. That was the moment Id been waiting for, she said. Thats all it took, and then I hit the ground running. Industrialists Sushil and Gopal Ansal, the owners of Uphaar cinema in south Delhi's Green Park who managed to avoid jail terms by paying a fine of Rs 30 crore each will continue to be free men as the Supreme Court turned down a curative petition by families of the victims of the fire tragedy. BCCL/FILE "The Judgment enhances the sentence awarded by the High Court from one year of rigorous imprisonment to two years of rigorous imprisonment for each of the convicts but erroneously substitutes the additional one year of sentence with a fine of Rs 30 crore on each. "Further, the Judgment also reduces the sentence of one year on Sushil Ansal to the period of sentence already undergone if the fine imposed is paid by the convict in view of his advanced age," the curative plea said. BCCL The curative petition filed by the Association of Victims of Uphaar Tragedy has "no merit", a Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice SA Bobde and Justices NV Ramana and Arun Mishra said. "We have gone through the curative petitions and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out... Hence, the curative petition is dismissed," the bench said in its order. BCCL The two brothers, who had served less than six months in jail for their crimes was allowed to walk free by the SC in 2015 after it ordered them to pay a compensation of Rs 30 crore each. The court had freed them from jail in August 2015 after taking into account the age of Sushil who was then 75 years old and held that his younger brother Gopal aged 67 who was also found guilty of the same charges deserves parity with him. The penalty money was directed to be utilized for setting up trauma centers or upgrading existing ones by the government of Delhi. The duo was found guilty of criminal negligence for their role in the Uphaar Cinema Tragedy in 1997 that killed 59 people and over 100 were injured. BCCL However, in 2017, a three-judge bench had awarded a jail sentence to Sushil, which he had already undergone during the trail and relieved him considering his "advanced age-related complications" but Gopal was asked to serve the remaining one-year jail term. BCCL The brothers who were the promoters of Ansal Theatre and Clubotels (P) Ltd which ran Uphaar cinema, were accused of negligence after a fire broke out on June 13, 1997, during the screening of the film "Border". Fifty-nine people had died of asphyxia, while over 100 others were injured in the ensuing stampede. An Ikeja High Court on Thursday sentenced a part-time lecturer at the University of Lagos, Akoka, Afeez Baruwa, to 21- year imprisonment for raping an 18-year-old girl admission seeker. Justice Josephine Oyefeso convicted Baruwa of a one count charge of rape brought against him. Justice Oyefeso said: the prosecution has proven his case beyond a reasonable doubt. I found him guilty of the charge . Delivering her judgement ,the judge said: I cannot begin to imagine the emotional trauma of the girl. The convict offended his family, the victim, the society and God. Baruwa I hereby sentenced you to 21 years imprisonment Maximum, this is my judgment Follow Us on Facebook @LadunLiadi; Instagram @LadunLiadi; Twitter @LadunLiadi; Youtube @LadunLiadiTV for updates Talks between the Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors and protesters over vacating the road at Shaheen Bagh made little headway on Thursday as the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act demonstrators remained firm on continuing with their sit-in at the site. New Delhi: Talks between the Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors and protesters over vacating the road at Shaheen Bagh made little headway on Thursday as the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act demonstrators remained firm on continuing with their sit-in at the site. They told the interlocutors that once the Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens (NRC) are rolled back, they will not only vacate the road but also clean it. Senior lawyers Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran, the apex court-appointed interlocutors who reached the site in the afternoon on the second consecutive day, were not willing to start the discussion in the presence of media. When the protestors managed to convince the interlocutors to let the media cover the proceedings, a media personnel's remark irked them. The interlocutors subsequently asked the media to leave the tent where discussions were on. The discussion lasted for nearly three hours. Sadhna Ramachandran, Supreme Court-appointed mediator: Our mediation talks are continuing and we will come back again tomorrow to Shaheen Bagh. pic.twitter.com/42UQzToY3f ANI (@ANI) February 20, 2020 Ramachandran began addressing the protesters saying, "We have come here for you. We have to think over it and talk in detail. We are thankful that yesterday we received blessings from all dadis." She also appealed to the protesters to find another way to continue with the protest that does not cause inconvenience to others. A crowd of over 100 men and women were not convinced. They unanimously replied in the negative. Hegde too tried to persuade them. He said the apex court has recognised their right to protest. "We cannot do a 'my way or the highway here'. We need two hands to clap. If we get adamant and tomorrow if there is a bigger issue and lawmakers put their foot down and do not listen..." Hegde said other citizens of the city also need to work, travel and feed their families. "When Shaheen Bagh has become an example of protests in India then let us set an example of a protest that doesn't disturb anybody. You all must be rest assured that we are here to fight for you. Don't think that if you change your spot, your fight will die down," Hegde said. "We have seen many prime ministers come and go. Whoever comes in power and runs the country.... sometimes they could be right or wrong. Whatever you are saying the whole country is listening and also the prime minister," he added. On Monday, the Supreme Court observed that the blockade of the road at Shaheen Bagh was "troubling" and suggested the protesters go to another site where no public place would be blocked. It, however, upheld their right to protest. The apex court also asked Hegde to "play a constructive role as an interlocutor" to persuade the protesters to move to an alternative site. It said the interlocutors could seek former bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah's assistance. The protesters, many turning emotional or angry, shared their grievances with the interlocutors on Thursday. A man broke down while talking to the interlocutors. "I am very scared...very scared of what will happen to my children. Madam save us," he said. The interlocutors asked him what he is scared of, to which he replied, "I am a single father. My girls go to school where they are being told that you will go out of the country." Another man, while talking to them, said, "I have a national flag on my bicycle. We love this country and stop calling us traitors." His daughter, who appeared to be below 10 years old, told mediators, "I am a young girl and I want a beautiful India." Ramchandran repeatedly tried to address their concerns. "Who says NRC and CAA can't be rolled back? The Supreme Court will decide on this. You have all the right to seek rollback of this legislation. However until then one cannot remain adamant and say that they won't move until the decision is taken." As the session went on without any solution, the protesters started losing their patience and some of them even shouted slogans which upset the interlocutors. At one point, Ramchandran told one of the protesters to leave the venue and said, "The atmosphere here is not right for a discussion. The women should select a spot where 10 to 12 women can come in a group to talk to us." She said if the Supreme Court wanted it could have passed orders to vacate the site. Yet, they want a peaceful mediation and the protesters must respect the decision, Ramachandran said. One woman protester also referred to Judge Birjgopal Harikishan Loya's death and said if the judiciary is not safe how can they be. In 2018, the Supreme Court dismissed a bunch of public interest litigations (PILs) seeking an independent probe into the judges death. A woman protester said she appreciates the efforts of the apex court to hear them out but the allegation that only Shaheen Bagh has created blockade is not right. "When LK Advani took out a Rath Yatra, it created more issues for citizens," she said referring to the BJP veteran's rath yatra in early 90s. She pointed to the man who had broken down and said, "Did you see how a father was crying and asking for security of his children. The atmosphere at his home would be so depressing. His children and all our children are seeing us struggle for our rights." Hegde told the protesters that they were making the same representations as on Wednesday. "We are not asking you to stop protesting but just make a small amendment in your movement and let the road be open to all. The matter here is related to the blockade," he said. Get this newsletter in your inbox Monday-Friday by signing up at subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters. Top stories for Thursday, Feb. 20 MAX STABBINGS: Lawyers in the trial of Jeremy Christian (above) made their closing arguments Wednesday, clearing the way for the jury to deliberate the 12 charges against him, including murder and attempted murder, starting Thursday. The charges stem from the 2017 stabbings of three men on a Portland MAX train and another confrontation the night before. See more trial photos. (Beth Nakamura/Staff) WRONGFUL ARREST: The U.S. Department of Justice will conduct a federal civil rights investigation into the 2017 wrongful arrest of Portland resident Michael Fesser. The decision comes a week after three federal lawmakers urged a federal inquiry into the wrongdoing by West Linn police against a black Portland man that led to West Linns payout of $600,000 to settle Fessers federal racial discrimination and wrongful arrest lawsuit. BUSINESS TAX: Oregons new $1 billion business tax, which went into effect Jan. 1, is causing confusion and consternation as business managers puzzle over what it will cost them and how to plan their investments before the first payments are due at the end of April. CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK: An Oregon comedian has lost his job as a cruise ship performer and has gained hundreds of new critics after he left the Cambodian city where his ship had docked during the coronavirus scare and caught a flight back to the United States a move many say unnecessarily put people at risk. Meanwhile, a Forest Grove couple under quarantine for coronavirus in Japan got a boost in their effort to return home as Oregons U.S. senators and a representative asked the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo when the two will be released. AMAZON OPENINGS: The e-commerce giant thats established several data centers in rural Oregon will open two facilities in the Portland area, one in Tualatin and one at the former Portland Meadows facility, the Portland Business Journal reported Wednesday evening. Snap of the day Grant Butler STUMPTOWN: Until Tuesday, downtown Portlands Terry Schrunk Plaza was home to 14 flowering plum trees. The 45-year-old trees were cut down because they were starting to split and crack, creating a possible safety hazard, according to the federal agency in charge of the plaza. Replacements are planned. (Grant Butler/Staff) More news Associate principal killed after driving into path of truck while leaving Clark Co. school, deputies say City takes legal action to bar police union from using ex-Portland human resources manager for contract talks Portland loses another e-scooter option as Shared pulls its vehicles from city streets 3 ODOT employees investigated for theft One of Portlands best ice cream shops to open first west-side location Find more at oregonlive.com Weather and traffic A dry day with sunny skies early, then increasing clouds in the afternoon. High 55, low 31. Oregon 22 will remain closed to through traffic between Idanha and the junction of Oregon 22 and U.S. 20, mileposts 53-81, at least through Friday following a truck crash and diesel spill. Get the latest forecast at oregonlive.com/weather Stay up to date on traffic conditions at oregonlive.com/commuting Advice Ask Amy: Abuse survivor trying to heal, longs to tell her parents Dear Abby: Man wants to move secret office affair forward Dear Annie: FaceTime is a great way for long-distance grandmas to stay connected Find more, including today's horoscope, 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 In 1905: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Jacobson v. Massachusetts, upheld, 7-2, compulsory vaccination laws intended to protect the publics health. In 1923: Victor George Vic Atiyeh, the 32nd governor of Oregon (1979-1987) and the first elected U.S. governor of Syrian descent, was born in Portland. (He died in 2014.) In 1962: Astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth as he flew aboard Project Mercurys Friendship 7 spacecraft, which circled the globe three times. Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories. Vice President Venkaiah Naidu visited the Hunar Haat at the Rajpath here on Thursday and interacted with the participating artisans and craftsmen from various parts of the country. Naidu, along with his wife Ushamma, visited various stalls at the Hunar Haat which is being organised by the Ministry of Minority Affairs, and took keen interest in the indigenous crafts and their history. Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi also accompanied the vice-president during his tour of the Haat. The vice president's visit to the Hunar Haat comes a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a surprise visit there and interacted with the artisans. Modi relished 'litti-chokha' and 'kulhad' tea during his over 50-minute stay at the Hunar Haat and also tried his hand at music, playing a traditional musical instrument at a stall. The 'Hunar Haat' here is based on the theme of 'Kaushal Ko Kaam' and will be held till February 23. Master artisans, craftsmen and culinary experts, with over 50 per cent of them women, from across the country are participating at the Haat. A 'bawarchikhana' section has also been set up with traditional delicacies of several states available for the people to savour. Cultural programmes are also being organised on a daily basis at the Hunar Haat. Hunar Haat will be organised in Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Dehradun, Patna, Bhopal, Goa, Kochi, Guwahati and Bhubneshwar, among other places, over the next few months. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Pune, Feb 20 : A special CBI court here has sentenced, to 10 years rigorous imprisonment, a former branch manager of the Bank of Maharashtra for causing a loss of Rs 2.56 crore to the bank. A fine of Rs 24 lakh was also slapped on Shaliwahan Solegaonkar. Another accused Rakesh Jadhav was given a three year term of rigorous imprisonment and a Rs 10,000 penalty. The scam was committed between 2009-2017. A Guatemalan woman, who was deported to her homeland after being convicted of murder and kidnapping, has been arrested by federal agents after she was found to have been living in Lynn illegally. Ingrid Corzo-Armas, who is also known as Ingrid Sanchez, 49, was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Monday and charged with one count of illegal reentry. She is scheduled to appear on Friday in U.S. District Court in Boston, said Christina-DiLorio-Sterling, spokeswoman for U.S. Attorney Andrew E. Lelling. Corzo-Armas was convicted of murder and kidnapping in California in 1993 and sentenced to state prison. After her release, she was deported to Guatemala in June 1999, she said. Sometime after her deportation, it is alleged that Corzo-Armas illegally reentered the United States and was most recently living in Lynn under the alias Ingrid Sanchez, she said in a written statement. Through the use of fingerprints, agents were able to establish Sanchez had been deported. She also admitted that she had illegally reentered the country in an interview, DiLorio-Sterling said. If convicted, Corzo-Armas could be sentenced to serve a maximum of 20 years in prison and ordered to pay a fine of up to $250,000, she said. The Congress on Thursday raised questions over the antecedents of the Donald Trump Nagrik Abhinandan Samiti that is organising the Namaste Trump event at the Motera stadium in Ahmedabad on February 24. In a series of tweets, chief Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala sought to know who heads the samiti and when the invitation was extended to Trump. His comments came after external affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said in response to a question at a press conference on whether leaders of the opposition would be invited to Namaste Trump that the event was being organised by the Donald Trump Nagrik Abhinandan Samiti. The samiti is taking all decisions on whom to invite, he added. This will be very similar to the Howdy Modi event which took place in Houston hosted by the Indian-American community, Kumar had said. In another Tweet, Surjewala asked: why is Gujarat Govt then spending ~120 Crore for a 3-hour event organized by an unknown Pvt entity? The government did not respond to Surejewalas posts, but HT learnt that the external affairs ministry is expected to give the details at a press conference on Friday. Leaders of opposition parties have not been invited. The office of former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said he was yet to get an invite to any function to be held during Trumps visit. The University of Arkansas and a former student reached a settlement agreement in a lawsuit alleging school officials acted with deliberate indifference after she reported being sexually assaulted by another student on campus. The student will receive $100,000 in the settlement, with another $15,000 going to her attorneys to cover legal expenses. A jury trial had been scheduled for March, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported. Both sides filed a joint stipulation in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville that the case be dismissed with prejudice, so it cannot be filed again. The university released the settlement agreement to the newspaper. The plaintiff in this case and the University of Arkansas agree that it would be mutually beneficial to avoid continued litigation. The process of litigating the facts of this case has continued for several years and had the potential of continuing for years into the future, the student and university said in a joint statement. The student, who was 19 when she reported the attack October 2014, filed the Title IX lawsuit in 2016. Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination at schools receiving federal funding. I hope that the Universitys commitment to raise awareness and fight against sexual assault on campus continues to be a priority. It is crucial that colleges proactively prevent and respond to claims of sexual harassment and sexual violence, as well as provide resources and accommodations to survivors of campus sexual assault, the plaintiff said in a statement as part of the settlement. In November, U.S. District Judge P.K. Holmes III ruled the student could move ahead with the lawsuit after the universitys attorneys filed a motion seeking summary judgement in their favor. Holmes had dismissed pre-assault allegations that UA should have done more to keep the accused assailant from campus given a history that included an arrest and a previous suspension. He cited the misleading nature of communication as part of the appeals process and an arguable reluctance to provide accommodations. The alleged assailant is not facing criminal charges. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Abuse Molestation Education Universities Donald Trumps pastor is telling Florida worshippers to prioritise giving money to the church, before paying their own mortgages. Paula White, the controversial televangelist who serves as Mr Trumps spiritual guide, warned thousands of congregants in Miami to put God before their own financial needs. During the sermon she urged attendees of the mass to pay their monthly donation, or tithe, to the church before they had payed other necessary personal expenses such as electricity or their mortgage. "So let's just say I get paid $1,000 and I pay my mortgage first or I pay, what's the electric company here? FPL. I pay FPL first instead of bringing the first tenth to the house of God every week, which clearly is instructed throughout the word of God," she said. Ms White continued to encourage members to contribute large amounts of money to the church. Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan Show all 18 1 /18 Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan Palestinian protesters burn pictures of US President Donald Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a demonstration in the West Bank against the expected peace plan proposal AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan US President and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announce Trump's Middle East peace plan in the White House AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan Reuters Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan Reuters Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan EPA Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan EPA Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan EPA Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan EPA Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan EPA Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AFP via Getty Palestinian protests against President Trump's Middle East peace plan AP "You can't just bring a gratitude offering. It has to be a First Fruits offering! If it is one week's salary, if it's a month. If it's a day, it's got to be the whole of something. Quickly! Bring it updo you need an envelope?" she said. Ms White is known for her self-proclaimed rags to riches narrative, having worked her way up from rural Tupelo Mississipi to the White House, often citing a close relationship with God and Donald Trump as her driving forces. A tithe is one tenth of monthly earnings expected to be paid as a contribution to a religious organisation, but is not intended to be mandatory for financially underprivileged members of the church. However, Ms White emphasised to the room, which hosts almost 7,000 people, that members should prioritise the investment in God above all else. "You see, there is a divine accurate order. People pay tithe but they pay it in leftover," she said. Ms White placed shoes on her hands and pants over her head in a theatrical demonstration of how backward it is to pay your bills before contributing tithes. She joined the Trump administration in an official capacity last year to work in the Office of Public Liaison, but has stood as the presidents unofficial advisor since 2016. The pastor has long been a source of controversy, facing backlash in January for comments seemingly advocating divine forces to cause the miscarriage of babies in "satanic wombs." Ms White later took to Twitter to argue that the miscarriage comments in the video posted by Right Wing Watch were taken out of context. It has been 13 years since Hend Gamal stood beside her fathers deathbed, not knowing what to do, her teenage emotions overwhelmed by grief, shock and confusion. A mental image of the hardest moment in her life still runs through her head. I had never thought I would lose him, Gamal said. Few people are prepared for such a moment. Gamal still recalls the bustle and blur as she tried to obtain a burial permit and organize her father's funeral. I was a mere 18, Gamal said. My fear of being alone was coupled with the sheer horror of not knowing what to do now that he was dead, how to bury him. She quickly discovered how financially costly the death of a relative can be, as many people sought to overcharge her for services when they recognized her inexperience and realized that she was on her own. Gamal's mother had died when she was a child, and after that she had lived alone with her father. Today people who find themselves in need of guidance like Gamal can turn to two online platforms that offer assistance with afterlife services. Among the services and items provided are a ghusl (the full-body wash required by Islam and done by hanoutis, or undertakers, or by family members), shrouds and coffins. One such business, Sokna, established in 2018, ensures that religious rites are properly followed, from ghusl to burial, and also provides for the transfer of the body from the location of death. Volunteers with Ikram Mayet, which provides afterlife services for women, holding a book by Asmaa Afifi on the Islamic ritual of washing the bodies of the deceased, 2019 Photo provided by Asmaa Afifi. Ahmed Gaballah, an Egyptian American who lives in the United States, founded Sokna after he was informed in 2016 that he had potentially fatal pancreatitis. Young and healthy, Gaballah had not thought about his own death until then, but with his diagnosis and prognosis, he realized that he wanted to be buried in his home country. His wish was a worrying prospect, given that funerals in Egypt tended to be difficult and costly for families. I thought that if I could change only one thing before I died, it would be funeral services, said Gaballah, who studied computer science at the American University in Cairo. He survived and returned to Egypt to start Sokna, Arabic for peace, tranquility or calm. We are more than an online platform, Gaballah said. We help organize funerals and provide support for the family of the deceased. Technology is a facilitator, but you need to be there physically to solve problems. Before launching Sokna, Gaballah and his team researched afterlife services in other countries, including the United States, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand, to identify best practices so they could offer the same in Egypt. Our main aim is to help families feel at peace and at ease at such a difficult moment, Gaballah said. Our team has trained with sheikhs from Al-Azhar to learn how to wash the deceased according to Islam, he explained. We also trained with churches so we would understand Christian burial rites. Once the team receives a request on Sokna's Facebook page or website or by phone, six to eight members head to the location of the deceased, toting gloves, face masks and overshoes. The team leader explains procedures to the family and assigns duties to team members. Their tasks include washing the body, renting funeral halls and preparing the burial plot. The total cost ranges between 5,000 and 7,000 Egyptian pounds ($300-450) in Cairo, the organizations base. Ahmed Hamdy, who succeeded his father as a hanouti, is unsure how long he will be able to continue in the profession. Ive been washing the bodies of the dead for over 25 years, he said. In the past, there were only a few hanouti offices operating, but now there are many hanoutis in addition to online platforms, so the competition is stiff, and I dont know how we can survive. With a strong online presence and a multi-functional team on the ground, Sokna could indeed prove to be strong competition for local undertakers, but Gaballah said that Sokna aims to help local undertakers, not compete with them. We want to improve societys attitude toward the hanouti, because many look down on them, Gaballah said. We build partnerships with them. Some of them work for us and give us ideas, and we give them training and help them generate income. Shrouds made by Asmaa Afifi, who developed Ikram Mayet, an app for accessing afterlife services for women. Undated photo provided by Asmaa Afifi. Asmaa Afifi, a mother of three, launched the mobile app Ikram Mayet, which translates as honoring the dead. Through it, Afifi offers gusl and shrouding for women, by women. People seeking her organizations' help are put in touch with the nearest Ikram Mayet volunteer, all of whom Afifi trains herself. Unlike Sokna, Ikram Mayet provides services free of charge. Afifis mother had died when Afifi was 19. I wanted to wash my mother, but I did not know how, she said. After her death, I learned how and started volunteering to wash the dead. Afifi also trained other women on the Islamic ritual of washing the dead. I used to work alone, but I found that my mobile never stopped ringing, so I thought about developing a mobile app, said Afifi, who studied computer science and launched her app through donations. Our volunteers are women who are well-educated and presentable. We do not accept tips or payment. We only do it for thawab [Gods reward]. According to one hadith the words and deeds of Prophet Muhammad that provide guidance on what Islam permits Allah grants forgiveness to those who wash the dead and remain discreet about it. Regardless of any divine rewards, some customers and friends of Afifi and Gaballah view their work as gloomy. This perception doesn't bother the two, who view their jobs as valuable and meaningful. Life is a journey, and its up to you how you live it, Gaballah said. If you dont follow your passion, life will become boring and without meaning. WASHINGTON, Feb. 19, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The National Press Club and the National Press Club Journalism Institute urged the Chinese government on Wednesday to reconsider a plan to expel three Wall Street Journal reporters from China. China has ordered Josh Chin, the paper's deputy bureau chief in China, and reporters Chao Deng and Philip Wen to leave the country in five days, The Journal said Wednesday. Chin and Deng are U.S. citizens and Wen is Australian. A Chinese spokesman, Geng Shuang, said the planned expulsions were a response to a Feb. 3 Wall Street Journal opinion column that he called "racist" and an attack on China. The column, "China is the Real Sick Man of Asia," was about the economic and political implications of the coronavirus and was written by Walter Russell Mead, an academic and a contributor to the paper's opinion pages. "Allowing a free exchange of ideas, including those we disagree with, is a mark of a healthy and strong nation," National Press Club President Michael Freedman said. "This type of retaliation is unworthy of a major world power and we call on China to reverse it." Angela Greiling Keane, president of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, said: "The Wall Street Journal reporters are in China simply to report the facts. Newspapers publish a variety of opinions in their editorial pages that are separate and independent from the reporters and editors who cover the news." The National Press Club, the world's leading professional organization for journalists, represents more than 3,000 reporters, editors and professional communicators worldwide. The Club's nonprofit affiliate, the National Press Club Journalism Institute, promotes an engaged global citizenry through an independent and free press, and equips journalists with skills and standards to inform the public in ways that inspire civic engagement. Contact: John M. Donnelly, NPC Press Freedom Team Chairman: [email protected]; 202 650 6738. SOURCE National Press Club Porterville, CA (93257) Today Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 38F. Winds light and variable.. Tonight Cloudy skies this evening will become partly cloudy after midnight. Low 38F. Winds light and variable. House impeachment manager Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) speaks during the impeachment trial against President Donald Trump in the Senate on Wednesday (Senate TV) NY Man Arrested for Threatening Schiff, Schumer Over Impeachment A New York man was arrested Wednesday for allegedly threatening to kill Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). Salvatore Lippa, 57, of Greece, in Western New York, was charged with threatening to assault and murder a federal official on account of the performance of their official duties, said the U.S Attorneys Office. He was also charged with interstate communication of a threat. Both charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, the office said. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) talks to reporters about the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 16, 2020. (Matt Rourke/AP Photo) On Jan. 23, ahead of the impeachment trial, Schiff, who was the lead manager in the inquiry into President Donald Trump, received a death threat at his office in Washington. About 10 days later, Schumers office in Albany, New York, received a voice mail that also contained a death threat, according to federal officials. The threats were reported to the United States Capitol Police, Threat Assessment Section, which began an investigation. The telephone number that both the calls originated from was traced back to the defendant, the U.S. Attorneys Office wrote. When questioned by Special Agents from the United States Capitol Police, Lippa admitted to making the threatening calls to Congressman Schiff and Senator Schumer because he was upset about the impeachment proceedings. Lippa threatened Schiff by allegedly saying he would put a bullet in your [expletive] forehead, according to a criminal complaint, reported the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle. When he called Schumers office, he allegedly said, Somebody wants to assassinate you, Im going to be the driver. And hell shoot you from 200 yards away, according to the complaint. Lippa was ordered to have no contact with Schiff, Schumer, or their staff members. THE Mayor of Henley and his deputy have called on people to stop driving on grass verges and pavements in the town. Ken Arlett and David Eggleton say the damage it causes creates a bad impression for visitors and costs taxpayers money in repairs undertaken by Oxfordshire County Council, the highways authority. It is illegal to drive on or over a pavement except to gain lawful access to property or in the event of an emergency. The Mayor said drivers regularly parked on verges in Fair Mile and elsewhere, causing damage. But the town council was unable to act unless it was given enforcement powers so it could employ traffic wardens to issue parking tickets instead of the police. We can do absolutely nothing, said Councillor Arlett. The ones that can do something about it are the police but unfortunately they say they havent got the time to do it. Ive had meetings with the police community support officers and they say they have more urgent things to do than ticketing cars. I would like the police to go along the Fair Mile and ticket every car that has gone over the verge. Maybe we could charge the owners an amount of money to put the verge back in the correct state. Councillor Eggleton said there were about 20 broken kerbstones in Elizabeth Road, near the junction at Greys Road. He said parts of the pavement there were also sinking because lorries had driven over them and the gullies in the road were filled with silt, so there was flooding after heavy rain. He suggested raising the pavements or installing bollards to prevent drivers going over them. Cllr Eggleton said: We need to stop people driving on the pavements. About three people have come to me because theyre fed up with it. They cant see anything being done about it. I understand lorry drivers have to get to jobs but I dont understand why they have to drive on pavements. Each time it happens the electricity cables and piping beneath the pavements are pushed down. Thats why the pipes fracture. Highways should not have to repair pavements because lots of lorries have driven over them. Cllr Eggleton said loose kerbstones posed a danger to pedestrians. If an elderly person or anyone crossing the road stepped on one they would just trip over it, he said. I would not be surprised if someone has already done it. I know things are tight but what price do we put on peoples safety? To me its first and foremost. Cllr Arlett said there was a problem in Elizabeth Road with workers parking there. The more they drive on the pavements or the grass verges, the more they are damaged, he said. Would you wish that to happen outside your house? Its going to cost someone money to refurbish all that. This is why our council tax keeps going up. The people that damage it should pay to have it repaired. A county council spokesman said: Our inspector has inspected the site and, at the time of the visit, the kerbstones required repair but did not present a safety hazard. Non-urgent repair work was ordered but we will visit again shortly to check the current condition of the stones. In the next financial year we are planning to resurface the section of Elizabeth Road from Valley Road to Greys Road and hopefully residents will be pleased with the results. A Thames Valley Police spokesman said: The force receives more than one million calls a year and has to prioritise these incidents based on the threat, risk and harm to the public. Of these calls, 15,000 are related to parking but 60 per cent are not matters for the police. Parking enforcement in Henley continues to be the responsibility of police. It should be reported to police when a vehicle is parked dangerously, on zig-zag lines or a pedestrian crossing, or in a way that would prevent emergency vehicles from access. It should be reported to your local council when a vehicle is parked opposite or within 10m of a junction, over a dropped kerb, in spaces reserved for blue badge holders, residents or motorbikes, in marked taxi bays, cycle lanes or red lines, near a school entrance, bus or tram stop, or on double yellow lines. If the parking does not fall within these parameters, then it is classed as inconsiderate and is a civil matter and it is for you to arrange with neighbours or your management company or, failing that, speak to your local council. If a vehicle is parked on the kerb, these incidents are dealt with on a case-by- case basis. On some streets, parking on the kerb is unavoidable so neither the police nor the council would intervene. In some cases, parking on the kerb could restrict access for those who are vulnerable or who have disabilities so we would attend. If a polite word with the driver does not resolve the situation, you may wish to seek advice from Citizens Advice or a solicitor. (Newser) While six Democrats vying to replace him were clashing in Las Vegas, President Trump was holding a rally one state overand he gave the audience in Phoenix a debate update. "I hear hes getting pounded tonight," Trump said of Michael Bloomberg. "I hear they're pounding him." Trump once again claimed that the Democratic Party was trying to rob Bernie Sanders of the nomination,the Hill reports. "And thats OK, because we don't care who the hell it is, were going to win," Trump told the crowd at Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum . "We have to." story continues below Trump, who started his Phoenix speech about 30 minutes after the Democratic debate began, mocked other Democratic candidates including "jerk" Tom Steyer, who didn't qualify for the debate, reports CBS. After the rally, the president tweeted: "Mini Mike Bloombergs debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesnt knock him out of the race, nothing will." In a statement, Trump's campaign claimed that the Democratic Party is "in the midst of a full-scale meltdown." (Read more President Trump stories.) Video PlayerClose Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, visits the Taikang Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 15, 2020. [Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu] Currently, more than 30,000 medical personnel, including military medics, have been sent to Wuhan from across the country. BEIJING, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) China has gone all out to treat COVID-19 patients both with mild symptoms and in severe conditions alike in the epicenter city of Wuhan as the number of hospital beds reserved for COVID-19 patients has risen to about 40,000 and the supporting medical personnel over 30,000. Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who is leading a central government team guiding the epidemic control on the ground, visited frontline medical workers in Wuhan and made further instructions on treating patients with all-out efforts. Noting that some effective methods have been tried, Sun said it is necessary to draw experience in a timely manner and form treatment protocols that can be promoted across hospitals. She also called for concerted efforts from multi-disciplinary medical teams to treat critically ill patients to reduce the mortality rate. Military medics arrive at Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 13, 2020. [Xinhua/Li Yun] Currently, more than 30,000 medical personnel, including military medics, have been sent to Wuhan from across the country with specialties in a number of disciplines, including respiratory infections, heart and kidneys. Wuhan now has 11,000 intensive care medical staff, accounting for 10 percent of the nation's total. Sun said some positive changes have taken place in the epidemic prevention and control, but the situation remains grim in Wuhan. She urged the medical treatment work to be moved forward to prevent mild symptoms from developing into severe ones, and called for strengthening treatment combining traditional Chinese and Western medicine in temporary hospitals. The guiding team also called for strengthening the detection of fever patients in Wuhan to block the transmission route of the virus. The number of designated hospitals in Wuhan, reserved to treat COVID-19 patients, especially those with severe symptoms, has risen to 45, with a capacity of 19,161 beds. In addition, 12 temporary hospitals, which were converted from gyms, convention or exhibition centers, have all been put into use with a combined over 20,000 beds planned for patients with mild symptoms. (Source: Xinhua) Handout photo of Taoiseach Leo Varadkar with other members of the Fine Gael party during the first sitting of the 33rd Dail in Dublin. Photo: Maxwell Photography/PA Wire THE new Dail has met for the first time since a seismic general election result delivered a new and fractured political landscape. Despite several hours of speeches and four separate votes, no Taoiseach has been elected - although for the first time ever a woman and a Sinn Fein candidate has secured more votes than any other contender for the job. But Mary Lou McDonald fell short in her first bid to lead the next government. Tonight, Leo Varadkar is formally resigning as Taoiseach but will remain on as caretaker until the parties can cobble together a government - and that may take some time. Here are five things we learned on day one of the 33rd Dail. Mary Lou in the lead - but with borrowed socialist votes The Sinn Fein leader got 45 votes for Taoiseach but with Fine Gael and Fianna Fail opposing her nomination, she was soundly beaten. She secured the backing of left-wing TDs in RISE, Solidarity, People Before Profit and Independents4Change. But there were significant caveats outlined in their respective Dail speeches. In stark terms, RISE TD Paul Murphy said: "If you go into government with Fianna Fail it will represent a betrayal of your voters." Ms McDonald said earlier she hopes it does not take until April to get a government but Sinn Fein faces an uphill battle and will lose the support it gained from left-wing TDs today if it sits down with Fianna Fail in the coming weeks. Read More Meet the new Dail boss (same as the old boss) To no great surprise, Sean O Fearghail was re-elected Ceann Comhairle. He is the first Dail chairman to serve consecutive terms since Tipperary Independent Sean Treacy in the 1990s. Although it is a secret ballot, his re-election was a fait accompli with Fine Gael and Sinn Fein keen to pare back Fianna Fails Dail numbers and Micheal Martin encouraging his own ranks to back their man. It was a landslide 130-28 victory for Mr O Fearghail with two spoiled ballots. Independent TD Denis Naughten contested the election and made a compelling pitch, promising to bolster the power of Dail deputies to hold bodies like the HSE to account and tackle the growing prevalence of state agencies to hide behind GDPR. Mr O Fearghails pitch involved listing many of the reforms he has championed and to serve the members rather than be a slave to the system. His election was widely-welcomed with Green Party leader Eamon Ryan describing him as a "superb" Ceann Comhairle in the last Dail. Independent TDs make their mark It wasnt the traffic-stopping event of 2016 but the Healy-Raes made a loud entrance to the Dail with Kerry TDs Danny, Michael and a horde of their supporters landing outside Leinster House before midday. Danny and daughters Maura and Elaine provided the soundtrack with two accordions and a tin whistle while supporters gave a rousing rendition of the 'Rose of Tralee'. Danny Healy-Rae finished with a rendition of Amhran na bhFiann. Another Independent who caught the eye was new Limerick County TD Richard ODonoghue who arrived at Leinster House in a borrowed 1959 Plymouth car that he claimed was used in the convoy for John F Kennedys visit to Ireland in 1963. Mr ODonoghue declared: "I'm here to protect rural Ireland. Other Independents including former Labour TD Michael McNamara, former Fine Gael candidate Verona Murphy and former Army Ranger Cathal Berry, who were all elected to the Dail last week, made more low-key entrances. A very different seating plan The scale of Fine Gaels losses in the general election was evident from the moment the 33rd Dail began with the party unable to fill the back row of the government side of the house. Minister Richard Bruton and veteran backbencher Bernard Durkan sat alone in the back row and several empty seats away from a couple of Independents. With just 35 Fine Gael TDs elected to this Dail, even Peter Fitzpatrick was able to squeeze in beside his former party colleague Martin Heydon. Later Denis Naughten was sat among the Fine Gael ranks with one minister speculating that both he and Fitzpatrick could be tapped for a return to the Fine Gael fold in the weeks ahead. Elsewhere, Sinn Feins seismic election victory was evident from their occupation of an entire wing of the Dail chamber with four TDs spilling over into seats formerly occupied by Fine Gael. Over on the main opposition benches, Fianna Fail found themselves boxed in between the Socialists on their right and the new and old Independent TDs on their left. Meanwhile, Labour leadership rivals Alan Kelly and Aodhan O Riordain sat beside each other for much of the day but didnt appear to be exchanging much small talk. Micheal Martin scrambles for 'terra firma' The embattled Fianna Fail leader arrived to the plinth with his reduced parliamentary party to make the case that the electorate actually voted for centrist parties to form a government, and not necessarily a Sinn Fein-led left-wing administration. He said the parties need to get back to terra firma, in terms of what this result means and in terms of the implications. Mr Martin may be coming under pressure internally, but he is now applying pressure to caretaker Taoiseach Leo Varadkar telling him that the Fine Gael needs to engage in government talks. These appear to be the first tentative step towards discussions to form a grand coalition. There was a telling remark from Fianna Fail TD Thomas Byrne later in the Dail when he said: "We need a Taoiseach who will command a majority." He hopes it can be Mr Martin in a few weeks' time and if Sinn Fein is still being ruled out then that majority government can only happen with Fine Gael. Crucially Mr Martin secured 41 votes for Taoiseach, five more than Mr Varadkar, which puts him in pole position as an alternative to Ms McDonald. PM-designate forms coalition govt that will include Ennahda party in a deal that will prevent parliament dissolution. Tunisias prime minister-designate Elyes Fakhfakh has announced the formation of a new coalition government after coming to an agreement with Ennahda, the biggest party in parliament, in a deal that will potentially end a months-long political crisis. With this latest agreement, the proposed government will likely win a confidence vote in parliament in coming days, likely avoiding an early election. Fakhfakh proposed the line-up of a new government on Saturday and then said negotiations would continue after the Islamist Ennahda party sought some changes. With 53 seats in the 217-member parliament, Ennahda said it would only join a unity government that brings together parties from across Tunisias political spectrum. President Kais Saied said on Monday he would dissolve parliament and call for an early election if the new government failed to win a parliamentary confidence vote. The proposed government must be approved by the deeply fragmented parliament in coming days. Among the other proposed ministers in his cabinet are Mongi Marzouk as energy minister, Mohamed Ali Toumi as tourism minister and Thouraya Jribi as justice minister. Qalb Tounes or Heart of Tunisia, the second-biggest party with 38 seats, also said it would not back the government after the prime minister-designate excluded it from the coalition. Fakhfakh had promised to name a government that would draw only from parties he considered aligned with the goals of Tunisias 2011 revolution and committed to rooting out corruption. The cabinet proposed includes Ennahda, Tahya Tounes, Achaab , Attayar, El Badil parties and independents. Tunisia faces a series of long-term economic challenges which threaten to undermine public trust in the young democracy, and which demand political decisions that could be unpopular. Tunisian officials said the IMF was waiting for the new government to start talks over a sixth review of its IMF loan programme. Tunisia needs to borrow about $3bn internationally in 2020 to meet spending commitments. Since the 2011 revolution, unemployment has been high and growth low, while the government has sunk further into debt with a series of big budget deficits that foreign lenders demand it bring under control. Elections in September and October returned Saied, a political independent, as president, and a parliament in which Ennahda held fewer than a quarter of the seats. Former New York city mayor Mike Bloomberg downplayed Chinas contribution to climate change during Wednesday nights Democratic debate, arguing that the rapidly industrializing superpower has slowed down its pollution in recent years. Well youre not going to go to war with them. You have to negotiate with them, and weve seen how well that works, with tariffs that are hurting us Bloomberg said. What we have to do is convince the Chinese that it is in their interest as well their people are going to die, just as our people are going to die, and well work together. In all fairness, the Chinese have slowed down, its India that is even a bigger problem. While China has made progress in curbing emissions in recent years, it remains the worlds largest emitter of carbon dioxide due to its massive population and commensurate manufacturing base. Bloomberg has repeatedly defended the Chinese Communist Party in the past, and said in September that Xi Jinping is not a dictator, when asked a similar question on PBSs Firing Line on how to limit Chinas greenhouse emissions. China is doing a lot, India is doing some, but I think that China is doing a lot. Yes, they are still burning a lot of coal-fired power plants, yes they are, but theyre now moving plants away from the cities, Bloomberg claimed. The Communist Party wants to stay in power in China and they listen to the public. When the public says I cant breathe the air, Xi Jingping is not a dictator, he has to satisfy his constituents or hes not going to survive. The comments drew a scathing criticism from Senator Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), who called Bloombergs remarks the kind of stupid you cant script. Bloomberg has extensive business interests in China, and has headed efforts to allow the trading of Chinese currency in U.S. banks. In 2013, The New York Times reported that Bloombergs media conglomerate stifled its reporting on Chinese premier Xi Jingping after Beijing imposed restrictions on the Bloomberg News for its investigative reporting. Story continues Bloomberg did not deny that his company halted its reporting in accordance with Beijings censorship demands in comments to CNBC in 2014. In China, they have rules about what you can publish. We follow those rules. If you dont follow the rules, youre not in the country, he said. More from National Review A pair of Navy ships have for the first time nabbed a new kind of Iranian surface-to-air missiles during recent arms seizures in the Middle East. U.S. weapons experts have gotten their first look at a new "uniquely Iranian-designed missile," Navy Capt. William Urban, a U.S. Central Command spokesman, told reporters on Wednesday. Sailors aboard the destroyer Forrest Sherman and cruiser Normandy confiscated eight of the new 358-missiles during separate weapons seizures in the Middle East. The Forrest Sherman got five of the surface-to-air missiles in November and the Normandy seized three more earlier this month. Both operations took place in the Arabian Sea. Urban declined to talk about the new missile's capabilities or what the U.S. has learned about it. The eight missiles -- along with anti-tank missiles, pieces for land-attack and anti-ship cruise missiles, high-explosive warheads, drone parts, blasting caps and other items -- were on their way to war-torn Yemen. Related: Navy Cruiser Seizes Huge Iranian Arms Cache in Arabian Sea "The United States is confident that these weapons fit the pattern of weapons smuggling to the Houthis in Yemen, which Iran has been engaged in for five years," Urban said. "The latest two seizures add substantial support to the body of evidence that Iran continues to smuggle advanced weaponry into Yemen." The new Iranian missile has been used in the Yemeni battle space, Urban added. The Houthis have also used some of the Iranian-developed weapons outside of Yemen, firing missiles at U.S. warships and attempting to attack civilian targets in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, he said. The guided-missile cruiser USS Normandy (CG 60) boards a stateless dhow in the Arabian Sea, seizing an illicit shipment of advanced weapons intended for the Houthis in Yemen, Feb. 9, 2020. (U.S. Navy/Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Michael H. Lehman) Though Urban repeatedly declined to confirm that the caches were being provided to the Houthis directly by the Iranian government, he said the vessels stopped by the pair of Navy ships were contracted specifically for the purpose of delivering the weapons. "If the weapons were manufactured in Iran, then they came from Iran," Urban said. "Certainly 150 anti-tank guided missiles do not just walk away. They are illicitly smuggled for a purpose and that purpose is to spread lethal assistance to the Houthis, to Iranian proxies." Iran has for years backed the Houthis, who in 2015 seized control of much of Yemen, forcing the president to flee to Saudi Arabia. The yearslong war to restore him to power has led to a devastating humanitarian crisis in the country. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said after the Navy's intercept of the second weapons cache bound for Yemen that the world must reject Iran's attempts to spread violence. "The U.S. Navy interdicted 358 Iranian-made missiles + other weapons components on their way to the Houthis in Yemen," Pompeo tweeted. "This is another example of the world's largest state sponsor of terror the Islamic Republic of Iran continuing to defy the UN Security Council." -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. Read More: Here's the List of Clinics That Will No Longer Serve Military Families Several years ago, in an overheated room in Beijing, I was forced to endure a stern lecture from a Chinese foreign ministry official. My sin: As the editor at The Wall Street Journal responsible for the papers overseas opinion sections, I had apparently insulted the entire Chinese people by publishing the work of a well-known terrorist the courageous Uighur human-rights activist Rebiya Kadeer. I had to clench my jaw to suppress the rejoinder that Chinas best-known tyrant, Mao Zedong, has his portrait overlooking the killing field known as Tiananmen Square. I thought of that episode this week on hearing Wednesdays news that the Chinese government has decided to expel three Wall Street Journal reporters based in China two Americans and an Australian in retaliation for the headline of an opinion column by Walter Russell Mead, China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia. In a style reminiscent of my own experience, the Foreign Ministry issued a statement claiming, The Chinese people do not welcome media that publish racist statements and smear China with malicious attacks. Any reader of Meads column, headline and text alike, will note that there isnt an iota of racism in it, though it makes a devastating case about the ways in which the coronavirus epidemic has exposed the broader fragility of the Chinese system. And those familiar with The Wall Street Journal will know that the paper, like The Times, enforces a strict separation between its news and opinion sections meaning the reporters facing expulsion had absolutely nothing to do with the writing and publication of Meads column. A shooting that left a woman hospitalized had Bernalillo County sheriffs deputies shutting down a Southwest Albuquerque intersection for several hours Thursday morning. Connor Otero, a BCSO spokesman, said they closed off Atrisco Drive in both directions between Bridge and Salvador to investigate. Otero said the investigation began after a woman arrived to a hospital with a gunshot wound that she possibly received on Atrisco. On Thursday afternoon, Otero said the woman is alive but did not give an update on her condition or any other details on the shooting. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 16:41:22|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close NEW YORK, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- "China's commitment, competence and readiness to change and improve" are the three reasons why the world should be confident that China will overcome the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19), a leading U.S. expert on China has said. UNPRECEDENTED MOBILISATION "China's commitment to fight the illness is exemplified by the country's astonishing mobilisation to stop its spread," Robert Kuhn, chairman of the Kuhn Foundation, told Xinhua via email on Wednesday. Kuhn said he "takes it seriously" when the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, China's highest authority, calls the epidemic "a major test of China's system and capacity for governance." It is "a phrase of such significance that in my 30-plus years of watching China, I do not recall the like," Kuhn said. "China's mobilisation is unprecedented in global health history. Nowhere could it work like it works in China. And the reason it works relates to how the party system works," he added. "The whole country is marching to this music. This is China's monumental 'whole of society' commitment. In President Xi Jinping's words: mobilising the people of the whole country, the whole army, and the whole party," the U.S. expert said, adding that "confidence in Beijing's pledge to end the epidemic is rooted in the country's record in mass mobilisation to achieve objectives, including poverty alleviation." The CPC has been using the same kind of commitment and mobilisation to eliminate poverty in the country, lifting tens of millions out of poverty since 2012, he said. UNIQUE STRENGTHS "To me, one of the probative insights of why and how China can and will contain the epidemic is the remarkable parallelism between China's war on the novel coronavirus and China's war on poverty," Kuhn said. First, he spoke highly of the operational leadership of the CPC, which is not just giving directives and pronouncements but actually implementing programs and projects through the CPC's organizational structure -- the central government and five levels of local government -- provincial, municipal, county, township and village. Second, he commended the leadership of President Xi, who by voicing his personal commitment and allocating his personal time sets an example that leaders and officials must follow. Xi visited scores of poor villages across China, said Kuhn. According to public data, the Chinese president has been to all the 14 regions of extreme poverty listed in the national directive on poverty reduction. Similarly, when Xi visited hospitals, spoke with frontline doctors, the whole country gets the message," Kuhn said. Third, the mobilization leadership of the CPC, which is able to command the country's human and material resources, for example, assigning "sister" relationships between strong provinces and specific cities in Hubei Province, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, is laudable, he said. "An important factor is that since the CPC controls the PLA (People's Liberation Army), through the Central Military Commission of the CPC, of which Xi is obviously chairman, the military can be mobilized instantly to help in domestic crises, like earthquakes, floods and now epidemics," Kuhn said. Several thousand military medical personnel have been flown to Wuhan, Hubei to engage on the frontlines working with infected and suspected patients, the U.S. expert said. "The party leadership has also shown a willingness to change and correct mistakes, as seen in its admission of shortcomings in containment efforts so far," he said. "China's readiness to change and improve is a critical part of its governance system." Kejriwal believes in good governance and takes pride in his Hindu identity, points out Sudhir Bisht. IMAGE: Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his wife Sunita offer prayers at the Hanuman Mandir in Connaught Place on the eve of the Delhi assembly election, February 7, 2020. Photograph: Arun Sharma/PTI Photo I am an admirer of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party since I was a child. In 1971, when I was not even in my teens, I had an opportunity to listen to a marvellous man of the Bhartiya Jan Sangh, the original version of the present day BJP, who was the candidate from the New Delhi Lok Sabha constituency. Professor Manohar Lal Sondhi had been a former IFS officer and was seeking re-election from New Delhi. He had won the seat in 1967. During that time the Jan Sangh's symbol was the earthen lamp. The 'lotus' came onto the scene much later, in 1980, after the failed experiment of the Janata Party. The Jan Sangh had merged into the Janata Party in 1977, but resurrected itself in 1980 as the BJP with the now omnipresent Lotus symbol. I was very impressed by whatever Professor Sondhi spoke and in the next few days, I had the good fortune of listening to a very fiery speech by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. I maintain that ABV is the best speaker India ever produced, although his speech lost its magic by the time he was elected PM for the third time in 1999. Sushma Swaraj comes next and then comes Narendra Damodardas Modi. So I have been a Jan Sangh/BJP admirer since my childhood and my heart leaps with joy whenever the lotus scores over its rivals. What I have always liked about the BJP is its unambiguous pride in the Indian identity and in its oldest religion. I like the BJP's abhorrence for pseudo secularism that does not shed even a single tear at the mass exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley. I like the BJP's disdain for the perpetuation of a country-within-country that kept J&K away till about a few months ago. I also admire its distinct preference for the private sector with a strong regulatory mechanism in contrast to the other parties's obsession with the public sector. I laud the BJP's courage in introducing bold reforms in economic and social spheres and I am a great admirer of its present top leadership represented by Modi. But I am not averse to Arvind Kejriwal's rise in politics either. His landslide victory this month at the lotus's expense has not saddened me much. I see a junior version of Modi in Kejriwal. Here is a chief minister who bows his head before Hanuman and breaks into the Hanuman Chalisa without having to look at a paper. He knows the verses by heart and seems to be taking pride in that fact. Here's an activist who took the plunge into politics with a view to win power, but with the ultimate objective of serving the people. India has many great men who were powerful politicians but were shy of wielding power themselves. Was it because of their genuine disdain for power or was it their fear of failure to deliver on the expectations of their supporters? Who knows? Only Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan can tell. Kejriwal has the guts to get into a position where the buck stops with him. That is so much like Modi. Modi also takes full responsibility and leads from the front, something that Kejriwal has emulated. Moreover, Kejriwal in many ways has imbibed the Modi model of administrative leadership. He has put a firm plug on the leaky government-spending pipeline by reducing corruption substantially. Kejriwal has also shown no remorse for being a practitioner of Hinduism. The Haj subsidy for Muslim pilgrims has been there for years and was criticised by us. Now Kejriwal has organised pilgrimages for hundreds of poor Hindu senior citizens and is not ashamed of it. By the way, he has also increased the salaries of 180 imams and their helpers by more than 80 percent, but Kejriwal has not been vocal about it. He takes pride in organising pilgrimages for Hindus, but is not boastful of increasing the salaries of imams. This reversal of appeasement politics is admirable and requires political guts. Kejriwal's journey had its lows and its highs. The lowest of his lows was his stupidity of taking on Modi by raking up imaginary issues. Kejriwal also lost a lot of respect during his initial years in power by his repeated assaults on the titans of the Indian private sector, Mukesh Ambani being his favourite whipping boy, for no plausible reason at all. He also had problems with the lieutenant governor of Delhi, with the Delhi Development Authority, with the municipality. So determined was he to pick up fights that he even sat on a dharna with his cabinet colleagues in the heart of New Delhi. The Hindu newspaper reported in January 2014: 'Showing no signs of relenting, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal today ruled out negotiations to end the standoff with the Centre and threatened to flood Rajpath with lakhs of supporters that can disrupt the Republic Day celebrations.' Nevertheless, Kejriwal gave up his activism towards the middle of 2018 and contributed all his might in building his reputation as an achiever. He had already been doing a fine job, but his frequent diatribes against the Union government gave an impression of his being more of an activist than a leader. My article on Rediff.com highlights this aspect of him being his own worst enemy. From mid-2018 onwards, Kejriwal stopped focusing on fighting and started concentrating on highlighting his achievements. It is indeed true that Kejriwal took quite a few steps to serve the people of Delhi. He is passionate about Delhi just as Modi is passionate about India. The biggest plus for Kejriwal has been his corruption-free sarkar. Isn't it straight out of Modi's book? Kejriwal has successfully plugged the leakages that occurred due to corruption and using the funds thus saved, he has been able to provide big relief to the poor and lower middle class of Delhi. The consumption of electricity is free if one's meter reading is below 200 units. Of course, the resourceful residents of Delhi have been able to exploit this by installing two meters in their house if it is a double-storied building. So in effect, a family with two meters and with less than 400 units of combined electricity consumption is virtually getting free bijli! Similarly, water consumption is free if a family uses under 20,000 litres of water. I have personally checked that many unauthorised colonies started receiving water supply as mini greenfield pipeline projects were undertaken with gusto by the Delhi Jal Board, a department directly under Kejriwal's control. These colonies hitherto depended upon groundwater and water tankers but now receive good quality water for four hours at least twice a week. This takes care of their drinking water problem at least and the water is free, if one doesn't consume more than 20,000 litres water in a month. The mohalla clinic infrastructure built by Kejriwal is more hyped than it is useful, but it has created a good impression about his being alive to the need of bringing primary healthcare at the doorsteps of his people. Another area where Kejriwal has scored a massive win is in his success in forcing private schools to keep school fees at the same level as it was in 2015. This is a very, very major achievement and this has played out nicely and positively even with upper middle class voters. The mainstream media has not highlighted this achievement of Kejriwal adequately, but this is a big factor in the Aam Aadmi Party's win over the BJP in Delhi. Kejriwal's free bus ride scheme for the women of Delhi has given him a massive thumbs up from poor women. I have interacted with some women and they say that if Kejriwal had his way, then he would have also ensured free metro rides for women. Kejriwal's massive support base among women is modelled around Modi's special connect with women with his 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' campaign. As a resident of Delhi, I am happy with Kejriwal. To me the most important thing is that neither my CM nor my PM is corrupt. I can take legitimate pride in this fact. In addition, just as my PM built toilets for the poor of this country, my CM has provided primary healthcare at the doorsteps free. I am happy that just as my PM gave free cylinders to the poor households of rural India, my CM has given relief of at least a thousand rupees per month to the poor of Delhi by way of free water and free electricity. I do not buy the argument that 'nothing is free, everything is paid by the taxpayers eventually.' If freebies are financed by the savings that accrued by eliminating corruption, then why complain? And if this logic of 'nothing-is-free' is applicable for the CM, then it is applicable for all welfare schemes of the Union government too. So why should I not be happy with Kejriwal at the helm in my state and Modi at the Centre? Kejriwal is a true follower of BJP ideology that believes in good governance and takes pride in its Hindu identity. In the coming weeks I expect Kejriwal to give a clarion call to Muslims to lift the blockade of the national highway in Delhi that passes through Shaheen Bagh. He will do so in unequivocal terms, but in a soft tone. He is not someone who supports the burqa-clad women who for no rhyme or reason have disrupted the life of a part of South Delhi for the past eight weeks. In Kejriwal I have a Chotta Modi as CM and he and the original Modi will lead us well. Dr Sudhir Bisht, author and columnist, writes from New Delhi and tweets @sudhir_bisht. He can be contacted at sudhir_bisht@rediffmail.com Ratan Tata, the chairman emeritus of Tata group of companies, recently unveiled snippets of his life story to a popular Facebook page Humans of Bombay in a three portion post. The first part, shared on February 12, threw light on Tatas relationship with his grandmother and her role in shaping his character. It also talked about his carefree college days and surprisingly, his tale of falling in love and almost getting married. In the second portion of the post, shared on February 19, Tata talked about the role of JRD Tata as his mentor and how he played an integral part in Tatas journey - guiding him to become the Chairman of the Tata Sons amidst criticism. In this post, Ratan Tata shared some more fond memories of his grandmother. He then revealed how after her demise he went to work as an intern at his family establishment in Jamshedpur. And, his life as an intern is something many young adults may relate to. It was a total waste of time -- I was shuffled around from department to department, but nobody actually told me what to do! I guess, I was looked at as a family member, so no one said anything to me -- but I spent 6 months just trying to make myself look useful, Tata said. Eventually, he got a firm foothold in the company after he moved to Tata Steel and found ardent interest in different projects assigned to him. By the time I finished 6 years in Jamshedpur, architecture had become my hobby -- I enjoyed designing homes for myself and my mother, but apart from that, my life was dedicated to the business, Tata added. In the next few lines, the business tycoon expressed that in 1991 when JRD Tata decided to step down as Tata Sons Chairman, it created a wave of apprehensions among people about his ability to lead the group of companies. If you were to find the publications of that time, the criticism was personal -- JRD got clubbed with nepotism and I was branded as the wrong choice, he said. Ratan Tata with his mentor JRD Tata. (Facebook/ Humans of Bombay) Tata then revealed how he was able to give apt answers to all the critics and prove himself as a worthy successor of JRD Tata. The post concluded with Tata talking about the affectionate relationship he shared with JRD Tata which was more like a father and a brother. Read the detailed post here: The post has garnered almost 10,000 reactions and tons of comments from netizens. He is such an amazing man, a real inspiration, writes a Facebook user. The more I hear about his life, his struggles, his dedication the more I respect him. Such an amazing person, exclaims another. Waiting for the 3rd part, thanks for giving us the glimpse of the personal life of this great man, says a third. What do you think about this post? Also read | Ratan Tata talks about love, life and more in this post. Read In first visit since the killing of General Soleimani, US secretary of state reaffirms security concerns over Iran. On his second day in Saudi Arabia, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo visited American troops after discussing security concerns over Iran with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Pompeo met with US military commanders at a Saudi airbase where about 2,500 US troops are stationed in response to perceived threats from the Islamic Republic. The base includes a squadron of US Air Force F-15E fighter jets that fly daily missions over Iraq and Syria and two American Patriot missile batteries prepared to knock down any Iranian attack against the kingdom. Pompeos visit to Prince Sultan air base and a nearby US Patriot battery highlights the longstanding US-Saudi security relationship and reaffirms Americas determination to stand with Saudi Arabia in the face of Iranian malign behaviour, the State Department said in a statement. 200217222143105 Pompeo said the American military presence is a form of deterrence to deliver us to a place where I, as secretary of state, can get the diplomatic outcome that the president is seeking. The US began building up its military presence in the kingdom last summer as President Donald Trump and his oil-rich ally Riyadh accused Iran of attacking tankers in the Gulf and Saudi oil installations, incidents that roiled global energy markets last year. Tehran denies involvement in the attacks and Riyadh has since appeared eager to engage in cautious diplomacy to ease friction. Tensions in the region further heightened up following the US assassination of Irans top military commander Qassem Soleimani as he was visiting Iraq on January 3. The move triggered Iranian retaliation with missile strikes targeting Iraqi military bases housing US troops. Balancing act Prior to his departure to Saudi Arabia, Pompeo said he planned to raise US concerns over the kingdoms human rights record. Some Saudi-American citizens have been imprisoned in the kingdom as part of a wider crackdown on perceived critics of the powerful crown prince. They include Badr al-Ibrahim, a writer and physician, and Salah al-Haidar whose mother is prominent womens rights campaigner Aziza al-Yousef, who faces trial for her activism. Others are barred from leaving Saudi Arabia such as Walid Fitaihi, a Boston-area physician who was swept up in an anti-corruption campaign launched by Crown Prince Mohammed in late 2017. The Saudis share our strategic objectives. They are an important ally and partner, Pompeo told reporters Thursday. At the same time, we continue to make clear our expectations with respect to a broad range of human rights issues. When Walter Moses Burton arrived in Fort Bend County in 1860, he was a slave. His owner taught him how to read and write. The reading and writing lessons would pay off. In 1869, a few years after the Civil War ended and slaves were freed, Burton was elected the first African-American sheriff in Fort Bend. He went on to serve four terms as a state senator, representing Fort Bend, Waller, Wharton and Austin counties. During Reconstruction, African-Americans for the first time were granted the right to vote and seek public office. Newly freed slaves outnumbered whites in many southern counties, setting the stage for Burton and other blacks to get elected. Now Fort Bend, a county of more than 765,000 residents, is one of the most diverse in the country. Voters recently elected the countys first Asian county judge and first black district attorney. Still, street names and markers paying homage to shameful episodes of history dot the county. A street in a Missouri City neighborhood, for example, is named after the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Residents are seeking to change who is recognized on one neighborhoods streets. A group of African-American men are seeking to rename two streets in the New Territory subdivision that now honor plantation owners who took part in the states notorious convict leasing system. One of the streets would be named after Burton. The push comes as the county and nation mark Black History Month. We didnt come up with this to fight, said Paul Matthews, a Sugar Land resident and founder of the Buffalo Soldiers Museum. We came up with it to educate. An awesome time Walter Moses Burton was brought to Texas by his owner, a North Carolina planter named Thomas Burke Burton, according to Merline Pitres book, Through Many Dangers, Toils and Snares: Black Leadership in Texas. Thomas Burton owned a plantation and other large farms in the county. He later sold plots of his land for $900 to Walter Burton, who became one of the richest and most influential blacks in the county. In his book, The Negro in Texas 1874-1900, Lawrence Rice writes that 16 counties in Texas, including Fort Bend, were mostly composed of African-American residents between 1870 and 1900. Fort Bend County voters likely elected more African-Americans than any other county, Rice wrote. They included L.H. McCabe as district clerk and Bill Easton, Jack Cobbin and Tom Taylor to the commissioners court (in 1880). Its an awesome time honestly in American history because its the first time the country ever legitimately experimented with interracial democracy, government and interracial cooperation, said Matthew Clavin, a professor of history at the University of Houston. The successes that you find are short-lived but that being said, these Reconstruction governments, they fundamentally changed the Constitution. Burton was well-respected, but while he served as sheriff, a white deputy was hired to arrest all white persons. It is unknown whether Burton was allowed to arrest whites, Pitre noted. Burton was elected to the Texas state Senate in 1873, though his election was contested by a white Democratic opponent on the grounds that Burtons name had been listed on the ballot three different ways. The Senate confirmed his election. When a new state constitution was adopted in 1876, all incumbents had to seek re-election. In a newspaper, someone objected to having a black senator, describing Burton as a good subject with which to teach an object lesson on the Darwinian theory, according to Rices book. Many white southerners grappled with their former slaves rising to positions of power, Clavin pointed out. (Burton) still has to work with former Confederates, former slave owners because they still have an inordinate amount of power, said Clavin. Blacks have an abundance of power for the first time in American history, but their power still in some respects pales in comparison to white power. Despite the setbacks, Burton, described by Rice as tall, broad-shouldered and with whiskers that turned gray, became a well-respected senator. He was referred to as the best-dressed man in the Senate, with a peacemaking tone. Senators even gave him a gold-headed ebony cane as a sign of respect. Burton also was an advocate for education, pushing through a bill that helped establish the Prairie View Normal School, now Prairie View A&M University, according to Pitre. Reconstruction ended when federal troops were pulled out of southern states in 1877, to be replaced by a system of racial segregation and violence against blacks. It just aint right Paul Matthews has lived in New Territory, a subdivision with thousands of residents, since 1996. But something about the recent discovery of the remains of 95 African-Americans on a school construction site in Sugar Land stuck with him. The remains are believed to be of inmates who were contracted out by Texas prison officials to perform cheap labor across the state. Sugar plantation owners Ed H. Cunningham and L.A. Ellis were part of the convict-leasing system, leasing prisoners from the state from 1878 to 1883. The system targeted African-American men. Living in the neighborhood and driving down Ellis, said Matthews, I thought what my mom used to say, It just aint right. Matthews set out with other men to change the two street names inside their neighborhood. He thought of Burton as the perfect choice for one of the street names. During his time in the Texas Legislature, Burton, along with other black lawmakers, spoke out against the convict-leasing system. In the Senate, Burton produced a petition from Fort Bend residents opposed to convicts being employed in the county, according to Pitre. Matthews wants to change the other street name to honor Garrett Gamble, a Marine and Fort Bend High School graduate who was killed at age 20 while serving in Afghanistan. He filled out a street name change application form, which must receive approval from the owners of three properties on both Ellis and Cunningham streets: A homeowners association, Levee Improvement District No. 7 and a Fort Bend ISD school. However, the board of the homeowners association said the street name changes should be voted on by the residents. Ultimately, 85 percent of residents opposed the name change, while 15 percent were in favor. Members of the LID board said they would take no action, according to Matthews. The local school did not respond, Matthews said. But he hasnt given up. Bruce Lemmie, who has lived in New Territory for 25 years, has been helping Matthews. He said he was unfamiliar with Cunningham and Ellis until learning more recently about the convict-leasing system. For years Ive seen those names and they didnt mean anything to me because I grew up with people named Ellis and Cunningham and they were good people, said Lemmie. When I heard the stories about the names, I became very concerned because it sheds a bad light on the community itself. In my mind, if youre going to name a street after somebody, its somebody who has done something positive. After delivering a presentation at the homeowners meeting, he has been stopped by neighbors, many from different cultural backgrounds, saying they want to help. This is a very diverse community, said Matthews. I dont believe this is 1920, where people (say) No thats is not a good idea, or If you dont like it, leave. A victorious life Inside the sprawling Morton cemetery in Richmond, a small black fence surrounds Burtons gravesite. Brown leaves are strewn on the grass in front of his gray tombstone. A black historical marker sits in the front of Burtons grave site, extolling his life story. Burton has been honored in Fort Bend. An elementary school in Fresno was named after him. The schools mascot is named The Burton Sheriff. After Burton retired from the Senate in 1882, he moved back to Fort Bend and continued working in politics and farming until he died in 1913. Press accounts painted Burton as having the type of success an African-American could strive for, writes Rice. His own personal wealth was estimated at $50,000. I just thought he was an incredible figure in history, said Lemmie. To have someone who could be looked at as a victim, who leads a victorious life. brooke.lewis@chron.com Date night for two off-duty officers ended with them foiling a robbery at a restaurant chain in Kentucky. Chase and Nicole McKeown are both police officers in Elizabethtown and have been married for six months. The night started out normal when they went to Raising Cane's on Saturday, but things took a strange turn while they were eating dinner. A man came in wearing a mask and went up to the counter. "I think we kind of both saw him at the same time," Nicole said during a news conference. At first, she thought the man may be sick, given flu season, but soon realized the mask was for a less innocent reason, according to CNN affiliate WDRB. "I looked at [Chase] and said, 'That's kind of odd.'" Nicole said they saw the employee behind the counter put their hands up and that's when both realized what was happening. The officers drew their weapons and chased the suspect out of the establishment. On surveillance video, the suspect can be seen dropping the weapon, WDRB reported. The couple continued to pursue him a few blocks away from the restaurant and held him at gunpoint until the Louisville Metro Police arrived and arrested him. "It is my belief that if not for the heroic actions of these two officers the perpetrator's actions inside the business would have escalated, they acted honorable and heroically," said Deputy Dan Mason of the LMPD's robbery unit. The couple said officer instinct just kicked in as the situation progressed. "We both looked at each other and said 'Is this what's going on? OK let's go,'" Chase said. "When it comes to peoples' live in danger, any other officer would have done the same thing," Nicole said. The suspect is now in custody in Louisville, according to police. GPs are being ordered to test Australians who have travelled to Bali in the past two weeks for the coronavirus if they have any flu symptoms. This week NSW and Victorian health authorities updated their advice to test for the virus if patients had been to Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, or Indonesia and show signs of 'a clinically compatible illness'. 'This recommendation is based on the volume of travel between these countries, Australia and China, and the current epidemiology of COVID-19,' the updated advice, seen by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age said. GPs are being ordered to test Australians who have travelled to Bali in the past two weeks for coronavirus if they have any signs of flu symptoms Though Indonesian authorities have tested some people for COVID-19 they have not reported any confirmed cases to the World Health Organisation The countries mentioned have recorded multiple cases of coronavirus with the exception of Indonesia which has not reported any cases to the World Health Organisation. Experts, however, have said the country, which includes the popular tourist island of Bali, would likely have undetected cases. University of Queensland professor of virology Ian Mackay said he was sceptical Indonesia did not have one case of COVID-19 adding that 'it's a big country' and likely to have undetected infections. Royal Australian College of General Practitioners president Harry Nespolon agreed, saying anyone returning from Bali and experiencing flu-like symptoms should be tested for the virus. 'Indonesia's got a population of 267 million people, it has almost no effective screening - they say they do, but they probably don't. If you're looking at the stats, there should be some cases in Indonesia,' he said. Figures show that about 25,000 people flew between Australia and Bali each week during 2019 The updated testing guidelines stem from the communicable Diseases Network Australia which is chaired by the country's chief medical officer Brendan Murphy. The advice contradicts the federal health department's guidelines that only people that have been to China should be tested. Figures show that about 25,000 people flew between Australia and Bali each week during 2019 - which means more than 100,000 people have probably made the trip since the outbreak began towards the end of December. Bali is also a top tourist spot for China with about 1.2 million Chinese tourists travelling to the island in 2019. It is understood Indonesia has tested just 112 people for COVID-19 with 108 being negative and four being processed. The current SmartTraveller advice for Indonesia does not include a warning about coronavirus but some other south-east Asian countries such as Thailand have the warning the tourists should take precautions. Bali's airport (pictured) is a hub for tourists from Australia and many south-east Asian countries Thomas Sureau and his partner Lisa Buisine took possession of the keys to an abandoned cafe in the village of Congrier faced with the task of breathing life back into a small corner of La France Oubliee, or Forgotten France. The former owners of the Chene Vert, who also sold newspapers and cigarettes, rolled down the shutters for the last time in December 2018, leaving the village of 900 people without a central meeting point. The decline in Congriers fortunes is mirrored in small towns and villages across rural France where empty properties and vacant storefronts tell of the slow decay of local businesses. Sureau and Buisine were handpicked by the company SOS which specialises in social projects and targets re-opening 100 cafes this year in struggling villages. We wont just be running a cafe, Buisine said, surrounded by boxes in the house the local mayor has given them rent-free for six months as they seek to revive the cafe that was once the social heartbeat of the village. A view shows a street in Congrier, France, February 15, 2020. Congrier, 900 inhabitants, is one of the first villages selected for the "1,000 cafes" project launched in France to save cafes in small villages in order to breathe life back in the community. Picture taken February 15, 2020. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe (REUTERS) Well open a post office, a small store, there will be a games room with billiards and darts. Well host themed parties and do roast chicken on Sundays for churchgoers leaving mass, she added. Many villages are battling to hold onto local businesses in an era of e-commerce and out-of-town shopping malls. More than one in every two French communes is now without a village shop. The deterioration of local services and a sense of abandonment in villages like Congrier in the western region of Pays de Loire helped provoke the deep-seated anger that spurred the yellow vest public rebellion against President Emmanuel Macron. Those anti-government protests roiled France for months and highlighted the extent to which many French people living outside big cities and towns feel their communities are being hollowed out and ignored by Paris. A view shows Congrier, France, February 15, 2020. Congrier, 900 inhabitants, is one of the first villages selected for the "1,000 cafes" project launched in France to save cafes in small villages in order to breathe life back in the community. Picture taken February 15, 2020. REUTERS/Stephane Mahe (REUTERS) We desperately need a convivial meeting place, Congrier mayor Herve Tison said. I used to see folk in the bar whom I no longer see. The project dubbed 1,000 cafes has received bids from 550 villages to help resuscitate their local cafe and applications from about 1,500 people to run them. Sureau and Buisine paid nothing for the premises and as well as the free rent the mayors office will finance renovations to the tune of 10,000 euros. They hope to re-open in March, much to the joy of locals. In tiny villages like ours, you need activities, said retired couple Marie-Paule and Claude. (This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.) Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Feb 20 (Reuters) - The following are the top stories in the Wall Street Journal. Reuters has not verified these stories and does not vouch for their accuracy. - UBS Group AG Chief Executive Officer Sergio Ermotti is stepping down and will be succeeded by current ING Groep NV boss Ralph Hamers, in the latest leadership change at a major European bank. (https://on.wsj.com/329b9V3) - L Brands Inc is near a deal to sell control of Victoria's Secret to a private-equity firm in a transaction that values the lingerie brand at about $1.1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. (https://on.wsj.com/32arTeo) - General Electric Co is in talks with Airbus to design and sell an engine variant for Airbus' latest wide-body, called the A330neo, according to people familiar with the matter. (https://on.wsj.com/2SIS20Y) - A federal judge on Wednesday slammed PG&E Corp for falling behind on efforts to trim trees near power lines, which are designed to reduce the risk that its equipment will spark more California wildfires. (https://on.wsj.com/37GVXQa) - The National Credit Union Administration said Wednesday evening that it had sold the majority of its medallion loan portfolio to the investment firm Marblegate Asset Management LLC. (https://on.wsj.com/2vNjh1m) (Compiled by Bengaluru newsroom) Shellhorn Rd., 21700 block, Feb. 9 to Feb. 10. Electronics were stolen from a church entered by forcing a door. A trailer on the property was also entered by force but nothing was reported missing. Aliya Feroe recalls the flustered OB-GYN who referred her to another physician after learning she identified as queer. For Rhi Ledgerwood, who was designated female at birth, identifies as trans and doesnt have sex with men, it was a doctor advising about condoms and pregnancy prevention. For Tim Keyes, who came out as gay at age 17, its when doctors automatically assumed he sleeps with women. Ask any LGBTQ patient about awkward doctor visits and chances are theyll have a story to tell. When being heterosexual is presumed even in doctors offices, those who identify otherwise can feel marginalized and less likely to seek medical care, contributing to health problems that include high rates of depression, suicidal behavior, alcohol and drug use and inadequate health screenings, LGBTQ advocates say. Now, moves are afoot to remedy that. The American Medical Association vowed in November to push for a federal ban on gay conversion therapy. Medical schools are beefing up education on LBGTQ health issues. And some schools are making a major push to recruit LGBTQ medical students, backed by research showing that patients often get better care when treated by doctors more like them. Feroe, Keyes and Ledgerwood all pursuing medical careers are part of the trend. LGBTQ physicians deserve an equal standing in the medical community and LGBTQ patients deserve the same quality of care awarded to anyone else, said Feroe, a third-year Harvard medical student. Increasing LGBTQ enrollment and training in LGBTQ health issues in medical schools can help achieve those goals, advocates say. Exact numbers of LGBTQ medical students and doctors are unknown. In 2018, the AMA added sexual orientation and gender identity as an option for members to include in demographic profiles the group compiles. Of the 15,000 doctors and students who have volunteered that information so far, about 4% identify as LGBTQ. Thats similar to Gallup estimates for the general U.S. population, although LGBTQ advocates believe the numbers are higher and rising as more people are willing to out themselves. This past fall, Harvards entering class of medical students was 15% LGBTQ, a milestone that is no accident. The Association of American Medical Colleges primary application used by U.S. schools began offering prospective students the option of specifying gender identity and preferred pronouns in 2018. Harvards school-specific application allows applicants to identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. A response is not required, but the option sends a message that youre wanted, said Jessica Halem, the medical schools LGBTQ outreach director. We know that doctors need to look like and be a part of the communities they serve, Halem said. We have gay Muslim students. Lesbians from China. Students who are survivors of conversion therapy, she said. They are now out and very proud gay people and they are healing those wounds. Feroe had intended to present herself as straight in medical school, fearing doing otherwise would be off-putting for patients and make her feel like an anomaly among her peers. But Harvard has an active LGBTQ student group on campus, faculty members who ask students if they prefer being called her, him or they, and coursework addressing LGBTQ medical care. Halem said that includes what screening tests are needed for women who have sex with transgender men, the hormone treatments to prescribe for transgender patients, and what it means when someone identifies as pansexual. A 2017-18 Association of American Medical Colleges report found that while most schools include some LGBTQ coursework, half reported three or fewer lectures, group discussions or other learning activities. Lindsey Tanner is an Associated Press writer. Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness kicked off the Australian leg of his Road to Beijing tour in Brisbane, on Thursday. But not before he took the opportunity to get up close with some of Australia's cutest wildlife at Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary. The 32-year-old had a a ball as he fed kangaroos and cuddled koalas at the wildlife park. Koala-lity time off! Queer Eye's Jonathan Van Ness got up close with some of Australia's most adorable wildlife at the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Queensland this week, before he kicks off Road To Beijing Tour in Brisbane 'Holy Quad Lutz Brisbane, I wasnt even ready for your beauty!! Youre beyond GORGE & FUN!!,' the American TV star captioned the post. Jonathan enjoyed a tours of the wildlife sanctuary, which he shared to his Insta Story. In the clip he exclaimed how cute the local bats were. 'There like flying cats, I want to hold one,' he is heard saying off-camera. Cute: The 32-year-old had a a ball as he fed kangaroos and cuddled koalas at the wildlife park The visit comes after Jonathan threw his support behind Australian comedian Celeste Barber's mammoth bushfire fundraising efforts. He took to Instagram in January to urge his 4.8 million followers to donate to the worthy cause. 'My heart has been broken these last days watching the situation deteriorate there,' Jonathan said of the devastating fires across Australia,' he said at the time. 'The people, animals, and spirit of Australia is so beautifully unique': Jonathan said he felt a special connection to Australia since 'falling in love' with the country while filming a special episode of Queer Eye in 2018 in the rural town of Yass (above) Jonathan said he felt a special connection to Australia since 'falling in love' with the country while filming a special episode of Queer Eye in 2018 in the rural town of Yass. 'The people, animals, and spirit of Australia is so beautifully unique and seeing how much everyone has banded together to help is major especially @celestebarber and everything she has done to raise funds for her country in this crisis,' he said. 'Its estimated over 480 MILLION animals are dead and as fires are continuing to grow. They will surly (sic) need all the support they can get.' Obsession: The Road to Beijing tour is a parody inspired by his ongoing attempt and 'lifelong obsession' to become a figure-skating prodigy for the 2022 Beijing Olympics 'If youre in a position to donate anything. That would be very much appreciated,' he concluded. Jonathan, who rose to fame as a grooming expert on reality show Queer Eye, is currently on tour to star in his own one-man comedy show - Road to Beijing. The show is a parody inspired by his ongoing attempt and 'lifelong obsession' to become a figure-skating prodigy for the 2022 Beijing Olympics. The next show is scheduled in Adelaide on Friday. HANAU, Germany - In the German town of Hanau, a longtime immigrant destination with decades of coexistence between people of different origins, residents were left with the fear Thursday that their community was targeted after a gunman shot and killed nine people of foreign background. Residents shook their heads at a level of violence that is rare in Germany, and wondered at the degree of anti-foreigner hatred expressed by the attack in a place where Turks and ethnic Kurds patronize the same hookah bars, and where members of both groups were among the victims along with people with roots in Bulgaria, Bosniaand Romania, according to media reports. Among the dead was the owner of the Midnight Shisha Bar, an immigrant from Turkey who worked and saved to buy his own business, along with the gaming kiosk next door. He was very hard-working, he had a big circle of acquaintances and a lot of friends, very friendly with employees, said Hanau native Metin Kan, who recently helped out at the gaming parlour for several months. He said the area was clearly targeted because it was a centre for immigrants. Its shocking, he said. Turkish officials have said five of the victims were Turkish nationals, and Germanys federal prosecutor, Peter Frank, said all nine people killed were of foreign background. One of the victims was a Bosnian, identified by a relative from his hometown of Prijedor as Hamza Kurtovic. The relative, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Kurtovic was in his early 20s and was born in Germany, where his parents immigrated nearly 50 years ago. He said the shooter lived in the same neighbourhood of Hanau as Kurtovic as well as two other victims, and that they knew him in passing. The gunman has been identified as 43-year-old Tobias Rathjen, a Hanau resident who was found dead alongside his mother in his townhouse after the rampage. Both suffered from gunshot wounds, and a firearm was found on Rathjen, authorities said. In a hate-filled manifesto posted on his website, Rathjen called people from multiple countries, including Turkey, Israel, Syria, Iraq, India and Vietnam to be completely exterminated. Almost 3 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany. Many came to the country decades ago as guest workers, helping fill a labour shortage after World War II, and they include many of the countrys Kurdish minority. Despite the decades-old conflict in Turkey between the government and Kurdish separatists, the two groups get along on a personal level in Hanau, said Baran Celik, a 27-year old mechanical engineer whose grandfather arrived from Turkey in the 1970s, and whose father is the cousin of one of the victims. He saw no problem at all between the two groups. The families and friends all know each other, he said. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan did not differentiate between victims in a statement issued after the attacks. May God rest the souls of our expatriate citizens who lost their lives in yesterdays heinous attack in the German city of Hanau; and I call upon patience for their families and loved ones, he said. Turkeys Foreign Ministry said the Hanau shootings were a call to action, not just in the town but across Europe. The indifference shown in Europe to the fight against rising xenophobia has led to new attacks being added every day, the ministry said in a statement. It is time to say stop to these attacks. Hanau Mayor Claus Kaminsky, joined Thursday by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer to place flowers at the scene, said the attack was incomprehensible in a town with a long tradition of different groups getting along. The large town of about 100,000 residents is some 25 kilometres (15.5 miles) east of Germanys financial capital Frankfurt, and is on the Frankfurt subway line. City Councilman Thomas Morlock noted that Hanau has a history of accommodating people from elsewhere, including serving as home to some 30,000 U.S. troops during the Cold War. Longtime resident Ali Gemgucek, who heard the shots while out walking Wednesday night, was blunter about Hanaus gritty side, referring to the street where the shooting took place as a swamp not unlike the areas around neighbouring Frankfurts train station. Bilal Yildiz, a bartender from the Arena bar where the other shooting occurred, came to stand outside the police line at the Midnight Shisha bar. He had been scheduled to work behind the bar Wednesday night but was off with a bad shoulder. The bartender who took his shift was slightly injured. He hid under a chair, hes a lucky man, said Yildiz. We have never heard of such a thing. Speaking to Turkeys Haber television, victim Beyazkender Muhammed said he was one of only a few people who survived the shooting at the Arena Bar, the scene of the second attack. Lying in his hospital bed with a bandaged shoulder, Muhammed said he and his friends heard five or six shots outside before the gunman entered and opened fire on about a dozen people inside. He shot the first people he saw in the head. A man fell to the floor, Muhammed said in German-accented Turkish. Then he fired at all of us. I got shot in the arm while I tried to hide behind the wall. Muhammed said he lay on the floor on top of someone, and someone then lay on top of him, and someone else then on top of him. There was a kid underneath me with a hole in his throat, he said. The kid said to me: my brother, I cannot feel my tongue; I cannot breathe. I said to him, recite the Kalima Shahadat prayer (from the Quran). He recited the Kalima Shahadat, he called on everyone to recite it. There was no other sound, just the two of us. I didnt see him escape or anything. ___ Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Sabina Niksic in Sarajevo and David Rising in Berlin contributed to this story. BETHALTO Todd E. Marbles, 36, of St. Louis, was charged Tuesday with home invasion. He allegedly entered a home in the 100 block of Sunset Drive on Tuesday while a woman was present and pulled her hair and pushed her down. Bail was set at $100,000. WOOD RIVER Joary A. Axley, 21, of Troy, was charged Tuesday with 11 counts of burglary. He allegedly entered 11 automobiles on Sunday with the intent to commit a theft. Bail was set at $100,000. ALTON Matthew L. Richardson, 31, of Alton, was charged Tuesday with unlawful possession of methamphetamine. He allegedly possessed less than five grams of the drug on Tuesday. Bail was set at $15,000. ALTON Dominique D. Williams, 37, of Madison, was charged Tuesday with criminal damage to government supported property. He allegedly damaged a holding cell at the Alton City Jail, 1700 E. Broadway, on Feb. 14. Bail was set at $25,000. EDWARDSVILLE Christopher L. Roberts, 28, of South Roxana, was charged Wednesday with burglary and felony theft. He allegedly entered a building in the 4800 block of Street Car Road, Edwardsville, on Monday with the intent to commit a theft. He is also accused of stealing hunting accessories worth more than $500. Bail was set at $50,000. ALTON Ashley N. Tidwell, 34, of Alton, was charged Tuesday with unlawful possession of methamphetamine. She allegedly possessed less than 15 grams of the drug on Monday. Bail was set at $15,000. WOOD RIVER Lori A. Bennett, 47, of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, was charged Wednesday with unlawful possession of methamphetamine. She allegedly possessed less than five grams of the drug on Sept. 17. Bail was set at $15,000. WOOD RIVER Michael T. Johns, 30, of Wood River, was charged Wednesday with unlawful possession of methamphetamine. He allegedly possessed less than five grams of the drug on Feb. 14. Bail was set at $15,000. [February 20, 2020] Parexel Announces Acquisition of Leading Pharmacology Modeling & Analytics Modeling Firm Model Answers BOSTON and DURHAM, N.C. and BRISBANE, Australia , Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Parexel , a leading provider of solutions to accelerate the development and delivery of innovative new therapies to improve world health, from Clinical through Commercialization, today announced it has completed the acquisition of Model Answers, a consultancy firm based in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. Model Answers provides pharmacokinetic (PK) and pharmacodynamic (PD) modeling, simulation and analysis services to customers in the life sciences industry to help increase the likelihood of successful drug development. As part of the acquisition, the Model Answers highly specialized staff have joined Parexels growing Clinical Pharmacology, Modeling and Simulation team, bringing a proven approach to PK/PD modeling and customer collaboration. Modeling and simulation have quickly become a valuable part of the drug development process, helping to reduce risk and increase the likelihood of success by predicting outcomes that can result in a more informed trial design, said Sy Pretorius, M.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Medical & Scientific Officer. By leveraging Model Answers deep expertise and proven approach to modeling and simulation, Parexel will expand our ability to leverage this innovative approach, helping our customers to maximize their resources by improving understanding and decision-making at every stage of development. Founded in 2005, Model Answers has extensive experience working across many therapeutic areas including oncology, neurology and rare diseases while also providing important access to the growing Asia/Pacific market. The company has significant experience developing precliical PK and PD models for effectiveness and neutropenia, scaling to first-in-human studies, then supporting Phase I through to NDA submission. Model Answers team of Modelers, Clinical Pharmacologists, Data Managers and Programmers has supported numerous successful filing activities to the FDA, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the Pharmaceuticals and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA) and the Therapeutic Goods Association (TGA). Model Answers was founded on the idea that by providing highly specialized modeling capabilities in a way that is collaborative and efficient for customers, we can increase the likelihood of success in drug development, said Bruce Green, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, Model Answers. We are excited to join an organization with global capabilities where, as part of a larger combined team, we can bring our unique modeling and simulation approach to more life sciences companies, ultimately helping bring new medicines to patients sooner. Parexel will also leverage the proven Model Answers Process, including best practices and proprietary software solutions that support modeling and simulation. These include Model Answers client-interactive tools that drive both efficient collaboration and client ownership of complex models to ultimately help them make smarter, faster, and more informed clinical data management and drug development decisions. About Parexel Parexel is focused on supporting the development of innovative new therapies to improve patient health. We do this through a suite of services that help life science and biopharmaceutical customers across the globe transform scientific discoveries into new treatments for patients. From clinical trials to regulatory and consulting services to commercial and market access, our therapeutic, technical and functional ability is underpinned by a deep conviction in what we do. For more information, visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn , Twitter and Instagram . Parexel is a registered trademark of Parexel International Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Parexel Contacts: Media: Wendy Ryan, Parexel Tel.: +1 781-434-5104 Email: [email protected] Kathryn McMahon Arrigg, PAN Communications Tel.: +1 617-502-4300 Email: [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The feud between Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg boiled over in Wednesday's Democratic debate as the two moderate midwesterners attacked each other's qualifications and ended the evening with Klobuchar refusing to shake his hand. The two president candidates exchanged a series of sharp back-and-forths during the two hour debate that accumulated in Klobuchar deliberately giving Buttigieg a wide berth when the event ended, walking around him to exit the stage in such a way she would not interact with him. That also meant she didn't have to participate in the handshake candidates traditionally share when the night is over. Buttigieg gave her the side eyes as she cut around him, turning her back to him when she walked by. Buttigieg shook hands with the other Democratic presidential contenders as he made his way off stage. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg clashed repeatedly in Wednesday's Democratic debate When the debate ended, Klobuchar gave Buttigieg a wide berth The two candidates have seen tensions rise between them after Klobuchar rose in the polls following her third place finish in the New Hampshire primary and Buttigieg has started to see his numbers drop. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll out on Wednesday, Buttigieg was at 8 per cent to Klobuchar's 7 per cent. There were multiple points during the debate the two clashed with the Minnesota senator sarcastically saying she wished she was as perfect as Buttigieg and the former mayor of South Bend criticizing her for belittling his experience. Buttigieg attacked Klobuchar repeatedly, striking at her for her voting record in the Senate and for not knowing the name of the president of Mexico. 'I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete,' Klobuchar told him. Klobuchar was touting her work on immigration issues when Buttigieg went in for the kill, criticizing her for voting for Donald Trump's head of Customs and Border Protection and for voting to make English the national language. 'If you're going to run based on your record of voting in Washington, then you have to own those votes, especially when it comes to immigration,' he told her. 'You voted to confirm the head of Customs and Border Protection under Trump, who is one of the architects of the family separation policy. You voted to make English the national language. Do you know the message that sends in as multilingual a state as Nevada to immigrants?' He also delivered a message to immigrants in Spanish, which is one of the eight languages he speaks. That is when the Minnesota senator snapped back at him. 'I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete. But let me tell you what it's like to be in the arena,' she said. 'In fact, I have opposed, not supported, two-thirds of the Trump judges, so get your numbers right. And I am in the top 10 to 15 of opposing them.' Klobuchar carried on in her defense even as the debate moderators tried to move forward to a new topic. She pointed out the head of border patrol she voted for was a career staffer supported by multiple Democrats and then hit Buttigieg as merely citing talking points. 'You have not been in the arena doing that work. You've memorized a bunch of talking points and a bunch of things, but I can tell you one thing. What the people of this country want, they want a leader that has the heart for the immigrants of this country, and that is me,' she said. Buttigieg and Klobuchar are fighting to be a moderate alternative to Sanders And Buttigieg struck back her tone, citing the important work mayors do. 'You know, maybe leading a diverse city that was facing ruin doesn't sound like the arena to you. I'm used to senators telling mayors that senators are more important than mayors, but this is the arena, too. You don't have to be in Washington to matter. You don't have to be on Capitol Hill for your work to be significant,' he said. The two candidates share a common political philosophy of moderate Democrats and a political base in the Midwest. And they are fighting to emerge as the best moderate alternative to liberal front runner Bernie Sanders. Klobuchar was also asked about an interview she had given Telemundo where she couldn't name the president of Mexico Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. She called it a 'momentary forgetfulness.' 'I don't think that that momentary forgetfulness actually reflects what I know about Mexico and how much I care about it. And I first want to say greetings to President Lopez Obrador,' she said. 'I made an error,' Klobuchar continued. 'I think having a president that maybe is humble and is able to admit that here and there maybe wouldn't be a bad thing.' But Buttigieg pushed back, pointing out she serves on a Senate committee that deals with Mexico. 'But you're staking your candidacy on your Washington experience. You're on the committee that oversees border security. You're on the committee that does trade. You're literally in part of the committee that's overseeing these things and were not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country to our south,' he said. 'Are you trying to say that I'm dumb? Or are you mocking me here, Pete?,' Klobuchar responded. 'I'm saying you shouldn't trivialize that knowledge,' he said. Buttigieg criticized Amy Klobuchar for forgetting the name of the president of Mexico Elizabeth Warren defended Klobuchar 'I said I made an error. People sometimes forget names,' she said. 'He's basically saying that I don't have the experience to be president of the United States. I have passed over 100 bills as the lead Democrat since being in the U.S. Senate. I am the one, not you, that has won statewide in congressional district after congressional district. And I will say, when you tried in Indiana, Pete, to run, what happened to you? You lost by over 20 points to someone who later lost to my friend, Joe Donnelly. So don't tell me about experience. What unites us here is we want to win. And I think we should put a proven winner in charge of the ticket.' Buttigieg didn't hold back in his response. 'This is a race for president. This is a race for president. If winning a race for Senate in Minnesota translated directly to becoming president, I would have grown up under the presidency of Walter Mondale. This is different,' he said. But it was Elizabeth Warren who got in the last word when she defended Klobuchar. 'Can I just defend Senator Klobuchar for a minute? This is not right. I understand she forgot a name,' Warren said. 'It happens. It happens to everybody on this stage.' The audience applauded her. A man in North Carolina converted his entire home into a sophisticated growing and processing center for marijuana, according to the sheriffs office. Then he got caught. Sheriffs deputies arrested 58-year-old Michael Wayne Shoffner in Mocksville after seizing 723 plants and 127 pounds of marijuana from the residence, the Davie County Sheriffs Office said in a Facebook post Wednesday. The residence had new rooms built and had been rewired to accommodate grow lights, timers, fans, and a ventilation system to maximize the growing potential of the marijuana being cultivated inside the residence, the post states. Officers located marijuana in varying stages of production ranging from seedlings to mature plants to processed marijuana ready for sale. Michael Wayne Shoffner, 58, was arrested on charges of manufacturing marijuana, maintaining a dwelling for a controlled substance and seven counts of possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. Down the road, deputies found four handguns, three shotguns, ammunition and more than $1,700, the Sheriffs Office said. Shoffner was charged with manufacturing marijuana, maintaining a dwelling for a controlled substance, and seven counts of possessing a firearm as a convicted felon. His bond was set at $25,000 on the drug charges and $100,000 on the gun charges. Jail records show he was arrested Feb. 13 and has since bonded out. The Sheriffs Office attached a dozen photos of the home to the post, including the dismantled evidence in the back of an enclosed trailer. But some residents said law enforcements efforts were better spent elsewhere. What a waste of tax dollars, another said. Focus on all the human trafficking and meth that runs rampant through your county. Leave the poor old man alone. Another seemed to be sarcastically thanking officers for protecting our precious precious snacky snacks. STAMFORD The attorney charged in the Jennifer Dulos case pleaded not guilty Thursday during a brief court appearance where he was also seen passing a note to one of his lawyers. Kent Douglas Mawhinney, 54, has been jailed on $2 million bond since his arrest at gunpoint on Jan. 7 for his alleged connection with the high-profile disappearance and suspected homicide of Jennifer Dulos last May. Mawhinney was considered a close friend of Fotis Dulos and represented him in a $2.5 million lawsuit filed by Jennifer Dulos mother, Gloria Farber. On Thursday, Mawhinney appeared for less than a minute as his attorney entered the not guilty plea. It was Mawhinneys first court appearance since he was arraigned last month. A piece of paper could be seen in the chest pocket of Mawhinneys tan prison-issued uniform while he was in court. When the hearing ended, Mawhinney, his hands cuffed behind his back, leaned over and his attorney Lee Gold took the note from his pocket. When Gold and fellow defense attorney Jeremy Donnelly left the courthouse about a half an hour later, they declined to comment about the contents of the note. Mawhinney is next scheduled to appear in court for the case on March 31. When Mawhinney was in Hartford court last week for sexual assault and violating a protective order charges in connection with alleged incidents involving his own estranged wife, a judge said a deal could be close in that case pending discussions in the Jennifer Dulos homicide. In Mawhinneys June arrest warrant, police said his wife believed Fotis Dulos was working with her husband to get rid of her. She stated that she believed that Mawhinney wanted her dead, police said in the arrest warrant. Mawhinney is accused of conspiracy to commit murder in the Jennifer Dulos case by attempting to provide an alibi for Fotis Dulos on the morning of the incident and he was also linked to an East Granby gun club where a witness described finding a human grave around the time of the disappearance, according to his arrest warrant. According to the warrant, Mawhinneys cellphone pinged off a tower near the Windsor Rod & Gun Club around 11 p.m. on May 31 hours after police visited Fotis Dulos Farmington home and conducted an intense search in Hartford where they say clothing and other items were found in the trash containing Jennifer Dulos blood. The next day, Fotis Dulos and his former girlfriend, Michelle Troconis, were arrested on tampering with evidence and hindering prosecution charges. Since Fotis Dulos died Jan. 30 from an apparent suicide, the dynamic of the prosecutions case has changed, shifting the focus to Mawhinney and Troconis, who pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit murder earlier this month. Mawhinney was considered a flight risk after he tried to avoid being arrested and was eventually taken into custody at gunpoint in Tolland. Since his arrest, Mawhinney lost custody of his children from a previous marriage and had his license to practice law suspended because he was unable to serve his clients while incarcerated. While the outbreak has forced most leading brands like Apple, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Realme to rework their launch dates and pricing strategies, Samsung, which struggled to maintain its hold over the market last year, has taken the lead. As China reels from the coronavirus epidemic, Korean mobile phone maker Samsung seems to be recovering some of the lost ground. While the outbreak has forced most leading brands like Apple, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, and Realme to rework their launch dates and pricing strategies, Samsung, which struggled to maintain its hold over the market last year, has taken the lead. The data from the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) shows that the local unit of the Korean major has lined up nine new handset models for launch in early 2020. Among major brands, only Redmi (from Xiaomi) and LG have registered two models each since January 1 with the national standards body, followed by Motorola and Coolpad (one each). Delhi-based local brand Cellecor, which has a presence in the entry-level segment, tops the chart with 15 models registered since January 1. Hitech, another Indian brand, holds the third spot with eight models registered over this period. According to Faisal Kawoosa, lead analyst at TechArc, the trend clearly indicates that major OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) are delaying their launches. "Typically, after the BIS registration, models are launched in 4-6 weeks. He said, As of now it gives advantage to Samsung among major OEMs as it can procure from Korea and other countries, resulting in low impact on its supply chain. With manufacturing suspended in China and supply of key components and handset models in jeopardy, Chinese firms are feeling the heat. Though many of them have set up facilities in India, they continue to depend heavily on supplies from China. Samsung, however, is somewhat immune to supply disruptions in the neighbouring country. This is because the firm, which has been manufacturing most of its handsets locally, ramped up its capacity in 2018 by adding new lines and product categories at its Noida facility, doubling its installed capacity to 120 million units from 68 million a year. Moreover, unlike its rivals, Samsung has an in-house supply chain of key components like printed circuit board and display panels. And its largest production base is in Vietnam. Navkendar Singh, research director at IDC, said Samsung was less likely to be impacted by the recent crisis. Unlike its Chinese rivals, Samsungs operations are spread across continents. "Thus, it has a larger inventory level and its plans are not solely dependent on China or India. "Supply crunch from China, thus, may help it during the first quarter here, he said. We not only produce most of our components in India, but also, we have a huge facility in Vietnam. "Thus, we are not expecting any major impact on operations because of the coronavirus crisis, said a senior executive of Samsung India. According to the person, the firm is on course to roll out its two new flagships - Samsung Galaxy Z Flip and Samsung Galaxy S20+ - by March. It has opened pre-booking for the models. Samsung had steadily lost market share last year - from 25.3 per cent in the June quarter to 15.5 per cent in the December quarter. Samsung, which was once the market leader, was pushed to the third spot by the end of 2019 - behind Xiaomi and Vivo. With its rivals pushed to the corner, it has a chance to extend regain lost ground by April. Photograph: Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters Richard Lee, who has been police chief in the small town of Croydon, New Hampshire for 20 years, was stripped of his duties on Tuesday A small town police chief in New Hampshire stripped off his uniform and walked out into a snowstorm in just his underwear after finding out he was being fired from his one-man department. Richard Lee became upset when the three members of his local selectboard in Croydon voted on Tuesday night to eliminate the one-man police department. Lee has been police chief in the small town of Croydon, which has a population of just 700 people, for 20 years. The selectboard voted to move to 100 percent coverage by the New Hampshire State Police. Lee, who was at the meeting when the decision was made, was told to immediately turn in the key to his police cruiser, his guns and his uniform. He went into an office he shared with town officials and started stripping off his clothes before the board chairman. 'I gave them my uniform shirt. I gave them my turtleneck, I gave them my ballistic vest,' he said. 'I sat down in the chair, took off my boots, took off my pants, put those in the chair, and put my boots back on, and walked out the door.' The police chief stripped off his uniform and walked out of the meeting at the town hall (above) on Tuesday night. He walked a mile in his underwear and boots before his wife found him He didn't have spare clothes or a ride home. Lee walked nearly a mile towards his home before his wife found him and picked him up. Lee said he didn't want to face the possibility of being arrested if he left with his uniform or cruiser. As he was taking off his clothes, Lee said the chairman told him he didn't have to do that. Lee, however, said those were the orders. He said he is now discussing what happened with his attorney. In addition to being the town's only police officer, Lee is also its sole prosecutor as well. The Chairman Russell Edwards and two other selectmen, Ian Underwood and Joseph Marko, have not commented about the incident. Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh attended a special meeting of the ASEAN Coordinating Council (ACC) in Vientiane on February 20. browser not support iframe. The event drew foreign ministers from the 10 ASEAN member states and ASEAN Secretary General Lim Jock Hoi. Speaking in his capacity as ACC Chairman, Minh said the meeting aims to coordinate efforts and discuss ASEAN joint work against novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). It is also meant to realise the ASEAN Chairs Statement on the blocs collective response to COVID-19 epidemic, he said, adding that ASEAN member states will work closely together to promote a cohesive and responsive ASEAN community so as to cope with the danger of COVID-19 that is threatening the safety of citizens and the development of member countries and the region. Following the meeting, ASEAN and Chinese foreign ministers also attended a special meeting to discuss cooperation in the fight. When the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) erupted in 2003, China and ASEAN also held a special high-level meeting to debate combating the epidemic./. VNA Democratic presidential candidates (LR) former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg speaks as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) react during the Democratic presidential primary debate at Paris Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Only Sanders Opposes Brokered Convention: Nevada Debate Highlights Here are the evenings highlights from the Democratic presidential debate that took place in Las Vegas on Feb. 19. The candidates on stage were former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, 78; former Vice President Joe Biden, 77; Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), 78; former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, 38; Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), 70; and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), 59. Only Sanders Opposes Brokered Convention Every candidate but Sanders said that they support delegates at the Democratic National Convention this summer choosing the Democratic presidential nominee. If no candidate wins a majority of the delegates, a brokered convention could then take place. Such a convention, in which party bosses or delegates decide the nominee through floor fights and negotiations, hasnt happened since the invention of the modern primary system five decades ago. Asked about such a possibility at the debate, five candidates said it would be fine. But Sanders said that whichever candidate goes into the convention with the most nominees should get the nomination. Appearing on CNN early Feb. 20, former presidential candidate John Kerry pushed back on Sanderss contention. This is not a race for the most delegates going into the convention, Kerry, a Biden supporter, argued. When you become a candidate for president of the United States, you know what the rules are. And if youre going to be a good president, you need to play by the rules, something that Donald Trump doesnt do. Former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said before the debate on Wednesday that a brokered convention should take place if no candidate gets a majority of delegates. Weve had brokered conventions before, and weve always come up with good candidates. Its not the end of the world. It just slows the process down, he said. Former U.S. Sen. Harry Reid listens during an interview in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (John Locher/AP Photo) Bloomberg, Sanders Spar Over Wealth, Lawmaker History While every candidate took time to attack at least one rival, a lengthy back-and-forth was seen between Bloomberg and Sanders, with the ex-mayor repeatedly criticizing Sanders over his decades as a U.S. lawmaker and Sanders hitting at Bloomberg for his massive fortune. At one point, Sanders charged that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the middle class! Why do you complain? Who wrote the tax code? Bloomberg asked, referring to Sanderss long history as a government official. The billionaires, Sanders responded. Bloomberg dismissed the claim before Sanders added: Politicians put in place by billionaires, prompting Bloomberg to add: Most of whom are Democrats. Bloomberg said that the conversations on stage during the debate were making it easier for President Donald Trump to get reelected, before adding: Were not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called Communism and it just didnt work. Sanders, a self-described socialist, honeymooned in the Soviet Union and has praised some aspects of the system that was in place before the fall of the sovereign state. Bloomberg has also praised communist governments, primarily the Chinese Communist Party. After Sanders railed against the most wealthy in the United States, Bloomberg responded, saying: What a wonderful country we have. The best known socialist in the company happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What did I miss? Sanders said that one of his homes is in Washington, where he works as a senator, and another is in Vermont. The third, he said, is a summer camp. Where is your home? Which tax haven is your home? Sanders asked Bloomberg. The former mayor said he lives in New York City and pays all of his taxes. He added that as mayor, he raised taxes on city residents. After Bloomberg said that he earned his money by working hard, Sanders jumped in, telling him: Maybe it wasnt you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played a part in that as well. Democratic presidential hopeful Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), right, walks past former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg during the ninth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images) Trump Trolls Democrats Debating in Nevada From Arizona Rally President Donald Trump trolled his political rivals Wednesday in the first of three rallies in the West over three days as Democrats vied in neighboring Nevada to challenge him in the November election. Just minutes before Trump regaled a friendly crowd in Phoenix, Democrats watched billionaire and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg make his debut on the debate stage ahead of Nevadas party caucuses on Saturday. Trump took aim at the new target. I hear hes getting pounded tonightyou know hes in a debate, Trump said about the man he has dubbed Mini Mike because of his short stature. I hear that pounding. He spent $500 million so far and I think he has 15 points. Crazy Bernie was at 30. Trump added: Thats OK because we dont care who the hell it is, were going to win. Arizona is a 2020 battleground state and home to Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who stood by the president during the Senate impeachment trial. Democrats think with a little luck, the state could be in play. Trump said hed win the state as he did in 2016. With your help this November, we are going to defeat the radical socialist Democrats and we are going to win Arizona in a landslide, Trump said to loud applause. President Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally at Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, Ariz., on Feb. 19, 2020. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo) Biden, Bloomberg Promise Action on Climate Biden and Bloomberg were among candidates promising action on climate change if elected president. On day one in office, Biden said hed call on the signatories of the Paris Climate Accords to meet. I will get them to up the ante in a big way, he said. Asked about large companies blamed for affecting the climate, Biden said hed get them to stop. He also said hed try to take action relating to past pollution and other negative effects. This is the industry we should be able to sue, just like the tobacco companies, he said. Bloomberg said he would move to close coal-fired power plants but said eliminating fracking was not realistic. He said fracking is a technique that needs to be done correctly. The world is coming apart faster than any scientific study had predicted, Bloomberg claimed. Buttigieg told the audience that the deadline to take action is 2020. If one of several Democrats isnt elected president, Buttigieg said, it would become too late to take action. It was another jab at some of the former mayors rivals, including Sanders. Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden speaks during the Democratic presidential primary debate at Paris Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Klobuchar on Not Remembering Mexican Presidents Name Klobuchar said her momentary lapse in memory when she couldnt recall the name of Mexicos president shouldnt overshadow her knowledge about Mexico. Klobuchar was unable to name the president of the nation south of the United States when asked by a Telemundo reporter during a forum in Nevada last week. The president of Mexico is Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. He was elected last year. I dont think that that momentary forgetfulness actually reflects what I know about Mexico and how much I know about it, Klobuchar told the debate audience. I made an error. I think having a president that, maybe, is humble and is able to admit that wouldnt be a bad thing. Klobuchar said at a CNN town hall on Tuesday that she spent a long day in Washington before traveling to the forum. Billionaire businessman Tom Steyer was also unable to name Mexicos president. He didnt qualify for Wednesdays debate. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) also didnt qualify. Biden used the opportunity to highlight his experience in government, saying: Im the only one who has spent hundreds of hours in Latin America. I met with the [Mexican] president and the one before that. Democratic presidential candidates former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, left, looks on as Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (John Locher/AP Photo) Sanders Defends Decision Not to Release Medical Records Sanders defended an announcement he made Tuesday night in which he reversed course and said he wouldnt release his full medical records. Sanders suffered a heart attack last year. Sanders argued that his campaign did release the records, referring to three letters it released from doctors, which included information about the senators health history. He then pointed to Bloomberg, saying: You have two stents as well. Sanders went on to quote from one of the letters, in which a doctor said that the 78-year-old is in good enough health to be the commander-in-chief. When asked to respond, Buttigieg said that Sanders hadnt released enough information. Transparency matters, especially living through the Trump era, he said. But, he added that he was more concerned about Sanders not being transparent about how hed pay for Medicare for All. Sanders rebutted by attacking Buttigiegs plan as a maintenance of the status quo. If my plan was the status quo, why was it attacked by the insurance industry when it came out? Buttigieg responded back. Bloomberg, when asked about the wait for the release of his tax records, said it just takes a long time. The number of pages will probably be in the thousands of pages. I cant go to TurboTax, he said. Theyll be out in a few weeks. Democratic presidential hopeful Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) speaks during the ninth Democratic primary debate of the 2020 presidential campaign season at the Paris Theater in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (Mark Ralston/AFP via Getty Images) Bloomberg Embarrassed About Stop and Frisk Bloomberg says the controversial stop-and-frisk policy represents the singular thing hes really worried about and embarrassed about from his time as New York City mayor. Bloomberg said during Wednesday nights Democratic debate in Las Vegas that he has repeatedly apologized for the policy, which gave police wide authority to detain people they suspected of committing a crime. Bloomberg aggressively pursued the tactic when he first took over as mayor in 2002. A federal judge found in 2013 that stop and frisk intentionally and systematically violated the civil rights of tens of thousands of people by wrongly targeting black and Hispanic men. Bloomberg blasted the ruling at the time, calling it a dangerous decision made by a judge who I think does not understand how policing works and what is compliant with the U.S. Constitution. Biden argued that the policy stopped only after the Obama administration sent in monitors to observe the process. Candidates Attack Sanders, Bloomberg Following Warrens attacks on Bloomberg, Biden also went on the offensive against the billionaire. Biden claimed that Bloomberg didnt get a whole lot done while mayor of New York City, saying the stop-and-frisk policies that Bloomberg escalated in the city included putting thousands of young black men up against a wall. Buttigieg later attacked Sanders, saying that the Democratic nominee should actually be a Democrat. Sanders is an Independent and self-described socialist. Buttigieg pointed to the Culinary Workers Union, a local union that announced its opposition to Sanders over his Medicare for All healthcare plan. Youre at war with the union, he told Sanders. Sanders responded by saying he has more union support than other candidates. He later said it was unthinkable that any of his supporters have been attacking union workers. Sanders also said that Medicare for All is necessary because of high healthcare costs, as did Warren. She attacked Buttigiegs healthcare plan, which would introduce a public option, as well as Klobuchars plan that also features a public option. Democratic presidential candidates (L-R) former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) participate in the Democratic presidential primary debate at Paris Las Vegas in Las Vegas on Feb. 19, 2020. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Bloomberg Opposes Medicare for All Bloomberg has said he opposes Medicare for All, directly attacking Sanders, who wrote the bill outlining the socialist policy. The former mayor said in the opening moments of the debate that he doesnt think the proposal is a good idea. He then alleged that if Sanders wins the Democratic nomination, President Donald Trump will win reelection. If he goes and is the candidate, well have Donald Trump for four more years, Bloomberg said. Warren followed the attack with one of her own, quoting some disparaging remarks Bloomberg allegedly made about women before informing the crowd that the comments werent uttered by Trumpthey were said by Bloomberg. Bloomberg later said he supported Obamacare, or the Affordable Care Act, but believes it didnt go as far as we should. Find ways to expand it. Another public option, having some rules capping charges, he said. We shouldnt walk away and start something that is totally untried. Biden said Bloomberg called Obamacare a disgrace. According to an archived speech found by CNN, Bloomberg gave at Dartmouth College in 2010, Bloomberg said the final version of the act would do absolutely nothing to fix the big health care problems and also called the program a disgrace. A Bloomberg spokeswoman told CNN that Bloomberg did support the bill but wanted Congress to go further than they did. Bloomberg qualified for his first debate after the Democratic National Committee axed a donor requirement, allowing Bloomberg to qualify based on poll results alone. The Associated Press contributed to this report. Haiti - News : Zapping... Orphanage fire : Officials summoned to the Prosecutor's Office The Deputy of the Government Commissioner, Frantz Louis Juste announced at a press conference, that the Prosecutor's Office has been seized of the fire of the orphanage of the church for understanding of the Bible since the day of the drama and that the officials of this orphanage are summoned to the prosecution Friday morning February 21. Recall that the toll of the fire is heavy : 20 dead (18 children and 2 adults) https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30063-haiti-security-the-balance-sheet-of-the-fire-of-the-orphanage-revised-upwards.html and 28 surviving children. Arielle Jeanty, Director General of the Institute of Social Welfare and Research revealed to have learned on CNN, that this orphanage had a budget of 6.6 million dollars ! Cap-Haitien : Sweet Micky divides The organization "Christophiens en Marche" protests against the participation of Sweet Micky in the carnival parade of Cap-Haitien, recalling that the Capois carnival has always been to the image of the population and that "to let Sweet Micky participate in the parade would only defile the legacy that Septen, Tropic, Lakol, Kazak, Feeling and so many other formations wanted to bequeath to the following generations." Note that Wednesday morning, Sweet Micky's chariot arrived in Cap-Haitien, arousing curiosity and admiration of the population. The committee remained silent on the participation of the musical formation Sweet Micky in the Carnival parade. Launch of the BRH Research Fund Wednesday, at the convention and documentation center of the Bank of the Republic of Haiti (BRH), Jean Baden Dubois, the Governor of BRH launched the BRH Fund for research and development (FRD-BRH) intended to promote and support scientific research in various disciplines including economics and finance. This fund will be financed by the private sector without excluding the possibility of financial contributions from international donors or national institutions. Strengthening the independence of the judiciary The representative of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP-Haiti) met this week with the President and the Technical Secretariat of the Superior Council of Judicial Power (CSPJ) on the main challenges of the judicial sector in Haiti as well as on the current and future collaboration in favor of strengthening the independence of the judiciary. Cap-Haitien : calendar of activities This Thursday 20 the carnival activities will start with the Carnival of the little ones. Friday 21 will be the Carnival of the students then will follow the three fat days of the Carnival of Cap-Haitien COVID-19 Global report 20 February Thursday February 20, 2020, the number of people infected worldwide with the Coronavirus COVID-19 (laboratory and clinical confirmed cases) amounted to 75,727 an increase of 526 (+ 0.7 %%) compared to the previous day https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-30068-haiti-news-zapping.html The number of new cases of coronavirus contamination in China has been at its lowest for almost a month; 2,129 deaths (+ 5.8%), i.e. 117 more than the day before (2,012); 16,526 people healed or 1,503 people (-23.4%) less compared to the day before but 7.7 times more healing than death compared to 7.4 times the day before. To date, there are 1,015 confirmed infected people worldwide (+ 13%), ie 117 more cases. Number of deaths abroad unchanged (5): 1 in the Philippines, 2 in Hong Kong, 1 in Japan, and 1 in France. (Iran has announced two deaths are pending verification). HL/ HaitiLibre Source said Kate is serious about the work, saying: 'This is not a vanity exercise' Opened up about her childhood, retelling personal stories and tales of royal life Source has told how Kate Middleton, 38, is 'exposing herself' with recent work Kate Middleton's deeply personal conversations on a recent podcast were 'not a vanity exercise' but part of her work as a 'credible' voice in the Early Year's space, a source has revealed. The Duchess of Cambridge, 38, shared her anxieties and spoke of worrying about falling short in her parenting to Prince George, 6, Princess Charlotte, 4, and Prince Louis, 1 on, Giovanna Fletcher's Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast last week. But now a palace source has revealed that Kate has been 'exposing' a major part of her normally private life in the intimate conversations. They said she was motivated by her passion for childhood development, telling People magazine: 'This is her talking about her work, and what she has learned as a mother because of her work.' Kate Middleton, 38, was 'exposing herself' in deeply personal conversations on Giovanna Fletcher's Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast last week, a source has revealed (pictured Kate and Giovanna during the recording) The duchess opened up in the deeply intimate conversation with Giovanna, who has also written about being a mother to three children with her husband Tom Fletcher, a member of the band McFly. The source said the move by the Duchess involved her baring a major - normally private - part of herself and opening up about her life as a mother. During the podcast, the 38-year-old described herself as a 'hands-on-mum', but believes any mother who does not admit to feeling like a failure from time to time is 'lying'. And she also praised her parents Carole, 65, and Michael, 70, for their 'huge dedication' in raising her and her two siblings, Pippa, 36, and James, 32. The source told how the Duchess' work is 'not a vanity exercise' and said she has become a 'credible' voice in the Early Years development space (pictured, launching her landmark survey 5 Big Questions on the Under Fives') She spoke of her dismay at how royal duties sometimes force her to abandon parenting tasks such as doing the school run - and joked that her children berate her it. The podcast focused on her early years work and landmark survey 5 Big Questions on the Under Fives'. The Early Years episode discussed the 5 Big Questions on the Under Fives a quick, online survey which aims to spark a national conversation on the early years that will ultimately help bring about positive, lasting change for generations to come. It is designed to bring together the thoughts of as many people as possible recognising that everyone has a role in ensuring strong, healthy foundations for the youngest in our society that will positively affect their lifelong outcomes. On the podcast, which was released last week, Kate opened up about her family life with Prince William, 37, Prince George, 6, Princess Charlotte, 4, and Prince Louis, 1 (pictured together at Trooping the Colour in June 2019) This comes days after royal expert Omid Scobie revealed how Kate had 'quietly picked up steam' with the project. Earlier this week, Omid said the Duchess had 'really stepped out into a more confident role' in The Firm in recent months as she launched her Early Years work which will be a 'lifelong project' for the royal. Speaking on the Heirpod podcast, he said Kate's voice was getting 'louder and louder as she gains more confidence' in her position within the royal family. He said: 'I think there had been times where it felt like she wasn't doing a lot...and we're now at a point where I think she's really realising the impact that she can have when using her platform wisely.' Japanese vacationers will visit popular destinations in Hanoi such as Van Mieu-Quoc Tu Giam (Temple of Literature-National University), Thang Long Imperial Citadel, and Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre. According to the HPA, Japan is one of the leading tourism markets of Hanoi. To offset the declining number of Chinese tourists, the agency will focus on other markets such as Japan, the Republic of Korea, Europe, Australia, and North America. The effective control of the acute respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Vietnam and Hanoi in particular is an advantage over other nations to draw international tourists, the centre said. Vietnam aims to welcome 2 million Japanese visitors in 2020, according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT). Japan will be among the most important tourism markets for Vietnam this year. Over the years, the VNAT and the Japan National Tourism Organisation have carried out promotions for various Vietnamese destinations. The countries localities have also strengthened tourism cooperation, particularly between Hanoi and Tokyo. In the past 10 years, the number of Japanese arrivals to Vietnam has recorded average growth of 8%-10%. In 2019 alone, nearly 500,000 Vietnamese people travelled to Japan, a year-on-year increase of 27.3%. Meanwhile, Vietnam received close to 1 million Japanese holidaymakers, up 15.2% against the previous year. A rally for a $15 minimum hourly wage in New York City in 2015. The city raised its minimum wage to $15 in 2018, while New York State raised its minimum wage to $11.80 in December 2019, and that will increase statewide at the end of 2020 to $12.50. Getty Images Looking for another sign of a strong economy? Nearly half of states in the U.S. just raised their minimum wage, and most small business owners reacted with a shrug. In the latest CNBC|SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey for the first quarter 2020, small business owners across the country report sustained optimism at the start of 2020, and only a minority report a negative business impact resulting from the increased minimum wages. In fact, in this quarter's survey, 57% of all small business owners say these minimum wage increases will have no impact at all on their business in 2020, indicating that they can absorb the cost of the wage increase, sustain any loss in profits and find ways to raise revenue to compensate for the increase on their balance sheets. Or perhaps many were always paying their workers above the minimum wage even before the change was made. The risk of a wage increase is that it will be set too far above the hourly rate that employers can afford to pay their employees, forcing them to lay off workers if they can't offset that cost in some other way. Small businesses typically have smaller profit margins and fewer ways to reallocate funds if their business model suddenly changes. But with these wage increases coming at a time of near-record unemployment and steady national GDP growth not to mention great confidence among small business owners, specifically few small business owners are complaining about the wage boost. Perhaps more significantly, even those who expect a business impact thanks to the change only rarely say they will cut headcount as a result. Just 8% of small business owners say they will be forced to lay off workers as a result of the higher minimum wage, while 14% say they will be forced to cut worker hours, 14% say the higher minimum wage will result in less revenue for their business and 22% say it will result in less profit for them. State by state, results look the same All told, 20 states raised their minimum wage on Jan. 1, while a 21st (New York) raised it on the last day of 2019 another four, along with the District of Columbia, are set to raise their minimum wages later this year. The federal minimum wage stands at $7.25/hour, but each state is free to set their own floor at any level matching or exceeding the federal minimum. The states implementing minimum wage increases in 2020 are a true cross-section of the country, representing every region and political leaning. Florida's was the smallest dollar-value increase: a tiny 10-cent bump from $8.46 to $8.56. Washington state had the highest dollar-value increase a $1.50 boost from $12 to $13.50 tied with New Mexico's increase from $7.50 to $9. But overall, these numbers don't indicate the sharp state-by-state contrasts that might be expected with state-level regulatory changes. Notably, small business owners in states with minimum wage increases are only slightly more likely than those in other states to say their business will be affected by a minimum wage increase in 2020. Six in 10 small business owners (60%) in states without minimum wage increases say they expect no impact to their business, because of changes to minimum wage laws in 2020, while 54% of those in states with minimum wage increases say the same. The percentage of business owners who say they may be forced to cut workers or reduce hours are the same regardless of whether a small business owner is based in a state with or without a 2020 minimum wage increase. One clear difference that shows up in the data is that small business owners who are based in states with minimum wage increases in 2020 are more likely than those based in other states to say the higher minimum wage will result in less revenue for their business (17% vs. 10%). But they are only slightly more likely to say it will result in less profit for their business (23% vs. 20%), indicating they can offset the cost in other ways. Demand for workers continues to be high In this quarter's survey, as was true in the first quarter of 2019 and 2018, acquiring new customers and finding qualified employees are the top concerns plaguing small business owners nationwide. These are often two competing factors, as new customers are often best lured in with low prices while the best employees cost money to attract and retain. Past CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey results have shown that in a tight job market and a strong economy, small business owners are going to extreme lengths to attract and retain good workers. These latest results show that small business owners in states who've recently raised their minimum wage have the same expectations around headcount as those in other states, with 63% of small business owners overall expecting their staff to stay the same size, 32% expecting it to increase, and just 5% expecting it to decrease. Much has been said in recent days about General Motors axing of the Holden brand. A great deal of this discussion has been about Australian manufacturing, with predictable amounts of finger-pointing. But it was 2017 when GM ceased manufacturing Holden on Australian shores. The termination of Holden in 2020 is not really about manufacturing. The jobs lost this time are in design and sales and Holdens last gasp this year marks a significant historical moment for Australian industrial design. Time piece ... the FJ Holden. Credit:National Museum of Australia This is not to grandstand about some kind of iconic Australian style that is now lost. Thats not what is at stake here. Historically speaking, Holdens design culture was unique, but not because of chrome curves or sleek fenders. It was unique because of how it drew from a highly skilled Australian workforce of designers and tradespeople. Collaboration was at its core. Holdens design culture also emerged from a design and engineering partnership between the US and Australia. OTTAWA, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Leonovus Inc., (Leonovus or the Company) (TSXV: LTV) (OTC: LVNSF) today announced that it was awarded a $435,000 contract with the Canadian Federal Government through the Innovative Solutions Canada Program - formerly called the Build in Canada Innovation Program (BCIP). The Company expects to perform the work and recognize the revenue in the first three quarters of this fiscal year. The contract will involve the Department of Justice Canada and the Department of National Defense Canada performing rigorous testing of Leonovus Vault software (the Innovation), enhanced with our new Smart Filer technology. The Government of Canada recognises that cloud represents an increasingly important way of delivering data storage infrastructure and is looking for potential technology innovations, such as Leonovus Vault software, to support the adoption of hybrid cloud, securely and efficiently, said Michael Gaffney, CEO. The Leonovus Innovation is a secure multi-cloud data controller that manages storage on premises and across multiple public clouds. The Innovation presents a single, consistent object storage interface through which documents are uploaded, encrypted and fragmented using an enhanced erasure coding algorithm developed and owned by Leonovus. The fragments are then dispersed across configured storage endpoints, including public cloud storage and on-premises file servers. The Leonovus Vault innovation decouples data from storage infrastructure, allowing organizations to: Leverage under-utilized and idle on-premises storage, Pursue a true multi-cloud strategy with no cloud vendor lock-in, Provide flexibility to evolve storage strategies as cloud offerings and costs evolve, Enhance the security of their data across a complex storage infrastructure, and Achieve true data sovereignty across many geographies with multiple cloud vendors. In addition, the awarded contract includes testing the use of Leonovus Smart Filer to facilitate the automatic transferal of file data to Leonovus Vault. Another federal government department recently deployed our Smart Filer product. We anticipate finishing the installation and testing by the end of Q1, said Gaffney. About Leonovus Leonovus is a software provider that offers storage solutions that allow organizations to embrace cloud storage securely, simply and cost-effectively while giving them the flexibility to deal with the ever-evolving cloud storage landscape. Designed with the IT manager in mind, Leonovus Vault uses patented algorithms to analyze, classify, encrypt, shred and spread data across a network of on-premises, hybrid or multi-cloud storage nodes allowing for the most secure yet internally accessible form of object-based data storage across the entire solution. The advanced geo-distributed architecture minimizes latency, optimizes geo-availability, reduces remote backup costs and meets data sovereignty requirements. With its software and hardware agnostic design, Vault provides petabyte scalability and allows the enterprise to use its existing idle storage resources, extend the useable lifespan of depreciated resources and improve the enterprise's overall ROI. Leonovus Smart Filer is an information lifecycle management (ILM) solution that analyzes existing file storage and extends its capacity automatically and transparently. According to customer-defined policies, infrequently accessed files are automatically removed from high-cost, high-performance primary storage, and placed in secondary or cloud storage, without any changes to how users and applications access them. For more information, please contact: KYIV -- A plane carrying the first group of Ukrainians evacuated from China's Wuhan, the city at the epicenter of the deadly new coronavirus outbreak, has landed in Ukraine amid protests by residents of the eastern city of Kharkiv, where a quarantine center has been set up. Ukrainian authorities said 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreigners, as well as medical personnel and crew members, were aboard the plane. The nationalities of the foreign citizens were not immediately known. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wrote on Facebook on February 20 that the plane carrying both Ukrainians and several foreigners made a quick stop to refuel at Kyiv's Borispil airport before landing in Kharkiv. Zelenskiy said all the people who arrived from Wuhan will be quarantined for 14 days in the National Guard's medical center in the town of Novi Sanzhary in the eastern region of Poltava. Local authorities they will be transported to Novi Sanzhary in heavily guarded buses. Meanwhile, a group of Novi Sanzhary residents protesting the presence of the quarantine center in their town blocked a major highway in the region and scuffled with riot police. Regional Governor Oleh Synehubov arrived at the protest site to try to calm the protesters. Separately, in the western region of Lviv, protesters blocked a highway for a short time amid rumors that some of those evacuated from Wuhan could be placed in quarantine in a military hospital in the area. Local authorities denied the rumors. Zelenskiy in his Facebook post called on Ukrainians to show respect for their returning compatriots and stop the protests. A gunman suspected of murdering nine people during a rampage through a German town is believed to have had a far-right motive, prosecutors said today. The man, identified in German media as Tobias R, was found dead at his home, hours after attacks at two shisha lounges in Hanau , east of Frankfurt, on Wednesday evening. Bild, Germany's biggest newspaper, reported that the suspect had left behind a video and a written note explaining his motives. The paper said the man, said to have acted out of "radical right motives", claimed certain people living in Germany must be exterminated as their expulsion can no longer be achieved. Federal prosecutors said they had now taken charge of the investigation into the attack due to indications it had an extremist motive. Germany: Hanau Shooting - In pictures 1 /28 Germany: Hanau Shooting - In pictures Reuters A car that alegdgedly belongs to a supect in a killing is lifted on a truck, near the home of the suspect in Hanau, western Germany, AFP via Getty Images Police officers stand near a house that is being searched after a shooting in Hanau, Germany AP Candles lay behind a police cordon in front of one of the bar target in a shooting in Kesselstadt, near Frankfurt AFP via Getty Images Police officers at the scene outside the Midnight hookah bar, one of two bars that were targeted Getty Images Special police forces work at the scene following a deadly shooting attack in Hanau AP Forensic police work at a crime scene in front of a bar at the Heumarkt in the centre of Hanau, near Frankfurt am Main, western Germany AFP via Getty Images Emergency services work at the scene of a shooting in Hanau AFP via Getty Images Forensic police work near a crime scene in front of a bar at the Heumarkt in the centre of Hanau AFP via Getty Images Police handcuff a man near the scene of a shooting in Hanau, Germany AP Forensics enter a building at the scene after a shooting in central Hanau, Germany AP A special forces officer guards the road in front of a house that is searched through by police in Hanau, German AP Gun attacks: Police stand guard near the scene of one of the shootings in central Hanau AP A car covered with rescue blankets stands in front of a bar in Hanua, Germany AP A projectile lies on the sidewalk near a restaurant at the scene of a shooting in central Hanau, Germany AP Forensics investigate at the scene AP A police officer stands guard AP Officers detain a man near a damaged car at the scene after a shooting in Hanau, Germany Reuters Forensic experts outside a shisha bar after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt Reuters Police officers secure the area after a shooting in Hanau Reuters Forensic experts are seen outside a shisha bar after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt Reuters Die Welt newspaper also said the killer speaks on the video in fluent English and also delivered a "personal message to all Americans". The clip, which continued to be seen on the internet on Thursday morning, was apparently taken in a private apartment, which was posted online a few days ago. Gun attacks: Police stand guard near the scene of one of the shootings in central Hanau / AP In it, the man says there are underground military facilities in the US where children are abused and killed and devil worship takes place. The bloodbath happened on Wednesday evening in Hanau, less than 20 miles from the financial capital Frankfurt. Forensics enter a building at the scene after a shooting in central Hanau / AP Five young people of Kurdish origin - one of them female - were gunned down in the Midnight shisha bar on the Heumarkt in the town centre at 10pm. The victims were smoking molasses-based tobacco in traditional middle eastern Hookah pipes when they were slaughtered. Shisha bars offering smoking lounges are popular in immigrant communities across Germany. The second attack occurred in the Area Bar and Cafe less less than two miles away in Kurt-Schumacher-Platz. The gunmans abandoned BMW car with extra ammunition was found outside. A car that was damaged in a shooting is covered in thermo foil and surrounded by debris / AP Later, in the nearby Kesselstadt area of town, the gunman was found dead in his apartment after elite SEK forces stormed his home at 3.00am. Police said a second body was also found at the suspect's home. They added that their information suggested the gunman had committed suicide at his home after fleeing in a car. Loading.... Bild and other media reported that his video and writings justifying his killing spree were discovered near his body. The police said no other perpetrators are being sought. It would be impossible to imagine a night worse than this, said Hanau mayor Claus Kaminsky. A government spokesman said: Our thoughts are with the people of Hanau this morning, in the middle of which a horrific crime was committed. Deep sympathy goes out to the families affected who are grieving for their dead. The far-right has been on the ascendancy in Germany ever since Chancellor Angela Merkels decision five years ago to open up the nations borders to nearly a million refugees fleeing war and violence in Syria and other lands. Asylum homes have been firebombed, refugees attacked and in some cases murdered. Agencies have contributed to this report. Listen to today's episode of The Leader podcast: Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine have revealed they both went into a period of mourning when their presenting partnership ended six years ago. Trinny, 56, admitted their relationship was 'like a marriage' and she grieved when it ended in 2014 around the same time her ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff died, even appearing to admit she sought help from a counsellor or therapist. Speaking on her podcast My Wardrobe Malfunction, Susannah, 57, said: I remember you saying that you had gone to see someone, and they said you were mourning two things - you were mourning Johnny and also the end of our partnership.' Trinny admitted there were times she 'hated' Susannah, but that their relationship was 'like a marriage' because they loved and knew each other so well. The duo first worked together in 1994 before finding fame in 2001 when they presented BBC's What Not To Wear. They defected to ITV in 2006 with their show Trinny and Susannah undress. Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, pictured during the launch of their Littlewoods campaign in 2008, revealed they both went into mourning when they split After years of touring the world teaching the public how to dress, the pair went their separate ways. Susannah took part in I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, Strictly Come Dancing, published a novel and started her podcast. Meanwhile Trinny began her eponymous makeup brand which she now runs alongside occasionally presenting the fashion segment on This Morning. But soon after their split a therapist told Trinny she was mourning both the end of the partnership and the death of her ex-husband Johnny Elichaoff's, who she'd remained on good terms with. Trinny said: 'I remember that woman I went to see, exactly that thing. Our relationship was a marriage. I love you and hate you in total measures. 'You probably totally love me and I totally love you, but we know each other so well, and the ease of that now when you're not every day working together. Since their partnership ended in 2014 Susannah, pictured left on Good Morning Britain last year has written a novel while Trinny, pictured right in January, started a beauty brand 'When we were working together there were days when it would just kill you. That habit they have, like "Why are you doing that again, why are you acting out again".' Susannah completely agreed as she admitted she had to learn to organise her own life after they stopped working together following a tour of Finland and Germany. 'I didnt really get that. But now I look back, I went through the same thing, through a period of mourning and insecurity,' she revealed. 'It was literally like my right side had been taken away from me. Its taken a long time to find out who I am without you.' Trinny, who now runs a flourishing makeup business, TRINNY LONDON, used to make sure Susannah was on time for trains and remembered to put makeup on. Susannah added: 'You get so used to someone being really good at something, knowing your weaknesses and someone fills that hole of your weakness. I've relied on you to be organised.' Trinny, pictured with her ex husband Johnny the year after their divorce, went on to describe a coincidence that 'connects' her ex husband and her new beau Charles Saatchi, 76 While she used to procrastinate and was 'quite OCD', Susannah is now militant with keeping on top of life admin. She said: If Ive got to do something, I now get up and I do it. Im much more organised than I used to be because I used to rely on you for everything. 'I relied on you to be tidy and make sure we got to the train on time and all of that. 'And now Im militant in that area of my life. Its a side that was always there but I never needed to use it until you and I werent together. Similarly, Trinny admitted she discovered how to be funny when she struck out on her own - after suppressing her lighter side because Susannah was always there to be 'the emotionally-cuddly one'. She said: 'Ive learnt the opposite things but things that I was lacking. Ive learnt how to be funny. 'Ive let myself be funny. I felt in our relationship you were always the more emotionally-cuddly one and the one with a better sense of humour and I went into that anal obsessive box. 'Half of how I do it now is being with you long enough to learn it. You push it down because you have someone who has done it.' Trinny's next big lesson was how to be kinder to the people around her, something she said Susannah was always good at. The other thing probably is to acknowledge when people have done things well and to be kind,' she said. 'I didnt have so much time for kindness and you would be the one who was. I would do secret kindness but you were also politely very nicely kind. 'I would get riled up and you would be calm. But then occasionally, you would break and I would think: Wow a relief. Trinny went on to describe a coincidence that 'connects' her ex husband - they divorced in 2009 and Johnny went on to kill himself in 2014 - and her new beau Charles Saatchi, 76. She said: This is the irony. On our tenth wedding anniversary, the year we split up - we had been together 16 years - Johnny bought me this (necklace) and every little charm was significant in our marriage.' Trinny's ex-husband Johnny (pictured in March 2008) killed himself after getting into financial trouble in 2014 Both Susannah and Trinny's daughter Lyla Elichaoff, 16, bought a charm which she added to the necklace. She continued: Then, the year I got together with Charles, for Christmas, he gave me exactly the same. 'He had gone and chosen all the charms and he put them on and his daughter had got me a little present, a little ring, which I put on there too. 'So I have two. Not the same charms but it was so weird. Of all the things, Charles who never gives gifts, and Johnny, who would rather throw money at something and not think about it, was so thoughtful. Trinny joined the audience at the Roland Mouret show in September last year. Susannah said she was proud of Trinny in her podcast 'Its so odd. There are a few things which connect them. Gushing over their friendship since the split, Susannah said she was proud of Trinny for starting her business. The pair agreed they could not have had 'third careers' if it hadn't been for the end of their working relationship. Susannah said: This is the first time we've done anything work wise together. 'I cannot tell you how proud I am of my friend. There are 50 people working for her in the most exquisite place. 'If we had been still together this would never have happened. Trinny agreed: You would never have been able to write a novel, and I would never have done that. 'That's true. It was not until we were both over 50 that we all had this third career. 'The hardest part is getting it out of your head and onto the table.' Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 21:22:03|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close NAIROBI, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Kenya requires 2.3 billion shillings (about 23 million U.S. dollars) to eradicate the threat posed by desert locusts that crossed into the country on Dec. 28 last year, an official said on Thursday. David Mwangi, Director of Plant Protection Services with the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries said the government has so far released 5.3 million U.S. dollars to help eradicate the voracious pests. "We have presented a working budget of 23 million dollars to both the National Treasury and international donors to help fight the desert locusts," Mwangi said. He said that the locusts have spread to 18 counties across the country and posed a potential risk to food security. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, so far nine aircraft have been contracted to combat the desert locusts' infestation. "Five of the aircraft are fixed-wing for spraying operations while four helicopters are for surveillance to monitor the movement of the pests," Mwangi said. He said the aircraft are currently stationed in four bases but the government will add two more bases as part of the efforts of upscaling interventions to control the desert locusts in the country. He said that so far 100,000 liters of pesticides have been distributed to all affected regions. Mwangi said through a partnership with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the government plans to commission an independent organization next week to conduct an assessment of the negative impacts of desert locust in terms of destruction of vegetation and farmlands. Malaysia has never ruled out the possibility that missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 could have been downed by a suicidal pilot, the country's former prime minister Najib Razak said yesterday. Mr Najib, who was premier when MH370 vanished with 239 people on board nearly six years ago, was responding to remarks by former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott that Malaysian leaders had considered from the outset that flight captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah may have committed mass murder. "My very clear understanding from the very top levels of the Malaysian government is that from very, very early on here, they thought it was a murder-suicide by the pilot," Mr Abbott said in a Sky News documentary yesterday. Mr Najib said Malaysian officials had considered such a scenario during their investigation but had chosen not to make their views public. "It would have been deemed unfair and legally irresponsible since the black boxes and cockpit voice recorders had not been found and hence there was no conclusive proof whether the pilot was solely or jointly responsible," he said. "Again I must stress that this possible scenario was never ruled out during the search effort and investigations, where no effort was spared." A spokesman for Mr Najib confirmed his remarks. Malaysia's transport ministry declined to comment. Authorities previously said there was nothing suspicious in the captain's background, training or mental health, but did not rule out the possibility the aircraft had been deliberately taken off course. Mr Najib said there were several reasons for authorities to suspect Mr Zaharie's involvement, including his ownership of a home flight simulator and findings showing MH370's transponders were switched off shortly after the plane left Malaysian airspace. Flight MH370 disappeared on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. Malaysia, China, and Australia called off a two-year, A$200m (123m) underwater search in the southern Indian Ocean in January 2017 after finding no trace of the aircraft. A second three-month search, led by US firm Ocean Infinity, ended similarly in May 2018. Mr Najib lost a general election that month. He now faces corruption charges over alleged involvement in a multi-billion-dollar state fund scandal. He pleaded not guilty. A Japanese firm was chosen by Colombo Thursday to build a new $570 million terminal for Sri Lanka's main airport, as Tokyo re-emerges as a key infrastructure backer amid a raft of Chinese projects. The cabinet announced the Taisei Corporation was picked to develop the Japanese-funded project, with the new terminal expected to double capacity at Bandaranaike International airport to around 20 million passengers a year. The decision follows the financing of Colombo's planned $1.5-billion light rail system last year by Japan's overseas development agency -- the biggest single foreign investment in the island nation. During the presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, who was recently appointed prime minister, Sri Lanka secured almost $7 billion in loans from China, dislodging Japan as the island's main infrastructure funder. But a second international airport funded and built by China in Sri Lanka's south is a white elephant, with no airline using it for scheduled flights. Unable to service its loans, Colombo leased a Chinese-built deep-sea port at Hambantota to a Beijing company for $1.12 billion in 2017. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Forest Grove couple under quarantine for coronavirus in Japan got a boost in their effort to go home as Oregons two U.S. senators and a representative asked the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo when the two will be released. Kent and Rebecca Frasure have been stranded since Feb. 5, when the captain of the Diamond Princess, docked just south of Tokyo, told them and the rest of the cruise ships passengers to stay in their rooms. Rebecca Frasure tested positive for coronavirus the next day and was taken to a hospital in Tokyo where she has remained in isolation while her husband remained on the ship. Kent Frasure is not infected. His wifes symptoms consist of a rare, light cough. Rebecca Frasure said the U.S. government told her she had to stay in Japan because she was sick when the State Department made arrangements to evacuate hundreds of Americans from the ship. Her frustration boiled over when she learned 14 Americans found to have the virus were among the evacuees. In a letter Wednesday, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici and Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley asked the embassys charge daffaires for updates on the Frasures expected release from the cruise ship and hospital. The lawmakers expressed great concern for the health and safety of the Frasures. Speaking from her hospital room, Rebecca Frasure said the letter inspired guarded hope. It is up to the folks that that letter was sent to to make the right decision, she said. Rebecca Frasures stay could end this week, if she tests negative for coronavirus two days in a row. And, in theory, Kent Frasures quarantine should end Friday, he said. Once they are released, both will have to stay in Japan for another 14 days, per U.S. guidelines. Rebecca Frasure is one of tens of thousands of people infected with the new coronavirus, dubbed COVID-19. The bulk of cases have been in China, where the virus originated. The United States has had 15 confirmed cases as of Wednesday, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The letter came swiftly on the heels of an effort by Rebecca Frasures mother to get the lawmakers attention. Nancy Landes of Beaverton said she called all their offices Monday Presidents Day and left voicemails. Landes told them she thought it wasnt right that the United States evacuated so many Americans, including some sick with coronavirus, while leaving others. Staff for Bonamici and Merkley called back Tuesday, Landes said, and Wydens staff called Wednesday. Landes said she got a copy of the letter in her email Wednesday. I feel represented, Landes said. I feel like they heard me. -- Fedor Zarkhin fzarkhin@oregonian.com desk: 503-294-7674|cell: 971-373-2905|@fedorzarkhin Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories. 52-year-old Robert Lee Noye popularly known as the black guy in town" has been arrested by the police in Cedar Rapids, Iowa after reportedly kidnapping a woman he accused of being a "racist" and forcing her to watch "Roots" (a 9-hour miniseries on slavery). Noye who is facing charges of harassment and false imprisonment was arrested on Monday February 17, after policemen were sent to the area for an open-line 911 call "with lots of screaming". The 37-year-old woman and her 12-year-old daughter were found inside the house crying, after the intoxicated man answered the door when the police arrived. Recounting her ordeal, the lady told the police that Noye assaulted her all night and made her sit with him to watch the miniseries "Roots," based on Alex Haley's bestselling book "Roots: The Saga of an American Family," which drew attention to the brutality of slavery. The miniseries aired on ABC in 1977 and won a host of awards, including multiple Emmys and a Peabody. She further revealed that when she tried to move, the man told her to remain seated. The lady who was eventually able to call 911 and leave the line open, also accused Noye of threatening to kill her and spreading her body parts across Interstate 380 on the way to Chicago. Noye was arrested and taken to the Linn County Jail, but he was not listed as an inmate as of Tuesday evening. 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 Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Riza Roidila Mufti (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, February 20, 2020 12:58 692 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad20659e171 1 Business hygiene,cleanliness,public-toilet,tourism,competitiveness,WEF,Public-Works-and-Public-Housing-Ministry,Tourism-and-Creative-Economy-Ministry,Asita,travel Free With Indonesia scoring low in health and hygiene by international tourism standards, the government is focusing on the quality of public toilets and sanitation facilities at tourist hotspots, an official has said. The Public Works and Housing Ministry's human settlements director general, Danis Sumadilaga, said on Wednesday that issues regarding hygiene, health, sanitation and clean water at tourist destinations across the country were given "top priority" status during a meeting at the Coordinating Maritime Affairs and Investment Ministry. Indonesia ranks 40th overall out of 140 countries in the World Economic Forum (WEF) Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Report 2019, improving from 42nd in 2017 and 50th in 2015 in the biennial index. However, it ranks 102nd in health and hygiene. Read also: Quality first, numbers second: Stakeholders discuss tourism development in 2020 We should improve hygiene and health, as well as improve clean water and sanitation. It was identified that hygiene and the condition of toilets remain a great concern in some areas at several tourist destinations, Danis said, vowing to take the issue seriously. We will work to make them [sanitation facilities] better, especially public toilets. We will also build clean water access," he said. The ministry is currently installing clean water systems and waste management facilities at several tourist destinations. "For example, we are now building a waste incinerator in Labuan Bajo. And we are developing clean water systems in several areas," said Danis. President Joko "Jokowi" Widodo has expressed hope that the tourism industry would play a greater role, particularly by creating jobs and raking in foreign reserves for Southeast Asia's largest economy. The government has introduced five "super priority" tourist destinations as its core tourism development program, which includes building infrastructure from roads to energy. The five super priority destinations are Lake Toba in North Sumatra, Borobudur Temple in Central Java, Labuan Bajo in East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), Mandalika in West Nusa Tenggara (NTB) and Likupang in North Sulawesi. Read also: Indonesia introduces super-priority tourism destinations at ASEAN forum Chairwoman Elly Hutabarat of the Association of Indonesian Tour and Travel Agencies (ASITA), who has been campaigning for a "total facelift" in hygiene to attract more tourists, has voiced concern over the quality of sanitation facilities at tourist destinations on many occasions. Hygiene and cleanliness is essential. This is a basic issue but if we fail to attend to it, it could [rebound] on our tourist destinations," she said in January. "We should learn how to provide international standard sanitation facilities at our tourist destinations." Elly expressed her hope that the government would put more effort into hygine and health at tourist destinations by ensuring that public toilets and restaurants were of international standards. "Because I'm sorry to say [that] right now, the cleanliness of many sanitation facilities at tourist destinations in Indonesia has yet to meet international standards," she said in October last year. Ireland is now home to 3 trillion in funds under management, giving the industry the opportunity to leverage its firepower to take a leading role in the transition to environmentally sustainable finance, according to a new report. As part of a shift to a "green new deal", central banks, regulators and the finance industry have come under pressure to adapt their practices to a rising tide of concern over environmental issues. The report surveyed 33 central banks and regulatory authorities and found that 70pc of respondents consider climate change to be a major threat to financial stability. "There is a significant opportunity for Ireland to use its global financial services industry to support climate change initiatives both here and internationally," said Mark Kennedy, managing partner at Mazars Ireland which commissioned the report along with the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum (OMFIF) - a think tank for central banking, economic policy and public investment. Ireland is the domicile for 5.4pc of worldwide investment fund assets and is now the third-largest global centre and the second largest in Europe with 17 of the top 20 global asset managers having Irish-domiciled funds, according to industry data. "The most significant financial services businesses in banking, asset management and insurance are based here and positioned to support the European Green Deal objectives. This should be a key priority for our next Government," said Mr Kennedy. Embedding environmental concerns in central bank and financial policy is relatively recent. Bank of England governor Mark Carney was viewed as highly controversial when he raised the issue as a major concern for financial stability in a speech in 2015. Since then a raft of central banks, including the Central Bank of Ireland (CBI), have signed up for environmental mandates, although the new report said there were still huge gaps in their regulatory framework. The State has also raised money for environmental projects through the issue of "green bonds", raising 2bn late last year after a debut with 3bn in 2018. The CBI is now part of the Central Banks and Supervisors Network for Greening the Financial System, a body that groups 54 banks and regulators. It was one of the institutions surveyed in the report. "The CBI is researching how to adapt analytical models to incorporate the impact of acute and chronic climate change effects," it said in the report. "On the prudential side, the central bank has already suggested it intends to increase its focus on the adequacy of financial institutions' emerging risk management and disclosures." The State lags behind, however, on key environmental pledges. Ireland will miss its European Union commitments to cut carbon dioxide emissions by a wide margin and could face fines of up to 600m a year until it is back on track. The introduction of carbon pricing has been slow as the Government has been reluctant to alienate rural voters and the trucking industry. Official data showed that Ireland generated 13.3 tonnes of CO2 equivalent for each person living here in 2017, the third worst performance in the EU. Joe Buglewicz/Bloomberg via Getty Images En espanol | The two Democratic hopefuls who want to replace the private insurance system in America with a government program went on the offensive at the Democratic debate in Nevada, while the other four candidates on the stage defended their plans to expand the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Wednesday night's sparring took place in Las Vegas, where Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has come under fire from the union that represents thousands of hospitality workers who worry that his proposal would force them to give up their negotiated health plans. I will never sign a bill that will reduce the health care benefits they have, Sanders said. We will only expand it for them and for every union in America to the working class of this country. Sanders said his plan would raise taxes, but Americans would pay less for health care because he would eliminate premiums, deductibles and copays as well as expand benefits. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who made his debut appearance on a 2020 debate stage, responded to Sanders plan by saying that if he wants to win the election, you don't start out by saying, I've got 160 million people, I'm going to take away the insurance plan they love. Bloomberg said he favors restoring any ACA rollbacks, adding a government-backed public option to the current health care choices and capping some charges. We shouldn't just walk away and start something that is totally new and untried, Bloomberg added. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren took aim at several of her competitors. She said former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg really has a slogan that was thought up by a consultant to paper over a thin version of a plan that would leave millions of people unable to afford their health care. It's not a plan; it's a PowerPoint." Like Sanders, Warren supports a government-run (single-payer) health care system, but she has suggested a willingness to accept something less than a full break with the current system: My approach to this is we help as many people as quickly as possible. If we don't get all the first time, take the win, come back into the fight to ask for more." Buttigieg, who favors expanding the ACA with a Medicare buy-in for those who want it, dismissed Warren's PowerPoint comment and said his plan solves the problems and makes sure there is no such thing as an uninsured American and does it without kicking anybody off the plan." Warren also criticized Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, calling her plan a Post-it note, insert plan here, and said it was two paragraphs on Klobuchar's website. Klobuchar also favors a public option addition to the ACA. She said her plan would reduce premiums for 12 million people immediately and it would expand coverage for about the same number. Klobuchar's website actually includes an extensive explanation of her health care proposal. Warren didn't single out former Vice President Joe Biden for criticism. Biden said that he was the only one on the debate stage who accomplished something in health care because former President Barack Obama asked him to round up votes for the ACA. Biden favors a public option that he said would be paid for by making sure that Mike [Bloomberg] and other people pay the same tax rate their secretary pays." P olice have smashed a British-led gang behind Europes first underground illegal cigarette factory. Images released by detectives today showed them entering the 13ft deep bunker near the Costa del Sol in Spain and bringing out six Eastern Europeans who had been working and sleeping there. Counterfeit cigarettes were being produced at the rate of 3,500 an hour in the hideaway. One of the suspected ringleaders was a British fugitive who failed to return to prison in the UK after a temporary release. An officer handling tobacco at the illegal factory / www.guardiacivil.es The workers, whose bunker was hidden under a shipping container inside stables, were allegedly left to die by their bosses before they were discovered. Their supply of oxygen was cut off when the diesel-powered generator they depended on for clean air stopped working after the police raid and people detained above ground had initially kept silent about the soundproofed underground hideaway. Police used a forklift truck to move the shipping container and climbed down a ladder after the workers tried to escape as their air supply ran out. Images released by investigators showed the hi-tech factory where the Cartel-branded cigarettes were being produced, as well as underground bunk beds where the men slept and the kitchen where they made their meals. Spanish police said they had been supported by British officers in the investigation, dubbed Operation Hannibal. Cannabis resin and marijuana were also seized in the raids. The number of Brits arrested has not been made public, although Spanish police say the gang was formed mainly by British nationals. A Civil Guard spokesman said: A criminal organisation composed of British, Lithuanian and Ukrainian nationals, which made and commercialised black market cigarettes and was involved in drugs smuggling, has been smashed. Twenty people have been arrested and 13 searches have been carried out at residential properties and warehouses. The operation has led to the seizure of 153,000 packets of cigarettes which were ready to be sold, 17,600kg of tobacco, 20kg of cannabis resin and 144kg of marijuana. The clandestine cigarette factory discovered is the first-ever underground cigarette factory located in Europe. It was capable of producing 3,500 cigarettes an hour. By Easton Sanders Feb. 19, 2020 | 10:11 PM | MCCRACKEN COUNTY On Wednesday, officials celebrated the graduation of eighteen more inmates, eleven of which completed the jails first deckhand program, with the remaining seven completing the welding program. McCracken County Jailer David Knight spoke with West Kentucky Star about the programs. "We look forward to the success of these folks out in the community and that's really what this is all about," Knight said. "It's not just completing a course, it's about changing their lives, that's what we want. It not only changes their lives, it changes the community." Representatives from several area businesses and WKCTC, including Marquette Transportation and Western Rivers attended the meeting to meet with inmates after the ceremony to encourage them to apply. Arnie Puckett, an employee with the jail, says he is amazed with the results of the programs. He said, "Everybody has really rallied around this thing and it's taken on a life of its own. A lot of needs are being met here." Another round of inmates at McCracken County Jail are celebrating their graduation. I m a Londoner is a new series from the Evening Standard that hopes to reveal the beating heart of the capital through conversations with people living in this vibrant city. From bus drivers to 7/7 survivors, these stripped back and unheard stories will give you a glimpse into a London you may never have seen before. We aim to highlight the real voices of Londoners; to understand their experience of living in the capital and give a platform for them to tell their own stories and challenge stereotypes. With almost nine million people living in the capital, London is a diverse city. Through this series we hope to shine a light on the things that unite us rather than divide us as Londoners. In the second episode of our series, we spoke to Gina Martin, an activist based in the capital who fought for the upskirting law and made it a criminal offence. Since her incredible achievement, an allegation of upskirting has been reported to police nearly every single day since the law was changed. Growing up as a chatty child constantly stopping her schoolmates from working, Martin reveals how her insatiable passion and enthusiasm has helped her cause societal changes she never even thought were possible. "One person can change the world" The Londoner discusses what activism means and how anybody is capable of making a difference. No one can tell you youre not the right person to make the world a better place, she explains. In the summer of 2017, a then 25-year-old Martin was enjoying herself at BST Festival in Hyde Park when she caught sight of a mans phone screen. On it, a womans underwear and thighs were on full display. She soon realised it was her own body that had been photographed without her knowledge or consent. While the police were sympathetic, they told Martin that there was nothing they could do as the culprit had done nothing illegal. Angry and determined, she started a petition which eventually came into law and now sees upskirting offenders face jail time and be placed on the sex offenders register. Martins journey to reach this success was not smooth and she faced a horrific amount of abuse along the way. Here the campaigner reveals how the challenging process has only made her stronger. Im a Londoner and an activist. I guess I started in the public with the upskirting campaign but Ive always been someone who wanted to push for positive change. I brought a stray dog back from Greece three years ago and when I was in advertising, I started a collective where wed do marketing work pro bono for charities. I never thought wed actually change the law. When I started the upskirting campaign I thought oh, Ill give it a go. Ill see what I can do and Ill try. My boyfriend said to me on the phone: But imagine if you actually did it? And I laughed and was like, theres literally no way! But then the momentum just took over and I got a lawyer involved and that got me really serious and strategic. There was a lot of online abuse, a ridiculous amount. Id literally had rape threats for a year and a half. It was really hard. But I think having gone through that campaign, not being academic, or someone in law or politics, its really given me a lot of hope for society. Its shown me that when people really care about something, they actually can push things together. You cant teach passion. You can teach anything else but you cant teach passion. So you cant lose that because that is the difference between a successful campaign and an unsuccessful campaign. Its the energy you have, the passion you have being able to get people on board in an emotional way. I get billed as a feminist hero all the time. And Im like, sure! But also, Im just a regular person who works really hard. I think its way more helpful if Im honest about that and I dont keep my cards close to my chest. I try and show people how they can do the same thing. One person can change the world. Its really exciting unlike with everything else, like with a job, activism is the only thing you can do that no one can tell you you cant do. We need more people to do it. Because one person can make a difference, Ive made a difference. I didnt think I could but its definitely possible. Chinese handset maker Tecno on Thursday said it is keeping a close watch on coronavirus outbreak and does not plan any price hikes as of now. The brand, which is a part of Transsion Holdings, is also working on further solidifying its position in the Indian market in the sub-Rs 10,000 category this year as it expands presence in offline retail stores and brings in new products. "India continues to be an important part of our story and we will continue to bring in innovative products. Our aim is to be among the top 5 players in the offline segment in under Rs 10,000 catgeory. We are at sixth position currently," Transsion India CEO Arijeet Talapatra told PTI. He added that the targeted segment sees shipment of about 70 million units annually. According to Counterpoint Research, Indian smartphone market registered shipment of 158 million units in 2019, up 7 per cent over the previous year. India is now the second largest smartphone market after China. Talapatra said the company is witnessing strong demand from tier III and IV towns in the country. "We are bringing in our Camon 15 and Camon 15 Pro, part of our camera-centric series, that we feel will reshape daytime, low-light and night time photography for India's mid-budget consumers," he added. Priced Rs 9,999 onwards, the phones will go on sale on February 25 and will be available across over 35,000 offline retail stores, Talapatra said, adding that the company is working on further expanding its retail presence. On the coronavirus outbreak, Talapatra said the impact is being felt by the entire industry. "We have a manufacturing base here and we had stocked in advance keeping in mind the Chinese New Year break and new launches. However, we continue to be watchful and hope the situation will improve soon," he added. He said the company does not expect prices of its devices to go up in the near future on account of coronavirus outbreak, but continues to be watchful. While phone companies have set up manufacturing in India, many components continue to be imported from China. The companies had stocked in advance for Chinese New Year break, but the coronavirus outbreak has caused disruption in production and supply of many key components. Though some factories have re-opened, they are working with minimal staff. The travel ban for executives is also likely to affect product planning and new launches. Xiaomi, India's biggest smartphone vendor, had announced increase in price of its Redmi Note 8. Attributing the price hike to supply constraints, the company had said the increase is temporary and is likely to return to original price once cost of component stabilises. Earlier this week, Apple had warned investors that the ongoing coronavirus outbreak is hurting its business more than previously expected as its production in China has been hit. "Work is starting to resume around the country, but we are experiencing a slower return to normal conditions than we had anticipated," the company had said. Latest figures from China showed the death toll from coronavirus surging beyond 2,000 with more than 74,000 people infected, although the rate of new cases is slowing. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) ILAN is a non-profit organization that aims to bring together and share knowledge, progress and experiences, and promote communication, economic and social development through close collaboration between Israel, Mexico and various countries in Latin America, seeking to increase the great opportunities that each region has by providing solutions that positively impact and benefit the economy and welfare of society locally, regionally and globally. The Prime Minister of Israel learned directly from the Founder and President of ILAN about the actions that the organization carries out continuously from Mexico, among these currently: Trips by delegations from Mexican companies with goals and work agendas in which they meet businessmen and experts in Israel in various sectors, to contribute to the learning, experience and growth of projects with high social impact. in various sectors, to contribute to the learning, experience and growth of projects with high social impact. The first edition of the ILAN Awards, inspired by Shimon Peres , which was held on January 16, 2020 in Mexico City . The following Mexican companies received awards in seven categories: EDUCATION: Ernesto Peralta Q.A.C . Educational Unit HEALTH: Laboratorios Biomedica de Referencia for their Liver Health Campaign COMMUNICATION: The "Soy Incorruptible" ("I am Incorruptible") campaign, carried out by Metro CDMX Metro and Consejo de la Comunicacion (Communication Council). ENVIRONMENT: DerTek, a sustainable company, dedicated to the production and sale of advanced biofuels. TECHNOLOGY: The Dow company, which developed the world's first road made partially from recycled plastic. SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: Rutopia, a community of travelers who live unique experiences offered by local hosts in indigenous communities throughout Mexico . PEACE: Reinserta, an organization that seeks to break the cycles of crime and violence by working with the prison system, contributing to building a safer Mexico with programs for children born and living in prisons. "We both have great responsibilities and goals to accomplish and I am very grateful for the support of a country that is globally recognized for its constant innovationI am sure we will achieve them together," said Assa. "Governments, businesses, civil society organizations and academia must work collaboratively to find efficient and sustainable solutions at the national, regional and global levels," he added. For more information, please visit http://ilan.lat/ Press contact: Lizette Weber +52948215, ext.137 [email protected] Maria Yanez +5252948215, ext. 139 [email protected] www.lizetteweber.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1093153/ILAN_1.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1093154/ILAN.jpg SOURCE ILAN, Israel-Latin American Network Related Links http://ilan.lat/ There is an increased use of technology and informatics, heavier workloads and constant changes in the way in which disease processes are managed. Yet, when compared with other health professionals, nurses still spend a great deal of time in direct contact with patients and clients The Ethic of Care: A Moral Compass for Canadian Nursing Practice motivates the nurses in achieving accountability and sustainability in healthcare systems around Canada with great emphasis to overcome social biases. Encourages in the development of skills and compassion in order to leave the patient with better impression. Nurses should be the ethical leaders at client, community as well as global level. This book is unique from other nursing ethics textbooks in several key ways. The book adds a heightened dimension to the already rich knowledge in the field of applied nursing ethics and the ethic of care. The author argues that the ethic of care, or the moral imperative to act justly, be the guiding compass for everything that nurses do. It is with passion and conviction that nurses are encouraged to embody the ethic of care as a "lived virtue." Nurses are also inspired to be the leaders of tomorrow by working toward achieving accountability and sustainability in the Canadian publicly funded health care system and by effectively addressing social inequities. At the end of each chapter the author conveys real life case studies, as derived from her experiences as a critical care nurse, psychiatric nurse clinician and former Coroner. These vignettes bring the subject to life and serve as a means for applying newly acquired ethical knowledge. The aim of this book is to inspire nurses to be as skillful, and compassionate as they can be so that they will leave every encounter with their clients, better than when they first arrived. The book attempts to inspire nurses to be ethical leaders for social change at the patient/client, community and global level. This revised edition of the book includes additional information about trauma-informed care to combat systemic racism and improve the health outcomes for Indigenous people; ethics, gender and sexual orientation is dealt with in an inclusive and sensitive way, and a new Code of Conduct has been included. About the Author: Dr. Kathleen Stephany PhD is a Registered Nurse with British Columbia College of Nursing Professionals and a certified Psychologist with the Canadian Counselling & Psychotherapy Association. Dr. Kathleen has a PhD in Counselling Psychology and currently working as Nurse Educator in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing Program at Douglas College in Coquitlam, BC where she teaches courses in applied nursing ethics and mental health. Prior to being awarded her doctorate degree, she earned an MA in Counselling Psychology, BA in Psychology, BScN and a Diploma in Nursing. Dr. Kathleen is a member of the International Association for Suicide Prevention and the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention. She is also a member of other professional associations such as The Canadian Nurses Association, The Canadian Mental Health Association, the Xia Eta Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau International, Honor Society of Nursing, and The Western Northern Region of the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing. In January 2016 Dr. Kathleen was recognized by World Wide Branding for Excellence in Nursing Education. She is the author of several textbooks and self-help books and also serves as an Ethicist, Ethic of care Theorist, Suicidologist, motivational speaker and media consultant. Keywords: Nursing, Canadian nursing practice, Ethic of care, Nurse's Code of Conduct, Healthcare system, Patientcare, psychiatric nurse ### Conventional optics (e.g. lenses or mirrors) manipulate the phase via optical path difference by controlling thickness or refractive index of material. Recently, researchers reported that arbitrary wavefront of light can be achieved with flat optics by spatially varying anisotropy, using geometric or Pancharatnam-Berry phase. However, despite various methods employed for anisotropy patterning, producing spatially varying birefringence with low loss, high damage threshold and durability remains a challenge. In addition, the technologies of birefringence patterning have been also used for generating light beams with spatially variant polarization known as vector beams, in particular with radial or azimuthal polarization. Radially polarized vector beams are especially interesting due to the non-vanishing longitudinal electric field component when tightly focused, allowing superresolution imaging. Radial polarization is also the optimal choice for material processing. On the other hand, azimuthal vector beams can induce longitudinal magnetic fields with potential applications in spectroscopy and microscopy. Nonetheless, generating such beams with high efficiency is not a trivial matter. In an article published in Light Science & Applications, scientists from the Optoelectronics Research Centre, University of Southampton, UK, demonstrated a new type of birefringent modification with ultra-low loss by ultrafast laser direct writing in silica glass. The discovered birefringent modificati which is completely different from the conventional one originating from nanogratings or nanoplatelets, contains randomly distributed nanopores with elongated anisotropic shapes, aligned perpendicular to the writing polarization, which are responsible for the high transparency and controllable birefringence. The birefringent modification enabled fabrication of ultra-low loss spatially variant birefringent optical elements including geometrical phase flat prism and lens, vector beam converters and zero-order retarders, which can be used for high power lasers. The high transmittance from UV to near-infrared and high durability of the demonstrated birefringent optical elements in silica glass overcome the limitations of geometrical phase and polarization shaping using conventional materials and fabrication methods including photo-aligned liquid crystals and meta-surfaces. "We observed ultrafast laser induced modification in silica glass with the evidence of anisotropic nanopore formation representing a new type of nanoporous material." "The technology of low loss polarization and geometrical phase patterning widens the applications of geometrical phase optical elements and vector beam convertors for high power lasers and visible and UV light sources." "The space-selective birefringent modification with high transparency also enables high capacity multiplexed data storage in silica glass." ### The book presents answers and opportunities to rich and provocative questions related to aging. Written by subject-matter experts, in collaboration with strategic innovators, and supported by extensive research, the book outlines the complex realities and possibilities around aging and what the future holds for older adults. Using unique personas, each chapter provides thought-provoking scenarios for what it means to age at home; and redefines what it means to age well. "The Future of Aging is the culmination of SE Health's commitment to care and putting people first," says Shirlee Sharkey, President and CEO of SE Health and one of the book's authors. "The book challenges the cultural norms and stereotypes of aging and captures SE Health's ongoing dedication to reimagining aging through innovation, collaboration and curiosity for change. It also highlights the commendable work of our SE Futures Team dedicated to co-creating a future where Canadians age with health, vitality and dignity." "The Future of Aging provides a nuanced, thoughtful and compassionate view of what it means to age with purpose," says Alexis Wise, Director of Health at Sidewalk Labs. "As we look to innovation to improve the experience of aging, this book reminds us that the human experience is core to that work and challenges us to think deeply about what matters to people as they age. Whatever your industry or expertise, there are insights for everyone in The Future of Aging. Congratulations on raising the bar in the global conversation about aging and innovation." The Future of Aging will be available to purchase on Amazon in the coming weeks. All proceeds from the book will go to the Saint Elizabeth Foundation and will be used to strengthen community health care. Please visit https://sehc.com/foundation/ to learn more. To download the complimentary introduction of the book written by Shirlee Sharkey and for more information on The Future of Aging visit https://futureofaging.sehc.com/. About SE Health SE Health is a not-for-profit social enterprise applying knowledge, vision and drive to impact how people live and age at home, today and into the future. With Canadian roots and 110+ years of expertise, the organization brings quality excellence and innovation to home care, seniors' lifestyle, and family caregiving. Through its team of 9,000 Leaders of Impact, SE Health delivers 21,000 care exchanges daily, totaling 50 million in the last decade alone. Visit us online at sehc.com. About Cognizant Cognizant is one of the world's leading professional services companies, transforming clients' business, operating and technology models for the digital era. Our unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses. Headquartered in the U.S., Cognizant is ranked 193 on the Fortune 500 and is consistently listed among the most admired companies in the world. Learn how Cognizant helps clients lead with digital at www.cognizant.com or follow us @Cognizant. SOURCE SE Health For further information: Media Inquiries - Sarah Quadri, Director, Corporate Communications, SE Health, [email protected], (647) 612-7145 Related Links https://sehc.com/ UNITED NATIONS (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 19th February, 2020) Washington will intensify economic and political pressure on Syrian President Bashar Assad in the coming days to deliver relief to the province of Idlib, US Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft said in a Security Council meeting on Wednesday. "Let me close [her statement] by taking a moment to address the men, women and children in the Idlib province," Craft said. "In the days ahead, the United States will not spare any effort, including working with allies, to isolate the Assad regime diplomatically and economically to deliver the relief, the resources and, ultimately, the peace that is kept from you for far too long. " In December, Syrian government forces launched an offensive to recapture areas of Idlib province, the last remaining rebel stronghold in the country. Tensions in the region escalated further after Syrian government forces shelled a Turkish observation point on February 3, killing seven military personnel and one civilian contractor. According to the United Nations, almost 900,000 civilians have been forced to leave their homes due to the ongoing military escalation in Syria's northwest since December 1. Close World Health Organisation gives an update on coronavirus The mayor of Daegu, South Koreas fourth largest city, has urged its 2.5 million population to refrain from going outside amid a spike in coronavirus cases within the region. Kwon Young-jin said the city was facing an unprecedented crisis, with 49 reported patients traced to an infected individual who had attended a local church. But the World Health Organisation director general insisted the number of South Korean cases is really manageable, adding he hopes officials can contain the outbreak at an early age. It comes as the Japanese government confirmed the death of two citizens, both in their 80s, who contracted the virus while aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. More than 620 people onboard the ship which was carrying 3,700 passengers have tested positive for the condition. Meanwhile in the UK, a total of 5,549 British nationals had been tested as of 2pm on Thursday. Nine cases of the virus have been discovered so far. Please allow a moment for the liveblog to load: 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. New Delhi/Beijing, Feb 20 : Even as it is bogged down by the coronavirus epidemic, China on Thursday reopened a hostile front with India as Beijing "firmly opposed" Union Home Minister Amit Shah's visit to Arunachal Pradesh on its statehood day and warned India against "complicating" the border issue. Arunachal Pradesh became a full state from a Union Territory, 34 years ago on February 20. The region was part of British India in 1913-14 and formally included when the McMahon Line was established as the border between India and Tibet in 1938. Disputing India's sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told the media in Beijing that "The Chinese government has never recognised the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' and is firmly opposed to Shah's visit." China considers Arunachal Pradesh a part of southern Tibet region which it occupied in 1951. Geng said, "China's position on the eastern sector of the India-China, or the southern part of China's Tibet region, is consistent and clear." Geng said the visit "violated China's territorial sovereignty, undermined the stability of the border area, sabotaged political mutual trust, and violated relevant bilateral agreement." He asked New Delhi not to take any actions which can "further complicate the border issue". "The Chinese side urges the Indian side to take concrete actions to uphold peace and tranquillity of the border area," Geng said. Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release SubCategory Select Sub-Category Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 22:33:12|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close SHANGHAI, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Financial institutions in Shanghai have taken several measures to promote production resumption of enterprises amid the novel coronavirus epidemic, local authorities said Thursday. "The financial institutions are increasing credit support to enterprises to help them resume operation," said Li Jun, deputy director of the Shanghai Municipal Financial Regulatory Bureau, at a press conference. Statistics show that as of Feb. 18, Shanghai banks have issued 90 loans totaling about 1.3 billion yuan (over 186 million U.S. dollars) to 48 key enterprises. "These loans were granted in less than two days. Priorities were given to enterprises focusing on the production of epidemic prevention materials," said Li. Meanwhile, 54 banks in Shanghai have granted loans of 17.6 billion yuan to nearly 2,000 enterprises affected by the epidemic. About 350 million yuan of loan fees and interest have been exempted from over 4,300 enterprises seriously affected by the epidemic. Many insurance companies in Shanghai have also extended their insurance coverage to the novel coronavirus pneumonia, in an effort to help enterprises resume production. Bengaluru, Feb 21 : A young woman, identified as Amulya, was whisked away from the dais on Thursday, for shouting "Pakistan zindabad" at an anti-CAA rally here, police said. "Amaulya, a student activist, was taken off the dais and detained for shouting 'Pakistan zindabad' at the rally in Freedom Park in the presence of AIMIM President Asauddin Owaisi and leaders of different faiths," a police official told IANS here. The sudden incident, which embarrassed Owaisi and the rally organisers - Hindu-Muslim-Sikh-Issai Federation, occurred when Amulya was called on the dais to address the gathering in protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) under the banner of "Save Our Constitution". "When Owaisi and others tried to stop Amulya from shouting the pro-Pakistan slogan, she started chanting 'Hindustan zindabad'. Our personnel who were at the rally for providing security, took her off the dais to control the situation even as she insisted on speaking," the police officer recalled. Owaisi, President of the All-India Majilis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) and its 4-time Lok Sabha member from the Hyderabad constituency, condemned the activist for taking liberty to shout pro-Pakistan slogan and told the organisers to stop her from speaking. "When Amulya resisted the organisers from addressing the gathering, our policewomen had to forcibly escort from the stage and detain her in a corner," the police official added. Regretting the incident and denouncing the activist, Owaisi said in Hindi-Urdu that he and his party was against such slogans as they are for India and proud of being Indians. "We do not agree with the activist shouting such slogans. The organisers should not have invited her to the rally. If I knew this, I would not have come and we don't have any link with her. We are for India and don't support our enemy nation Pakistan. Our drive is to save India and our Constitution," asserted Owaisi. Converting entire-home Airbnbs into long-term housing would nudge the citys vacancy rate towards a healthy three per cent, says a new report from Fairbnb. The coalition of hotel workers, residents and housing advocates released the findings Thursday at city hall. The report estimates more than 7,300 entire-home listings on the short-term rental platform that do not appear to comply with Torontos new bylaws could become available, nearly 2,500 in Torontos waterfront area alone. If even half of those homes were returned to the long-term rental market the citys minuscule vacancy rate would increase to two per cent, and it could approach a healthy rate of three per cent if all entire-home listings became long-term rentals, the report said. That would be up from 1.3 per cent, the combined vacancy rate for condos and purpose-built rentals in Toronto in 2019, according to the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corp. Airbnb disputed those findings, and stressed that the citys new licensing and registration system has yet to be implemented. Fairbnb spokesperson Thorben Wieditz urged Airbnb to be good corporate citizens and remove listings that dont comply with the citys new bylaw. The rental situation is getting worse and worse in Toronto and the last thing that Toronto needs is a corporation like Airbnb that systemically turns housing into hotel rooms, Wieditz said. We dont have the luxury of waiting and waiting and waiting. The Fairbnb report used Toronto data from independent New York-based researcher Murray Cox of the website Inside Airbnb, which analyzes the platforms listings. The Fairbnb report looked at only entire-home listings rented out more than 180 days a year; entire-home listings rented out by hosts with two or more entire homes for rent; and listings by hosts who rent out more than three private rooms. These type of listings are not allowed under the citys new regulations, which are still being contested by landlords. Under the new rules people can only host short-term rentals in their principal residence, and though the law is in effect the registration process wont begin until the spring. According to the data, the total number of Airbnb listings that dont appear to follow the regulations increased by roughly 17.8 per cent, from about 8,241 in January 2019 to 9,708 one year later. The number of entire-home listings, often referred to as ghost hotels, which are rented to tourists, business travellers and partygoers, increased by 13.5 per cent, from about 6,479 in January 2019 to 7,354 in January 2020. These listings continue to be concentrated in the condo towers of the waterfront. About 34 per cent of all apparent non-compliant entire-home listings in Toronto were found there in January 2020, compared to about 30.5 per cent in December 2018. Airbnb spokesperson Alexandra Dagg said in an emailed statement that Fairbnbs report conveniently ignores the fact the city has not yet implemented its licensing and registration system. We continue to support the citys efforts to reach the spring 2020 deadline they have outlined for implementation, she added. Moreover, Fairbnb is yet again manipulating inaccurate data to protect the bottom line of their hotel industry benefactors. Under the citys new regulations, short-term rentals are restricted to principal residences. City council approved the short-term rental bylaw in December 2017, but it was on hold as short-term landlords challenged it at the provinces Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT). The tribunal ruled in the citys favour late last fall, paving the way for the restrictions to take effect. In its Nov. 18 written decision, the LPAT said the new rules have the potential to put up to 5,000 of Torontos more than 21,000 short-term rental units back into the long-term residential market. There is one simple solution right in front of us that could increase the accessibility of affordable housing and reduce skyrocketing rents, said Bahar Shadpour of the Advocacy Centre for Tenants Ontario at the press conference Thursday. But, she said, Airbnb has yet to remove those entire-home listings. In the midst of Torontos brutal housing crisis people are fleeing the city and its only going to get worse if things dont change, added Geordie Dent of the Federation of Metro Tenants Associations. No one can find a place to live, theres a lot of panic and a lot of stress. Airbnb and other short-term rental sites did not create this problem, but they are exacerbating it, he said. Landlords for short-term rentals plan to appeal the tribunal ruling to a divisional court, but the city is going ahead in the meantime. The citys framework for licensing platforms and hosts should be in place by this spring, said Ward 10 Coun. Joe Cressy. But Airbnb could step up now to delist listings that dont meet the citys requirements. We dont want this to be a cat-and-mouse game, he said. In an ongoing attempt to crack down on so-called party homes, Airbnb announced earlier this month it would stop renting entire homes to new users under 25 in their own communities. The latest move followed a shooting at a 32nd-storey downtown Toronto condo that killed three men and injured two others. Airbnb also announced a neighbourhood hotline for concerns and a donation of $300,000 over three years to Canadian Doctors for Protection from Guns, a group that raises awareness of the public health impacts of gun violence. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 13:12:16|Editor: ZD Video Player Close Staff members arrange living materials bound for Wuhan of central China's Hubei Province at Zhongchuan International Airport in Lanzhou, northwest China's Gansu Province, Feb. 19, 2020. A cargo plane bound for the epidemic-hit city of Wuhan took off from here on Wednesday, carrying traditional Chinese medicines, protective materials, food and living materials to help the fight against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) there. (Xinhua/Fan Peishen) The man said in the very first minutes of his freedom that he would overthrow. He did not say he would replace, he said he would overthrow, - Prime Minister of Georgia Giorgi Gakharia told reporters, when commenting on the statements made after the release of former Interior Minister Vano Merabishvili, InterPressNews reports. As the Prime Minister noted, he did not want to talk about the mentioned issue today, but he said that it was once again confirmed that the National Movement was the past. "We need to think about tomorrow and work hard to make this country a country of opportunities for young people, not a country of challenges. The man said in the very first minutes of his freedom that he would overthrow. He did not say he would finish, or replace, he said he would overthrow. Lets agree that we are oriented to the future. Theyve had attempts to overthrow several times, but they have never succeeded and will never succeed. Our goal is to build strong Georgia, a country of opportunities, not a country of coups, overthrowing or the calamities we have left in the past," Gakharia said. Former Minister of Internal Affairs Vano Merabishvili left the so-called Matrosov prison after 7 years of imprisonment. Merabishvili was arrested in May 2013. He had been serving sentence for several cases, including a brutal dispersal of an opposition rally on May 26, 2011, the murder case of Sandro Girgvliani and the physical abuse of the opposition MP Valeri Gelashvili. Merabishvili may face further charges for the raid in Imedi TV in 2007 and the dispersal of another rally on November 7, 2007. The Dubai College of Tourism (DCT), established by Dubais Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (Dubai Tourism), invites all those with a passion for cooking to brush up on their skills and experience a culinary adventure during specialised classes and demo stations at the Dubai Food Festival 2020. Located at Jumeirah Beach (behind Sunset Mall), the free-to-attend sessions will be hosted as part of the Festivals flagship event, Etisalat Beach Canteen, with morning sessions run in collaboration with Top Chef Cooking Studio, which provides the practical learning space for DCTs Culinary Arts students. Whether you are a novice looking to gain confidence in the kitchen or a seasoned chef looking to add to your repertoire, the selection of fun and engaging sessions at the Dubai Food Festivals Etisalat Beach Canteen are perfect for all culinary enthusiasts. The instructors have honed their skills in some of the finest kitchens around the world, and now bring their expert guidance to help everybody cook like a chef no matter your skill level. Registrations are now open for the sessions running on weekdays between February 26 to March 12. Interested participants can sign up on dct.ac.ae and beachcanteen.ae. DCT Top Chef cooking classes take place on weekday afternoons offering essential cooking techniques as participants are guided through an impressive selection of dishes including pasta, pastry, vegan and healthy creations in state-of-the-art professional kitchen settings. During the evening sessions, DCTs experienced and distinguished culinary instructor, Christian Biesbrouck will share his tips, tricks and secrets to perfecting the art of cooking with resident students from DCTs culinary course demonstrating a selection of dishes in a theatre style set up. DCT will be officially launching its 2020 Short Courses programme starting on March 30, and to celebrate, all registered Beach Canteen participants will be entered into a raffle, standing a chance to win one of these short courses. The winner can choose from a Destination Marketing masterclass, Digital Marketing or E-Commerce boot camps or from a variety of Culinary Arts Classes. The DCT Top Chef sessions will be hosted from 2-4pm on weekdays, and the DCT chef instructor Christian Biesbrouck demo sessions with DCT students take place between 6-8pm on weekdays. For more information or to sign up for a class, please visit www.dct.ac.ae or www.beachcanteen.ae. - TradeArabia News Service A half-century before President Barack Obama ordered a restoration of full diplomatic relations with Cuba in 2014, Jean Daniel, a French journalist on a secret mission to Havana in the autumn of 1963, delivered a proposal by President John F. Kennedy to Fidel Castro. It was an offer to explore a rapprochement. Despite the distrust and raw feelings of the Cuban missile crisis, which had nearly plunged the world into nuclear war a year earlier, Mr. Daniel, a confidant of political leaders in many capitals during the Cold War, found Castro surprisingly, if cautiously, receptive to Kennedys overture. Three days later it was Nov. 22, 1963 over lunch at Castros seafront retreat on Varadero Beach, they were still discussing the offer when the phone rang with urgent news. Castro, the Cuban leader since 1959, picked up the receiver. Herido? he said. Muy gravemente? (Wounded? Very seriously?) Mr. Daniel who died on Wednesday at 99 at his home in Paris, according to LObs, the left-leaning weekly newsmagazine he co-founded recalled the dramatic scene with Castro in an article in The New Republic days after it happened. Hailing the Disha Act implemented by the Andhra Pradesh government recently, Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh on Thursday said that Uddhav Thackeray-led coalition government is also planning to enact the same law for women safety. Deshmukh met Andhra Pradesh Home Minister Mekathoti Sucharitha and Minister for Women and Child Welfare Taneti Vanitha at Andhra Pradesh Secretariat and discussed the Disha Act. "First of all, I congratulate the Chief Minister as well as Home Minister of Andhra Pradesh for enacting Disha Bill and initiating the Disha activities in the state. On the same lines, we are going to enact the Disha Act in Maharashtra for dealing with the heinous crimes against women," said Deshmukh. Andhra Pradesh Home Minister Sucharitha said, "Disha Act is a very important one and should be implemented in every state. "Maharashtra Home Minister and officials came to understand the objective of Disha Act to implement it in their state. The Disha Act 2019, allowing stringent punishment for crimes committed against women, introduced by the Government of Andhra Pradesh has been evoking interest among the other states in the country. Delhi and Odisha have also expressed interest in Act earlier and have sought details from the Andhra Pradesh government. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Berejiklian government concedes the cost of its signature metro rail project under Sydney Harbour and the central city is set to blow out by up to $3 billion, laying blame primarily on an "overheated" market for contractors. An extra $3 billion to complete the 30-kilometre metro rail line from Chatswood to Bankstown via Sydney's CBD within the next four years will drive up the final cost to $15.5 billion. The government's first public admission about the problems besetting the Metro City and Southwest rail project comes two weeks after the Herald revealed that an internal budget review in mid 2018 had warned it would cost $16.8 billion to finish $4.3 billion above the original forecast. Premier Gladys Berejiklian and Transport Minister Andrew Constance at a metro site in August. Credit:Ben Rushton While rejecting that it will blow out by that much, Transport Minister Andrew Constance said he expected it to cost $2 billion to $3 billion more than original forecasts. BOGOTA, Colombia, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Clever Leaves, a leading multi-national operator (MNO) and licensed producer of pharmaceutical-grade medical cannabis and hemp extracts, announced that it has launched its direct-to-business sales platform, Clever Leaves 360 , which offers pharmaceutical -grade cannabis extracts and finished products fit for a broad range of industries. The Companys portfolio of products can be delivered anywhere in the world where the regulatory framework allows, and Clever Leaves 360 currently serves clients throughout Europe, Australia, and South America. The platform offers businesses wholesale cannabis extracts with the ability to customize based on concentration, delivery system and size. Their current product portfolio includes medical-grade high CBD dry flower, CBD isolate, THC-free full spectrum CBD oil and full spectrum extracts. In the coming months, Clever Leaves 360 will also begin offering pharmaceutical-grade high THC extracts as well as high THC dry flower. Being one of the first cannabis companies with international exportation experience, weve acquired vast knowledge of the supply chain process and the ability in our cultivation and extraction facilities to provide pharmaceutical- grade standards. The Clever Leaves 360 sales platform strengthens our strategy to deliver value in every touchpoint and become a business partner for our clients around the world, including partners in newer industries looking to tap into the burgeoning international medical cannabis industry, said Kyle Detwiler, CEO of Clever Leaves. Clever Leaves 360 offers value through: Reliable Supply: control and tracking throughout the supply chain ensures a consistent product in both quality and supply Competitive Pricing: vertically integrated and focused on large-scale, cost-effective production results in one of the most competitive business solutions in the world Sustainable Operations: advanced operational processes combined with optimal environmental conditions to mitigate the environmental impact at every stage of the value chain Innovation Partners: a talented multidisciplinary team to drive innovation, experience, customization and knowledge to product creation and supply For more information please visit: https://www.cleverleaves360.com/ About Clever Leaves Northern Swan Holdings, Inc. and Eagle Canada Holdings, Inc. d/b/a Clever Leaves recently announced a definitive agreement to fully integrate their respective operations. Clever Leaves, the integrated company, is a multi-national cannabis company with a mission to operate in compliance with federal and state laws, and with an emphasis on ecologically sustainable, large-scale cultivation and processing as the cornerstone of building out distribution and brands. Clever Leaves is a leading vertically integrated producer of medical cannabis and hemp extracts and is currently cultivating over 1.8 million square feet of greenhouses under Good Agricultural and Collection Practices (GACP) in Colombia. Clever Leaves Colombian operations obtained its Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) certification from INVIMA, Colombias food and drug regulatory agency, after inspection of its top-of-the-line extraction facility and is being evaluated for certification under European Good Manufacturing Practices (EU GMP). Clever Leaves first extraction facility is currently capable of extracting 24,000 kilograms of dried flower, with expansion underway to increase expected extraction capacity to 324,000 kilograms of dried flower per year by mid-2020. In November 2019, Clever Leaves received authorisation from INFARMED I.P., the Portuguese regulatory authority, to start cultivation operations in Portugal. Based on the pre-licence received, Clever Leaves currently has a medicinal cannabis crop in Portugal. Clever Leaves currently has a 90 hectare farm in Portugal of which it anticipates the first harvest and full licenses by 2020. Clever Leaves is one of the worlds largest hemp and medical cannabis producers, with a global footprint encompassing brands, extraction facilities, cultivation operations and other investments across Canada, Colombia, Germany, Portugal, and the United States, and more than 700 employees worldwide. Press contacts: McKenna Miller KCSA Strategic Communications +1347-487-6197 mmiller@kcsa.com Ofsted is concerned that schools could 'squander' the 14billion boost in education spending due to be outlined in next month's Budget. Chief inspector of schools in England, Amanda Spielman said that funding can still be 'squandered when it is plentiful'. 'This means taxpayers' money could be wasted for little benefit,' she added. Her comments came in a removed blog post published on the Ofsted website Wednesday morning. The commentary had been intended not to be published until early next month, alongside research by the watchdog organisation on school funding. Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce a boost in funding for education to the tune of 14million over a three year period in next month's Budget. Most schools are cutting teacher numbers while others are slashing the curriculum amid funding problems, research by Ofsted has revealed (Stock image) Research by Ofsted has revealed most schools are cutting teacher numbers while others are slashing the curriculum amid funding problems. The findings are significant as the education watchdog is providing an independent view of funding amid warnings from teaching unions and pressure groups. They are likely to trigger a row with the Department for Education, which has repeatedly claimed that 'more money is going into schools than ever before'. Inspectors visited 16 primary and secondary schools in England, surveyed 201 head teachers and carried out telephone interviews with 18 of them. They reported 'significant financial pressure' due to 'funding cuts' and also rising costs. Ofsted's chief inspector Amanda Spielman said yesterday: 'We saw most schools making reductions to the number of teachers. In some of the secondary schools, subject specialists were not being replaced when they left and other teachers were teaching outside their specialism. 'In some schools, experienced teachers were replaced with less experienced and lower-qualified staff.' However, Miss Spielman said: 'This does not mean that we found universally strong financial decision-making in schools.' Ofsted is proposing having greater oversight of financial decisions, which could feed into judgments on leadership. It is conducting research and will report back. Last August, Boris Johnson announced the schools budget would be increased by 2.6billion in 2020-21, 4.8billion in 2021-22 and 7.1billion in 2022-23. Stephen Rollett, from the Association of School and College Leaders, welcomed Miss Spielman's 'acknowledgement of the damage done by the school funding crisis'. 'But we are disappointed she accuses schools of failing to do enough to monitor the impact of the cuts they have had to make,' he said. 'The blame lies with the Government which has caused the crisis by failing to fund schools properly.' A spokesman for the Department for Education said: 'We recognise the challenges that schools have faced and that is why we are increasing funding so all children get the top-quality education they deserve, while supporting schools to recruit and retain the best teachers.' NIGERIA: A video making the rounds online shows some students of a secondary School in Katsina beating up a man said to be a teacher in their school. In the footage shared by Kastina Post Hausa, two students were seen beating an older man in a green jersey while their colleagues cheered them on. The teacher finally managed to extricate himself from their grasp and grabbed one of the students. "Are you mad?" the visibly angry teacher asked as he slapped the boy across the face. Watch the video below - View this post on Instagram Secondary school students caught on camera beating their 'teacher' in Katsina katsinaposthausa A post shared by Lindaikejiblog (@lindaikejiblogofficial) on Feb 20, 2020 at 6:14am PST 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 BERLIN Nine people were killed and several others injured after shootings at multiple locations Wednesday night in the central German city of Hanau, east of Frankfurt, the police said. Police officers on Thursday found the suspected attacker dead at his home in Hanau, along with the body of another person. There are currently no indications of other perpetrators, the police in the southeastern region of the state of Hesse said in a tweet, adding that an investigation was continuing. The local public broadcaster, Hessischer Rundfunk, reported that an armed person had opened fire at a hookah bar in the center of the city, killing three people, then drove to a hookah bar in another neighborhood, where the attacker opened fire, killing five. In addition to those killed, several people were injured at each of the locations, the broadcaster said. PALMER A blanket being used as a curtain and left too close to a baseboard heater was the cause of a fire that displaced two residents from their Bondsville home last week, investigators said. The blanket ignited in a front bedroom of the Jim Ash Road home about 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, officials said. Two residents and their two dogs safely escaped. Firefighters rescued two cats from the burning home and gave them oxygen. Jennifer Mieth, spokeswoman for the state fire marshals office, said anything that can catch fire should left at least 18 inches away from baseboard heaters. The Western Massachusetts Chapter of the American Red Cross aided the displaced residents. PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 09:05:41 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 958 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 VANCOUVER, BC / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 - Ximen Mining Corp. (TSXV:XIM)(FRA:1XMA)(OTCQB:XXMMF) (the "Company" or "Ximen") announces that that it has entered into a Property Purchase Agreement (the "Agreement") dated February 14, 2020 with Klondike Gold Corp. ("Klondike Gold") for the acquisition of 100% of all of Klondike's British Columbia properties totalling 98 mineral claims covering 4,171 hectares and one Crown Granted mineral claim of 8.7 hectares located in the southeastern part of the province. The agreement covers four properties, namely Ron Gold (Nelson), Clubine, Hughes, and Quartz Mountain.Satellite Image showing Ron (upper) and Clubine (lower) properties (purple) and Ximen's Kenville and California mine properties (Red).The Ron Gold (Nelson) property adjoins Ximen's Kenville Gold Mine near Nelson, BC and consists of 29 mineral claims and one crown grant covering 1,176 hectares. Historically explored for structurally controlled gold-bearing vein mineralization related to the Silver King shear zone, the property also has potential gold-bearing porphyry-related mineralization. Several historic mineral occurrences occur within the property. A gold and copper soil anomaly was defined in 2017, with gold values ranging up to 1634.8 ppb (1.6 g/t Au) and averaging 49.8 ppb Au, and copper values ranging up to 1614.3 ppm Cu and averaging 189.8 ppm Cu (BC Assessment report 37345).The Clubine property comprises 5 claims covering an area of 232 hectares, located just north of Salmo, BC. and situated about 25 kilometers south of the Kenville Mine. Mineralization on the property includes the historic Clubine-Comstock mine and the Maggie zone. The Clubine-Comstock historic mine production totaled 3,964 ounces gold, 7,699 ounces silver and 818 kilograms zinc from quartz and quartz-carbonate veins containing pyrite, chalcopyrite, galena and minor sphalerite and pyrrhotite (BC Minfile). The Maggie zone high has high silver but low gold contents and consists of quartz and quartz-carbonate veins mineralized with galena, sphalerite and minor pyrite. In 2009, Klondike Gold drilled nine holes to test the Clubine vein system down dip to the east of the historic mine and intersected a mineralized zone with gold grades ranging up to 38.19 g/T Au across 0.95 meters (CB09-1).Satellite Image showing location of Quartz Mountain (lower left) and Hughes (upper right right)..The Hughes Range property is located approximately 20 km northeast of the town of Cranbrook, BC and consists of 6 claims covering 411 hectares and including one mining lease covering the past-producing Kootenay King mine. Work prior to 2012 was focused on a massive sulphide target like the Sullivan deposit, related to the Kootenay King stratiform lead-zinc deposit. Placer gold has been recovered in the area as well, and there are several gold occurrences on the property. In 2012, a widespread zone of disseminated copper sulphide mineralization was discovered within a southwest trending structural corridor that is marked by Cretaceous intrusive rocks and base and precious metal vein mineralization.The Quartz Mountain Property, also known as Anderson, Price's Pit or Golden Egg, is located 20 km northwest of Cranbrook and just southeast of Kimberley. It consists of 58 claims covering 2,361 hectares. Two past producers, Price's Pit and Golden Egg, which in total produced 1,767 ounces of gold are present on the property. Mineralization consists of chalcedonic quartz veins that occur in argillaceous quartzites of the mid-Proterozoic Creston Formation of the Purcell Supergroup. The veins contain specular hematite, pyrite, galena, sphalerite, chalcopyrite and native gold. Klondike Gold's 2004 drilling intersected 0.49 meters grading 16.5 g/tonne gold.The terms for the Agreement are as follows:Payment of $100,000 in cash,Payment of 1,000,000 Ximen shares and 1,000,000 warrants to purchase 1,000,000 shares of Ximen at $0.45 per share for a period of 24 months from date of issuance.Completion of the property purchase is subject to the satisfaction of a number of conditions, including approval from the TSX Venture Exchange.Dr. Mathew Ball, P.Geo., VP Exploration for Ximen Mining Corp. and a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101, approved the technical information contained in this News Release.On behalf of the Board of Directors,"Christopher R. Anderson"Christopher R. Anderson,President, CEO and Director604 488-3900Investor Relations:Sophy Cesar,604-488-3900,ir@ XimenMiningCorp.com About Ximen Mining Corp.Ximen Mining Corp. owns 100% interest in three of its precious metal projects located in southern BC. Ximen`s two Gold projects The Amelia Gold Mine and The Brett Epithermal Gold Project. Ximen also owns the Treasure Mountain Silver Project adjacent to the past producing Huldra Silver Mine. Currently, the Treasure Mountain Silver Project is under a option agreement. The option partner is making annual staged cash and stocks payments as well as funding the development of the project. The company has recently acquired control of the Kenville Gold mine near Nelson British Columbia which comes with surface and underground rights, buildings and equipment.Ximen is a publicly listed company trading on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol XIM, in the USA under the symbol XXMMF, and in Frankfurt, Munich, and Berlin Stock Exchanges in Germany under the symbol 1XMA and WKN with the number as A2JBKLThis press release contains certain "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Canadian securities legislation, including statements regarding the receipt of TSX Venture Exchange approval and the exercise of the Option by Ximen. 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 statements that are not historical facts; they are generally, but not always, identified by the words "expects," "plans," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "projects," "aims," "potential," "goal," "objective," "prospective," and similar expressions, or that events or conditions "will," "would," "may," "can," "could" or "should" occur, or are those statements, which, by their nature%2 Karnataka to undertake Triaging: What does it mean and how do you pronounce it Man belonging to a fringe Hindu outfit attempts self-immolation in front of Bihar Police HQ India oi-PTI Patna, Feb 20: A man belonging to a fringe Hindu outfit tried to immolate himself in front of the Bihar Police headquarters here on Thursday accusing the state government of "falsely implicating" people in a murder case to appease Muslims. Rajiv Brahmarshi had announced his intention to immolate himself through a video posted on social media and as a result, the police were prepared. He was caught by some police personnel as soon as he lit the fire, bundled into a waiting ambulance and whisked away to a nearby hospital, an officer present at the spot told the media. "We received inputs about a man threatening to immolate himself here. As a precautionary measure, police personnel and magistrates were deployed in front of the Sardar Patel Bhawan (the Bihar Police HQ) at Bailey Road here," the official said. "The man has been caught in time. Further action will be taken in accordance with the law," he said. In the video clip, Brahmarshi complained about Hindu activists being "falsely implicated" in cases like the Phulwari Sharif incident for the "politics of Muslim appeasement". Violence had rocked the Haroon Nagar locality of Phulwari Sharif Police Station area on December 21, last year during a state-wide bandh by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to protest against the CAA-NPR-NRC. A 17-year-old boy had gone missing that day and his body was found from a water-filled pit covered with hyacinth a week later. Locals had claimed that some pro-Hindutva activists had pounced upon the boy for allegedly shouting slogans while holding a tricolour. Several persons belonging to fringe Hindu outfits were arrested in connection with the incident. One of these outfits -- 'Hindu Putra', which purportedly has its registered office in the city's Ashiana Nagar locality, had issued a release about Brahmarshi's self-immolation bid and described him as the sanrakshak (patron) of the organisation. Brahmarshi had claimed in the video that recently he along with some top office-bearers of 'Shri Ram Sena' had gone to the JD(U) state headquarters to meet party leader Sanjay Gandhi, a close aide of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, with the request for intervention at the highest level. Gandhi had frowned at the sight of the Hindu activists and curtly told them to leave and try their luck with Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who is a BJP leader, he had claimed. We were appalled. It was not that we had gone there with an anti-Muslim agenda. All that we wanted was a fair and impartial probe. We have to run from pillar to post meeting parliamentarians and top bureaucrats. But there seems to be no way out of this harassment as the government is busy with its politics of Muslim appeasement, he alleged. We find ourselves driven against the wall. I am therefore going to give up my life by setting myself on fire in front of the police headquarters, Brahmarshi added. For Breaking News and Instant Updates Allow Notifications Story first published: Thursday, February 20, 2020, 17:12 [IST] Current Global has been named PR agency of record for Bota Box product of Delicato Family Wines. The agency is charged with developing and executing public relations programming to support the brand and its This Is How We Bota campaign throughout North America. Driving increased consumer awareness and defining the brand as a leader in a rapidly growing category are top priorities for the company this year. The account will be supported by Current Globals San Francisco office under the leadership of senior vice president Jennifer Strasburg. Bota Boxs wines, which were launched by Delicato Family Wines in 2003, come in portable, shatter-proof cartons that the company says keep the wine fresh for up to 30 days once open. Global Results Communications has added AMERGINT Technologies, a provider of mission-critical ground, test and networking systems for the space and defense industries, to its client roster. GRC will produce and launch campaigns to amplify media and analyst relations and generate coverage of the company in top-tier news and trade publications. Over 2,500 AMERGINT product deliveries are hosted on cloud architectures and dedicated servers, testing, launching and operating space systems. The International Space Stations voice, video, and data links flow through AMERGINTs softFEP systems at multiple NASA ground locations, with future manned space systems such as CST-100 following suit. William Mills Agency has been chosen to provide public relations services for Teslar Software. WMA is also providing marketing assistance for the company and has developed an app icon for its website and social media channels. Headquartered in Springdale, AR, Teslar offers automated workflow and portfolio management tools for community financial institutions. Teslar CEO and founder Joe Ehrhardt says that its partnership with WMA is intended to help bring Teslar into conversations with more community banks that are seeking enhanced efficiencies and a more competitive stake in the market. Far too often security is being overlooked in the rush to embrace digital innovation. As a result, as businesses rapidly adopt new technologies and computing platforms, they are also opening the door for cybercriminals who are looking to gain access to valuable data. With this in mind, cybersecurity needs to play a central role in all digital transformation efforts a strategy known as security-driven networking. However, many of these same businesses are also facing the challenges of the growing cybersecurity skills shortage, which can lead to unfilled roles with traditional areas of responsibility, such as identifying, patching, and updating vulnerable systems. While there is a clear need for individuals who can effectively manage these threats, security talent is difficult to find. How the Skills Shortage Impacts Business According to a study conducted by (ISC)2, the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals has now surpassed 4 million which means the global cybersecurity workforce must now grow at a staggering rate of 145% each year just to meet the growing demand for skilled talent. While there has been an uptick in universities offering cybersecurity degrees, that will barely make a dent in the workforce gap. CISOs will also need to work to address the cybersecurity skills shortage within their organizations, leveraging things like internal training, paying for certification courses, and establishing effective mentoring programs. A Forbes Insights survey commissioned by Fortinet found that CISOs are looking for more talent and need better training for employees. While this is taking place, they must also take care to consider how this gap is impacting the business as a whole, including their current employees. It is no secret that understaffing can put pressure on those employees required to pick up the slack. This stress can result in decreased productivity and employee burnout, which can often lead to human error. Without a security team that is fully rounded out and able to work as efficiently and effectively as possible, organizations may face network intrusions, data loss, and reputational damage. And from a financial standpoint, businesses lose an average of $3.86 million when impacted by a data breach. Why CISOs Need to Address This Challenge The impact of the skills shortage is too powerful to ignore and requires intervention. This is where an effective strategy driven by the CISO comes in. The evolution of the CISO has expanded the role from being a technologist solely focused on managing an organizations security risks, to also being a business strategist able to reach across organizational boundaries to shape and mobilize resources to enable things like secure digital transformation. In todays threat landscape, security solutions alone are no longer enough to withstand modern cyber threats. The expanding responsibilities of the CISO and the organizational impact of todays cybersecurity skills shortage both play a critical role in the success of an organizations digital transformation efforts and security strategies. While an effective CISO can provide essential guidance, a skills shortage can present uncertainties that can still adversely affect the productivity and morale of the security team which can directly impact the overall security of the organization. Taking Advantage of Current Talent Of course, the skills shortage has made new talent difficult to find which is precisely why CISOs must establish, or reinvigorate, training and education programs for their current employees., combined with an effective mentoring program to quickly bring entry-level team members up to speed. By investing time and efforts into existing team members, security leaders can actively provide more value to their organizations without having to rely solely on seeking new talent. Additionally, employees will gain new skills that will not only help them to do their job more efficiently, but also make them feel more confident while doing it. There is no one way to handle cybersecurity training and education. Recognizing this, Fortinet offers a range of training curriculum through its NSE Institute programs, comprised of the NSE Certification program, Fortinet Network Security Academy (FNSA) and the Fortinet Veterans (FortiVet) program. Organizations that prioritize ongoing training and mentoring programs will demonstrate a sense of devotion to their employees, which will in turn encourage potential internal candidates to join the cybersecurity team. With the right program in place, CISOs can open the door to a wider range of individuals who are willing to learn, even if they had not originally planned to work in this field. For CISOs to see success, they must start by evaluating their employees skills, capabilities, and experience, identify where the most need lies, and then build custom programs that include internal and external training, the selection and mentoring of internal candidates, and then filling gaps through specific hiring strategies. While some may require an introduction into the basics of the threat landscape, others may have the background knowledge required to master complex network security concepts. Final Thoughts The cybersecurity skills shortage can have a significant impact on organizations and their employees. CISOs are now responsible for bridging the gap between business operations and security, so it is fitting that these individuals should also be the ones to address this challenge. By establishing a training, mentoring, and education program, CISOs can help their employees expand their knowledge of network security and the threat landscape and build upon existing skills to bridge the skills gap. Learn more about Fortinets NSE Institute programs and how Fortinet is addressing the cyber skills shortage. Despite the presidential caucus debacle Iowa hosted Feb. 3, the too-old, too-white, and too-rural (at least to pundits who drop by every Leap Year) Hawkeye State still finished its awful week with an act of political courage rarely seen in U.S. agriculture today. Call to action The Des Moines Register published on Feb. 7 a clear, sharp call to action on the states increasing degradation of drinking water by pointing the finger directly at Big Ag and its enablers in the Iowa General Assembly. The criticism isnt new; several Iowa newspapers especially the Pulitzer Prize-winning Storm Lake Times regularly point out how Big Ag and the state legislature have worked together to make political buck-passing on the states worsening water quality Iowas unofficial sport. Ag experts The unusual part of the Registers op/ed, however, was its writers: four ag experts with impeccable legal and scientific credentials few would debate separately and no one should take on collectively. More on each later. Their editorial effort begins with a punch in the face: In 2019, Iowas streams carried away a billion pounds of nitrogen and 50 million pounds of phosphorus. Whoa, a billion pounds of wasted N and 50 million pounds of unusable P? What did that cost Iowa farmers, as well as the states citizens, parks and wildlife whose lives depend on clean water? To date, solutions have been short-sighted and ineffective. In 2013, the Iowa legislature passed its Nutrient Reduction Strategy, a timid approach its backers hoped would pacify public calls to act. But Iowas water quality has not improved. Weak regulations The reason is as obvious now as then: Iowas water problems flow from how its farmers operate: When the manure from the states 25 million hogs and 80 million laying hens is added on top of its fertilizer-intense corn-soybean monoculture, Animals are so overpopulated in some areas that manure-borne nutrients far exceed crops needs. Everyone knows this so, now, Its time to admit the obvious and regroup. All must recognize that the states livestock industry has grown far beyond our agencies capacity to enforce the weak regulations we have. Worse, these regulations mainly rely on farmer altruism, or self-sacrifice, that will require generations to produce measurable results. Iowans deserve better And thats just not good enough. We think Iowans deserve better from an industry indemnified by the taxpayer through billions of dollars spent on trade mitigation payments, crop insurance subsidies, and disaster relief. And, Poor water quality is not the result of callous, poorly informed or rogue farmers; rather it is the predictable result of land use policies, vulnerabilities of the corn-soybean-animal confinement scheme, and an economic system tyrannically ruling farmer decisions. What needs to be done, the four experts suggest, are forward-leaning actions most farm groups and state legislatures havent touched for decades. Now, however, everyone needs to focus on resilient ways that benefit all Iowans like taxing fertilizer and feed to trim overuse, monitor manure application to stop over-application and toughen todays weak regulatory system. These long-needed, well-informed ideas wont go away because the ag experts who offer them are Iowas most respected ag experts. One is Neil Hamilton, emeritus professor of law at Drake University and a nationally respected ag law expert. Another is Matt Liebman, a professor of agronomy and the H.A. Wallace Chair for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State. Two University of Iowa faculty members round out the four-person team: Sylvia Secchi specializes in sustainability and public policy and Chris Jones, a research engineer, writes an authoritative, often provocative blog on Iowa water quality. The four conclude their piece as they began it: with a clear, indisputable fact. The challenge represented by our degraded water is enormous. We know of no problems approaching this magnitude that have been solved through individual actions. Iowans deserve more than meaningless platitudes and dogmatic devotion to voluntary approaches. Now is the time to act if we are to avoid another century of degraded water. The United States has imposed restrictive measures on the five unelected members of an Iranian government agency it accuses of fixing national elections that are set for later this week. The Treasury Department announced the sanctions against the members of Irans Guardian Council and its Elections Supervision Committee on February 20, a day before the election. The United States accuses the agency of disqualifying candidates who dont follow the policies of the country's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The sanctioned men include Ahmad Jannati, a powerful cleric who is also the secretary of the Guardians Council. Jannati had taken part in vetting candidates, Brian Hook, the State Departments special representative for Iran, said at a February 20 briefing in Washington. Hook said the election committee denied more than 7,000 candidates the right to run for a parliamentary seat" in the February 21 poll. An additional 90 sitting members of parliament were disqualified from running for reelection, he added. Jannati and the four other sanctioned members "have denied the Iranian people free and fair" elections, Hook said. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement that "clerics like Jannati have deprived the Iranian people of a real choice at the ballot box for the last 41 years." He added that the Iranian people oppose this regimes brutality at home and its violent misadventures abroad. They deserve the opportunity to express their opinions without being marginalized or massacred. The voices of the Iranian people must be heard." In a statement early on February 21, one of the Iranian election officials affected by the sanctions said the U.S. actions show a disdain for democracy. "America's regime has shown through illegal sanctions...on members of the Guardians Council that it has nothing to do with democracy," Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei wrote on Twitter. "We are now even more determined to safeguard the people's vote," he added. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a separate statement that "the Trump Administration will not tolerate the manipulation of elections to favor the regime's malign agenda, and this [sanctions] action exposes those senior regime officials responsible for preventing the Iranian people from freely choosing their leaders." The measures also apply to Mohammad Yazdi, a member of Iran's Guardians Council who was formerly the country's first judiciary chief. The other three members of the election committee are Kadkhodaei, Siamak Rahpeyk, and Mohammad Hasan Sadeghi Moghadam. The sanctions will freeze any property belonging to the individuals in the United States and prohibit U.S. citizens from conducting financial transactions with them. Ryan Newman has skidded and now barrel-rolled his way to the finish line in his 20-year NASCAR career. His frightening crash on Monday night stole everyone's breath away. The 42-year-old Indiana native slid across the finish line on his final lap in a crumpled heap of metal. Sparks flew everywhere as his car skidded to a halt. His car's fuel was spilling onto the track and was frighteningly close to open flames. Workers immediately placed several large black screens around his car as they wrestled to get him out of the metal box. The car had to be flipped onto its tires before the workers could unstrap the "Rocketman". It took the team nearly 20 minutes to pull Newman out of the car. NASCAR announced Newman was confined at Halifax Medical Center, had non-life threatening injuries and was in serious condition two hours after the incident. "We had been waiting for information just like everyone else, so to hear some positive news tonight is a relief," global director for Ford Performance Motorsports Mark Rushbrook said. Ryan Blaney, who sent Newman spinning into the wall, was crestfallen. Corey LaJoie, who hit the driver side door of Newman's Ford, said it was "unavoidable". Fox: NASCAR released a clip of the accident on its Twitter page, promising updates on Newman's condition. Roush Fenway Racing released a statement Tuesday afternoon via Twitter saying Newman was awake and responsive to doctors and family. Newman was released from the hospital two days after his crash on Daytona 500. Roush Fenway Racing released a photo of Newman leaving the hospital's premises along with his two daughters. His release came hours after he was said to be alert and walking around the hospital. Newman's team said the Indiana native is showing great improvement, constantly joking around with staff, friends, and family. No details of Newman's injuries was released. Crashes are fairly common at Daytona International Speedway. Drivers reach a speed of 200 mph when racing for position and often make contact in tight quarters. There have been no casualties since Dale Earnhardt's 2001 Daytona 500 crash that took the Intimidator's life. NASCAR responded to the fatality by improving safety regulations, mandating head-and-neck restraints, and improving the design of the cars. Newman had been in many frightening wrecks at Daytona and Talladega in the span of his career. In 2003's Daytona 500, his car went airborne, flipped repeatedly, and landed on its roof. He had a similar incident in 2009 at Talladega. Denny Hamlin, the winner of the race, apologized for celebrating his victory. "We really didn't know," he said. "We got in the winner's circle and then that's when people told us. I wanted to explain that to everyone." Newman is known for being a harsh critic of NASCAR's struggles to keep cars on the racing track. He was also fined for public comments the sanctioning body found negative. Newman's crash will surely serve as a wake-up call for NASCAR to do even more. Newman said he stopped thinking about retirement after feeling renewed in his second year at Roush Fenway Racing. "I'm doing it past when I said I was going to do it 10 years ago. I don't know how to give the answer anymore, I really don't. I always said 40 and I'm 42 now," he said. "I want to have fun with my life. If I can have fun in this garage doing it and get paid what I feel like I deserve to get paid, then I'm all for it. It's got to be fun and it's got be rewarding in more ways than one." Five days after a Congress activist and a journalist were murdered in Odisha's Cuttack district, police on Thursday claimed to have solved the case by arresting two persons in this connection. Forty year-old Bhagaban Swain, Congress activist and husband of a sarpanch, and 38-year-old journalist Aditya Ransingh were murdered last week in Banki area of the district. Cuttack (Rural) Superintendent of Police R B Panigrahi said the murders were an outcome of previous rivalries. He said two persons have been arrested and two others detained in this connection. "Investigations made so far have revealed that the deceased persons and the perpetrators of the crime were always at loggerheads and there were reports of previous assaults and counter assaults between them," the officer said. A Congress delegation, on the other hand, met the state DGP at the police headquarters here during the day and demanded a crime branch inquiry into the killings. Describing the killings as "political murders", they indicated that ruling BJD was behind the incident. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) It is a sad day for the music industry as another rising rapper, Pop Smoke, died. According to a report published by TMZ, the 22-year-old Brooklyn-born rapper was fatally shot on Wednesday morning during a home invasion robbery. His record label Republic Records confirmed the news on Wednesday with a statement, saying "We are devastated by the unexpected and tragic loss of Pop Smoke. Our prayers and thoughts go out to his family, friends, and family as we mourn this loss together." According to the Los Angeles Police Department, an unknown number of suspects entered a Hollywood Hills home on Wednesday at 4:30 a.m and fatally shot an unidentified black male in their 20s. A few hours later, news outlets identified the victim as Pop Smoke, whose real name is Bashar Barakah Jackson. In the report, law enforcement officials said that the men fired multiple shots once inside, which critically wounded the rapper before being rushed to a nearby hospital at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in West Hollywood. Unfortunately, he did not make it and was pronounced dead. Multiple law enforcement sources familiar with the case said that police had not determined a motive. Pop Smoke has been described as a gang member in court documents, but it is unclear whether that played a part in his killing. An investigation is reportedly underway. Fans speculate that his final social media post identified his location and may have made him a target. Pop Smoke was just a walking lick homie posted his address on multiple times on the internet like the jackboys isnt lurking... pic.twitter.com/l63ffI0RZA N. Sterling (@SoulzOfMischief) February 19, 2020 His Instagram story shows him filming his shopping bags while he flaunted his new items, but for a brief second, his Hollywood address was visibly seen. Jackson's account now has 1 million followers, so hundreds of thousands of people likely saw his address in the lead up to the break-in. It could have been how his killers were able to track him down and shoot him, critically injuring him before fleeing. While authorities had not yet commented on whether the rapper's social media posts could be connected to the home invasion, some people were nonetheless interpreting the shooting as a cautionary tale. One person tweeted, "So Pop Smoke put his address up, and this morning someone robbed and killed him? This is not normal, that baby didn't even start life yet." Truly a talented rapper. Only just started blowing up #PopSmoke pic.twitter.com/L7ScIPvtw4 Isaaclett (@LettIsaac) February 19, 2020 Pop Smoke came on the rap scene in 2018, and just last spring, he broke up with a gang rap anthem, "Welcome to the Party," which bragged about shootings, killings, and drugs. The song was a massive hit that it drew attention from big names, such as Nicki Minaj who also did a remix of the song. Early this month, Pop Smoke released his album "Meet the Woo 2," which debuted at the number seven on the Billboard Top 200 Albums Chart. It was the followup to his first official release "Meet the Woo," which he released in July. In an interview with Rolling Stone just last week, Pop Smoke said he used a freestyle lyrical method and emphasized that he does not write anything because it is "all up on his head." "Everything that I will be writing, everything that I be saying, when it comes to these types of songs, just be so natural. Just how I be feeling," Pop Smoke added. He mentioned that 50 Cent is one of his influences, and the multiplatinum entertainer memorialized his fan by tweeting, "RIP to my man Pop Smoke. No sympathy for winners. God bless him." Nicki Minaj, Jamie Foxx, Justin Skye, and many others also posted a tribute to the late rapper on their social media pages. A mother has confessed to dumping her baby's lifeless body in an empty lot in northeastern Mexico after initially telling police that her daughter had been kidnapped. Five-month-old Karol Nahomi Tobias was found dead, wrapped in a blanket, under a tree near a pawn shop in Saltillo, Coahuila on Wednesday afternoon. Surveillance footage showed the mother, Ana Maria Maltos, walking with the baby and then a few minutes later leaving without her before allegedly telling residents in the Bellavista neighborhood that her child was abducted. Five-month-old Karol Nahomi Tobias (pictured) was found dead Wednesday after her mother abandoned her Tuesday at an empty lot in northeastern Mexico. Ana Maria Maltos confessed to authorities that she did not know what to do with her dead daughter and placed her lifeless body next to a tree after initially telling the police a man and a woman abducted the girl However, the baby died of asphyxiation at her home and did not have any bodily injuries except for some scratches, according to Gerardo Marquez, attorney general of the northeastern state of Coahuila, Marquez said that Tobias was sick for a couple of days and that her mother possibly abandoned her because she feared her daughter's biological father. 'The minor's illness allows us to infer that it led to bronchoaspiration and the mother did not notice,' said Marquez, while adding that results from the preliminary investigation do not point to the girl being kidnapped. The Coahuila prosecutor's office is investigating Ana Maria Maltos (left) after the woman confessed to dumping her five-month-old daughter, Karol Nahomi Tobias, at an empty lot in Bellavista, Saltillo, on Tuesday after telling the police her child was kidnapped. The attorney general for the state of Coahuila said the baby had been sick for a few days and died of asphyxiation at the family home Maltos, who is also the mother to an older boy, told authorities that her daughter was taken from her by a man and woman who jumped out of a yellow taxi and immediately fled in it at approximately 2:30pm Tuesday. Several Mexican news outlets got access to a surveillance video that shows the moment Maltos is walking with Tobias, who is tucked into a blanket, Tuesday at 2:27pm local time. The security camera captures Maltos a second time, at 2:41pm, but without her daughter. Witnesses said that Maltos rushed toward a grocery store with tears running down her face about two minutes after she was seen on the surveillance video. Surveillance camera captures Ana Maria Maltos (top left) walking with her daughter Karol Nahomi Tobias before abandoning her at an empty lot near a pawn shop in Saltillo, Mexico Security camera captures Ana Maria Maltos (top left) walking without her daughter Karol Nahomi Tobias after abandoning her at an empty lot near a pawn shop Investigators secure that area where the body of Karol Nahomi Tobias was dumped Tuesday by her mother after she told the police a man and a woman kidnapped her daughter outside a grocery store in Saltillo, Mexico However, Maltos, later admitted to dumping her daughter's lifeless body at the lot, telling police it was because she did not know what to do. A Saltillo Municipal Police Department patrol responded to a 911 call and located Tobias' body shortly after midday. The prosecutor's office is currently investigating Maltos, who has been detained, and has also interviewed at least a dozen witnesses, including family members. Maltos' son, who is at least two years old, has since been placed in the custody of the local child care services agency. GENEVA The feuding leaders of South Sudan announced on Thursday that after several missed deadlines they had agreed to form a unity government in a bid to end the ruinous civil war they began soon after the country was formed in 2011. South Sudan became the worlds youngest nation when, after decades of bloody conflict, it gained independence from Sudan in an internationally-mediated agreement. But two years later, a civil war broke out when President Salva Kiir, who belongs to the majority Dinka ethnic group, fired his deputy, Riek Machar, who belongs to the Nuer ethnic group. That war has since cost an estimated 400,000 lives and ignited Africas biggest refugee crisis in years. After talks in the capital, Juba, Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar, his former deputy turned rebel leader, told journalists on Thursday that they intend to form a unity government by a Saturday deadline. They had missed two previous deadlines in May and November last year, which they had set as part of an initial peace agreement that they reached in September 2018. South Sudan President Salva Kiir and rebel leader Riek Machar agreed on Thursday to form a unity government, a long-delayed step towards ending more than six years of war. The rivals have overseen a conflict that has left at least 380,000 dead and forced four million from their homes. "We have agreed to form the government in two days on 22nd February. We are still discussing on other things and I am hopeful we will resolve them all," Machar said after meeting Kiir. The president confirmed that they had agreed to a joint government for the third time since independence in 2011 -- an experiment which has ended in disaster twice before. "As the president, I will be appointing the vice presidents, and I will start by appointing Riek tomorrow (Friday) in the morning and I will dissolve the government today and then form a new government on the 22nd," he said. "These are changes which will bring peace." The formation of a unity government was the cornerstone of a September 2018 peace deal. But it has been delayed twice by failure to move forward on crucial issues such as forming a unified army, carving out state borders and creating a protection force to assure Machar's security. Kiir said his forces would be in charge of Machar's protection and of security in Juba. "I have taken responsibility of protection, as the unified forces are still under training," he said. He urged some 190,000 people living under United Nations protection in tent cities across the nation "to come out, because the dawn of peace has come". The progress came after weeks of mounting pressure from the region and the United States, which on Thursday welcomed the deal, citing Machar's "firm commitment to form an inclusive unity government" by Saturday. - 'Deliberately starving' civilians - Machar was sacked as vice president in 2013 and later accused of plotting a coup against Kiir, kickstarting a civil war characterised by violence, rape and UN warnings of ethnic cleansing. A 2015 peace deal brought Machar back as vice president and he returned to Juba with heavy security. When the deal fell apart in July 2016, the capital was plunged into a brutal battle between their rival armies and Machar was forced to flee on foot. The ensuing war drew in new parts of the country and other local grievances and disputes came to the fore. Experts have warned against rushing into a new unity government before all the outstanding issues are resolved, saying it could lead to disaster once again. Ragged bands of war-weary troops from both sides have been brought together in camps but formal training of a planned 83,000-strong army has yet to begin and soldiers are cooped up without adequate food and water, an AFP visit to one such site showed. The other key issue has been the number of states -- highly sensitive because it affects the control of key resources such as oil. Kiir this month said he would compromise by cutting the current 32 regional states to 10 -- but Machar resisted the addition of three "administrative areas". However the South Sudanese parliament on Thursday endorsed the incorporation of the 10 states and three administrative areas into the constitution. Even if the unity government is formed, a UN report released on Thursday highlighted some massive challenges. A three-member commission looked into rights abuses from the signing of a peace deal in September 2018 to December 2019 and delivered a damning indictment of "predatory and unaccountable elites". The commission said these elites had gone so far as to "deliberately starve" civilians in pursuit of their war. Three UN agencies and Juba said Thursday that despite a slight reduction in the number of people facing food insecurity, some 6.5 million people - more than half of the population -- could be experiencing severe hunger by the middle of this year. Other issues included in the rights report were the continued use of child soldiers by both sides, bloody localised conflicts, sexual violence and plunder of public funds -- all of which continued unhindered by the latest peace process. "The Commission notes with grave concern that beyond climate-induced factors, both government forces and armed groups have pursued policies responsible for the starvation of the population in Wau and Unity State," said the commission, referring to areas in the north of the country. Meanwhile, corruption had robbed the state of precious resources and "made several officials extremely wealthy at the expense of millions of starving civilians", said the report, which found millions of dollars in tax collections had been diverted and disappeared. FAIRFAX, Va., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC), the premier public-private partnership dedicated to advancing government through the application of information technology, today officially announced the release of the "DevOps Primer." It was produced through a collaborative, volunteer effort by a working group from government and industry, hosted by the ACT-IAC Emerging Technology Community of Interest (COI). DevOps is an organizational philosophy that requires an essential shift in attitudes and approach. It requires a growth mindset as much as it does new and reengineered practices and tools. ACT-IAC developed this primer to be a guide to support the Federal government in its understanding and application of DevOps to support its mission. It includes recommendations from government and industry leaders to identify and explore the culture, practice, and tools to advance the DevOps journey. "The ACT-IAC DevOps Primer is an outstanding example of the power of government and industry collaboration. It contains essential material for both federal and industry IT leaders looking for practical ways to innovate and quickly deliver results," said David Wennergren, CEO of ACT-IAC, "The featured case studies on federal agencies provide real world experience on using DevOps to drive improved mission outcomes." "The ACT-IAC DevOps Primer will help guide federal agencies and increase their ability to deliver applications and services at a faster pace than using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. It's a must-read, especially for smaller agencies," stated Jeremy Wood, Director of Policy and Planning, Office of the Chief Information Officer, Millennium Challenge Corporation. "Through hundreds of conversations about what is working and what is not, the ACT-IAC DevOps Primer shares insights on DevOps and 'what is next' for Federal agencies. We hope that the lessons learned and the recommendations will help organizations looking to apply DevOps tools and practices to fulfill their missions," said Robin Camarote, Senior Consultant, Wheelhouse Group. DevOps in government is the move towards a collaborative and communicative mindset and culture with streamlined practices by bringing the development and operations groups together to work as one team. It is a continuous journey and cannot be completed in a silo. Download the DevOps Primer at https://www.actiac.org/act-iac-white-paper-devops-primer To complement the DevOps Primer, ACT-IAC is hosting the DevOps Forum on February 20, 2020 in Washington, DC. Explore all the resources and opportunities at ACTIAC.org. American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) The American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) is a non-profit educational organization created to provide a safe haven for collaboration and the only place where government and industry can work together as true partners towards a shared vision of a more effective, efficient and innovative government. For more information: www.actiac.org. SOURCE The American Council for Technology - Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) Related Links http://www.actiac.org The average financial wealth of a Member sitting in parliament since 2010 has increased from HUF 3.1 million to HUF 23 mln in the last 9 years, according to a report by mfor.hu. While some people report staggering gains, others have only increased their debt. The wealth of parliamentarians has increased well beyond household wealth between 2010 and 2019, according to a summary of 2010 and recent asset declarations. For the sake of accurate comparability, the report looked at the wealth of MPs who already had a seat in the Parliament in 2010. The main focus was on finance and savings, including securities, investments, cash, as well as the amount of receivables and debts reported. Without the latter item, we can talk about financial assets, which, net of liabilities, gives us net financial assets, mfor.hu explains. MTI Photo: Mathe Zoltan The Economic and Organised Crime Office (EOCO) has launched investigations into the activities of Directors, Managers and Supervisors of the collapsed financial entities. The licenses of these financial entities were revoked by the Bank of Ghana for regulatory infractions and mismanagement. The Executive Director of EOCO, COP Retired Frank Adu-Poku told Citi News that they are investigating the criminality aspect of the dealings of the defunct entities. We are to fight organised crime and then recover proceeds of organised crime. The government started this process sometime in 2018, 2019 and the Receiver was appointed. And the Receiver in order to fight this, had to get some other institutions to support it so we came together as an investigative body to ensure that companies and directors who have collected monies from the public are brought to book so the Receiver submitted about 23 companies Savings and Loans Companies and 347 microfinance companies to us. Two teams to conduct investigations He indicated that two teams had been formed to conduct these investigations, adding that these two teams had started investigating three Savings and Loans companies Ideal Finance, Unit Credit and Express Savings and Loans. We had to come up with a strategy and that was to divide ourselves into two teams and the two teams looked at the major companies in terms of deposits taken from the members of the public and maybe the way that they handled members of the public. We started with three from the Savings and Loans and the three we are talking of are Ideal Finance, uniCredit and Express Savings and Loans. The quantum of deposits that they have collected from members of the public so many customers have been denied their monies. The idea was that they were to deposit these monies into the banks so they could receive their monies back. In the case of Ideal Finance, we are talking about 700 million cedis which have not been accounted for. In the case of microfinance companies, we are talking about 150 million ghana cedis so we pick depending on the quantum of amounts that have been lodged with them which they have not been able to account for. Mr. Adu-Poku said the investigations will be in two sessions the arrest and interrogation of directors, managers and supervisors of the collapsed financial entities as well as prosecution and freezing of their assets. In fact investigations is in two-folds. First, we arrest the directors, interrogate and if they have the money to pay, they pay. On the other hand, we are preparing them for prosecution and if they are prosecuted then we go after their assets and so far I believe the exercise has been successful. Kotei Dzanes arrest Mr. Adu-Poku confirmed that Kotei Dzanis prior to his assets being frozen by EOCO was arrested, adding that he was subsequently released after an intervention by his lawyers. We started with Ideal Finance where the main director is Kotei Dzani. We brought him to this office and it was based on an invitation. But in the course of investigations, we saw that he was somebody who can be treated as a suspect and so he was treated as such He was formally arrested and just about being put into the cells but because of the intervention of his lawyers, we decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and legalise whatever he had to. Citi News gathered that Mr. Dzanis assets were frozen to among others find a way of retrieving funds from him to pay back customers whose funds are locked up with the defunct Ideal Finance. Reports say the funds are in excess of GHS 700 million. EOCO, upon a referral from the Receiver for Ideal Finance, invited Nii Kotei Dzani for questioning on 3 allegations; GHc23m paid to a client, 200 acres of land he allegedly stole from Ideal Finance, and unlawful use of Ideal Finance's funds to build Camp Tsaetse. ---citinewsroom Dakar, Senegal (PANA) - Senegal's Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) coordinator, Ousseynou Badiane, has praised his country's achievements in the fight against cervical cancer, saying that in 2019, more than 200,000 girls were vaccinated against the disease Archbishop Samir Nassar, of the Maronites (Syria) speaks on the presence of the Church in war-torn Syria. By Benedict Mayaki The archbishop of Damascus reiterates the important presence of the Catholic Church in a country where violence has claimed hundreds of thousands of human lives and has led to the forced migration of millions. Syria has been at war for the past nine years. What began as protests against the regime of President Assad in 2011 degenerated into a war between the Syrian government and anti-government rebel groups. Speaking to the Vatican Radio, Archbishop Samir Nassar, of Damascus of the Maronites in Syria, touched on pertinent issues such as justice, inter-religious dialogue between Christians and Muslims, migration, and the application of the social teachings of the Church in the context of Syria. Listen to the interview with Archbishop Samir Nassar Church presence despite war Speaking on the presence of the Church, Archbishop Nassar affirmed the Churchs perseverance. We are still there. All bishops and priests, still there we still keep going. On the effect of the war on the Church, he said, We are a very old church. Sometime in the past, we had more than 33,000 churches in Syria. Now, we only have some hundreds we have lost a lot we have lost more than fifty percent of our number We are a minority. We used to be about five percent, now we are maybe two percent. Role of the Church Reiterating the Apostolic exhortation of Pope Benedict at the Synod for the Church in the Middle East in 2012, Archbishop Nassar advocates for a stronger place for the laity in the Church, better relations between the Catholic Church and Muslims, and the practice of the Churchs social teachings as means of assuring the Churchs mission in Syria. On Migration We have to change the situation. Everybody is closing his country against the neighbor. We have to open these frontiers to each other and live in one community, one fraternity of people. This is the meaning of Christian life, this the meaning of our religion, said Archbishop Nassar. Bari Meeting Archbishop Samir Nassar hailed Sundays meeting of Bishops of the Mediterranean countries in Bari as a good initiative towards the protection of the victims of the war in Syria. He said that the meeting, that foresees the presence of Pope Francis, is a good step towards the achievement of peace in the Mediterranean area. If we start in the Mediterranean, we can later on go to other areas in the world so that we can have peace everywhere. I nvestors gave outgoing Moneysupermarket boss Mark Lewis the thumbs-up on Thursday as the price comparison site recorded a decent boost in profits. The solid, if unspectacular, Lewis said yesterday he will step down shortly amid rumours he could be off to work in private equity. He has overseen a difficult three years since he joined in early 2017 as the company tried to encourage more of its customers to buy products on their mobiles. Dubbed the Reinvent strategy, under Lewis the firm ploughed millions into marketing and advertising campaigns to make it happen. Customers were reluctant at first but in the past 12 months the strategy has started to bear fruit and is boosting the bottom line. The company refused to publish any precise data but analysts say the number of people signed up to the app is in the millions, making purchases more frequent. As a result profit was up 10% to 94.9 million in 2019, while revenue increased 9% to 388 million. Many in the City, inclduing Liberum analyst Harry Read said they were surprised Lewis has decided to leave. The shares gained 29p to 338p. The share price stood at 341p when Lewis joined the business. But it was a slow day on the blue-chip FTSE 100 index, which was up 6.33 points to 7463.35. Hip and knee implants maker Smith & Nephew was the only major riser as it downplayed the panic over Covid-19, which has gripped the markets in recent weeks. Chief executive Roland Diggelmann told investors that the epidemic had not affected either of its factories in Beijing or Suzhou and as a result all its operations are running as normal. The comments sent shares up 7%, or 148p, to 1993p as China accounts for 7% of the companys revenues. It also posted revenue growth of 4.4% for the full year, which propelled Smith & Nephews sales to 3.8 billion. Bathroom and kitchen products supplier Norcros slid 12% after it warned profit for the year would be hit by supply chain disruptions due to coronavirus. The shares were down 37.7p to 253p. But Revolution Bars gained 1p at 72p after the pubs and bars group was given a Buy rating by analysts at Peel Hunt. The Democrats running for president are mostly focused on each other, with their campaigning and advertising largely concentrated in whichever state holds the next Democratic primary. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is free to hold rallies and run ads in key states including Pennsylvania expected to decide the 2020 election. Hes running unopposed, as the experts put it, and thats a big disadvantage for Democrats. With a half-dozen Democrats having a plausible shot at becoming the Democrat nominee and that scenario potentially extending for months, its likely Trump wont lose the advantage anytime soon. With that in mind, a pair of Democrat-supporting super PACs are trying to offset the advantage, buying millions of dollars worth of ads in Pennsylvania and a small handful of other swing states. One of them, American Bridge, this week announced $10 million worth of ad buys in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, with the Pennsylvania ads beginning Wednesday in more rural parts of the state. A similar group, Priorities USA, recently announced a campaign of ads in those three states as well as Florida and Arizona. The campaign will include TV commercials and digital ads on platforms such as YouTube, Hulu and Pandora. Priorities USA noted Trumps campaign and the Republican National Committee have hundreds of millions to spend on ads and it is imperative that they do not have the airwaves to themselves before a Democratic nominee is selected. American Bridge said its effort will have a special focus on rural, working class voters in Pennsylvania. That includes TV spots featuring a Pennsylvania voter who voted for Trump and says he wont do so again. With a wide-open Democratic field and a potentially months-long nominating process, we need to take the fight to Donald Trump right now. We will continue to elevate the voices of local voters hurt by the presidents failed policies and broken promises and up the ante to deny Donald Trump the swing-state margins he needs in 2020, American Bridge President Bradly Beychok said in a news release. The news release also said, Over the past months, American Bridge has undertaken a massive and unprecedented effort to strategically target the voters Donald Trump needs most in battleground states. Beginning in November, American Bridge had already spent about $4 million on TV, radio and digital ads in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. It boasted that in 2019 it outspent Trumps campaign and super PAC in the three states. Trumps total margin of victory in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan was only about 80,000 out of 14 million cast, as he narrowly flipped the three states which had long histories of supporting Democrats for president. The two political organizations say their research shows working class voters can be swayed against Trump by focusing on his handling of the economy, health care, Medicare and Social Security, and by highlighting what they call Trumps broken promises. In 2016, Trump won Pennsylvania by about 44,292 votes less than one percent out of about 6.2 million cast. We dont have to win all of these voters back. We dont even have to win a majority of these voters back, American Bridge political director Sacha Haworth told POLITICO. We just need to be able to peel off enough of his supporters within this swath of voters to deny him the White House in 2020. Meanwhile, Trumps campaign believes there are Pennsylvania voters inclined to supporting Trump who didnt vote in 2016. It is working to reach and sway them with highly-sophisticated tactics, much of it involving social media. The Trump campaign has received much attention for its practice of requiring people who attend his rallies to register and provide cellphone and email contact information, enabling the campaign to target them with ads or contact them directly through election day. His campaign also uses rallies to find unregistered voters and sign them up. Priorities USA said it plans to spend $150 million on ads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida prior to the Democratic National Convention, which begins July 13 in Milwaukee. That includes $5.9 million in TV ads in Pennsylvania beginning March 17. More from PennLive When it comes to Pennsylvania politics, we should be addicted to hope | John Baer Listen to the latest episode of PennLives new political podcast Battleground Pa. on your favorite app including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts. Battleground Pa. examines the changing political climate across the state leading up to November 2020. Thanks for visiting PennLive. Quality local journalism has never been more important. We need your support. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work. Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - February 20, 2020) - San Marco Resources Inc. (TSXV: SMN) announces that it has closed its over-subscribed non-brokered private placement by raising C$ 784,849.91 from the issuance of 5,813,703 units at a price of $0.135 per unit. Each unit consisted of one common share and one-half of one common share purchase warrant. Each whole warrant entitles the holder to purchase one common share for $0.20 until February 19, 2023. If, after June 19, 2020, the closing price of San Marco's shares is at least $0.40 per share for 10 trading days, San Marco may accelerate the expiry of the warrants to 30 calendar days after the expiry of that 10 trading day period. The Company paid finders fees of 7% and issued finder warrants (each exercisable to purchase one share for $0.135 until February 19, 2021) of 7% to Haywood Securities Inc. ($32,848.20 and 243,320 finder warrants), Canaccord Genuity Corp. ($1,417.50 and 10,500 finder warrants) and T-Bone Ventures Inc. ($2,835 and 21,000 finder warrants). The shares issued and issuable under the private placement are subject to a four month hold period expiring on June 20, 2020. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the securities in the United States of America. 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 (as defined in the U.S. Securities Act) unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws, or an exemption from such registration requirement is available. About San Marco San Marco is a Canadian mineral exploration company actively pursuing world class gold, silver, zinc and copper projects with a focus in mining friendly jurisdictions in both British Columbia, Canada and Mexico. The Company's principal focus and asset is the recently optioned Buck Property in north-central British Columbia that has large tonnage gold-silver-zinc potential in a mining-friendly region that includes many former and current operating mines. In addition, the Company's portfolio includes the several prospective, early stage exploration properties in Mexico. For further information, contact: Robert Willis, P. Eng. Executive Director Sharyn Alexander, M.Sc. VP Technical Services info@sanmarcocorp.com Forward Looking Information Information set forth in this document may include forward-looking statements. While these statements reflect management's current plans, projections and intents, by their nature, forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, some of which are beyond the control of San Marco Resources Inc. Readers are cautioned that the assumptions used in the preparation of such information, although considered reasonable at the time of preparation, may prove to be imprecise and, as such, undue reliance should not be placed on these forward-looking statements. San Marco's actual results, programs, activities and financial position could differ materially from those expressed in or implied by these forward-looking statements. Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION TO UNITED STATES NEWSWIRE SERVICES OR DISSEMINATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/52612 Sinn Fein TD for Sligo-Leitrim Martin Kenny is calling on Waterways Ireland to call a halt to its new policy of requesting 1,000 from businesses and individuals to apply for licence to use the Shannon Navigation System. Deputy Kenny said: Constituents have told me that since September 2019, Waterways Ireland have been requesting businesses operating on the Shannon Navigation to apply for a licence to continue operating on the river. Prior to this, businesses had to seek permission from Waterways Ireland under the Shannon Navigation Bye Laws 1992. All business on the Shannon Navigation must still comply with these Bye Laws. This new Licence agreement seem to be just a revenue gathering exercise by Waterways Ireland with a new charge of 1,000 per annum being levied on all business. From one Licence Agreement I have seen, it looks like Waterways Ireland have gone overboard with the conditions they have inserted. For example, they are requesting a list of all personnel who will work for the business and that they have the right to veto the appointment of any new personnel. Businesses have been operating on the Shannon Navigation for years and have complied with Bye Laws during that time. The number of boats on the Shannon Navigation has been declining over the last number of years and to add new charge to these struggling businesses is unfair and unjustified. Waterways Ireland must call a halt to this or else many of these businesses will sink. LAS VEGAS From the opening bell, Democrats savaged New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg and raised pointed questions about Bernie Sanders take-no-prisoners politics during a contentious debate Wednesday night that threatened to further muddy the partys urgent quest to defeat President Donald Trump. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who was once a Republican, was forced to defend his record and past comments related to race, gender and his personal wealth in an occasionally rocky debate stage debut. Sanders, meanwhile, tried to beat back pointed questions about his embrace of democratic socialism and his health following a heart attack last year. The ninth debate of this cycle featured the most aggressive sustained period of infighting in the Democrats yearlong search for a presidential nominee. The tension reflected growing anxiety among candidates and party leaders that the nomination fight could yield a candidate who will struggle to build a winning coalition in November to beat Trump. The campaign is about to quickly intensify. Nevada votes on Saturday and South Carolina follows on February 29. More than a dozen states host Super Tuesday contests in less than two weeks with about one-third of the delegates needed to win the nomination at stake. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was in a fight for survival and stood out with repeated attacks on Bloomberg. She sought to undermine him with core Democratic voters who are uncomfortable with his vast wealth, his offensive remarks about policing of minorities and demeaning comments about women, including those who worked at his company. Warren labeled Bloomberg a billionaire who calls people fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. She wasnt alone. Sanders lashed out at Bloombergs policing policies as New York City mayor that Sanders said targeted African-American and Latinos in an outrageous way. And former Vice President Joe Biden charged that Bloombergs stop-and-frisk policy ended up throwing 5 million black men up against the wall. Watching during his Western campaign swing, Trump joined the Bloomberg pile on. Mini Mike Bloombergs debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones, Trump tweeted. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesnt knock him out of the race, nothing will. Not so easy to do what I did! After the debate, Warren told reporters: I have no doubt that Michael Bloomberg is reaching in his pocket right now, and spending another hundred million dollars to try to erase every Americans memory about what happened on the debate stage. On a night that threatened to tarnish the shine of his carefully constructed TV-ad image, Bloomberg faltered when attacked on issues related to race and gender. But he was firm and unapologetic about his wealth and how he has used it to affect change important to Democrats. He took particular aim at Sanders and his self-description as a democratic socialist. I dont think theres any chance of the senator beating Donald Trump, Bloomberg declared before noting Sanders rising wealth. The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses! Sanders defended owning multiple houses, noting he has one in Washington, where he works, and two in Vermont, the state he represents in the Senate. While Bloomberg was the shiny new object Wednesday, the debate also marked a major test for Sanders, who is emerging as the front-runner in the Democrats nomination fight, whether his partys establishment likes it or not. A growing group of donors, elected officials and political operatives fear that Sanders uncompromising progressive politics could be a disaster in the general election against Trump, yet theyve struggled to coalesce behind a single moderate alternative. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, went after both Bloomberg and Sanders, warning that one threatened to burn down the Democratic Party and the other was trying to buy it. He called them the two most polarizing figures on this stage, with little chance of defeating Trump or helping congressional Democrats in contests with Republicans. Bloomberg and Sanders were prime targets, but the stakes were no less dire for the other four candidates on stage. Longtime establishment favorite Biden, a two-term vice president, desperately needed to breathe new life into his flailing campaign, which entered the night at the bottom of a moderate muddle behind Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. And after a bad finish last week in New Hampshire, Warren was fighting to resurrect her stalled White House bid. A Warren campaign aide said on Twitter that her fiery first hour of debate was her best hour of fundraising to date. The other leading progressive in the race, Sanders came under attack from Biden and Bloomberg for his embrace of democratic socialism. Sanders, as he has repeatedly over the last year, defended the cost of his signature Medicare for All healthcare plan, which would eliminate the private insurance industry in favor of a government-backed healthcare system that would cover all Americans. When you asked Bernie how much it cost last time he saidWell find out,' Biden quipped. It costs over $35 trillion, lets get real. And ongoing animosity flared between Buttigieg and Klobuchar when the former Indiana mayor slammed the three-term Minnesota senator for failing to answer questions in a recent interview about Mexican policy and forgetting the name of the Mexican president. Buttigieg noted that shes on a committee that oversees trade issues in Mexico and she was not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country. She shot back: Are you trying to say Im dumb? Are you mocking me here? Later in the night she lashed out at Buttigieg again: I wish everyone else was as perfect as you, Pete. The debate closed with a question about the possibility that Democrats remain divided deep into the primary season with a final resolution coming during a contested national convention in July. Asked if the candidate with the most delegates should be the nominee even if he or she is short of a delegate majority, almost every candidate suggested that the convention process should work its way out, as Biden put it. Sanders, who helped force changes to the nomination process this year and hopes to take a significant delegate lead in the coming weeks, was the only exception. The person who has the most votes should become the nominee, he said. ___ Peoples and Jaffe reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report. ___ Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, Ground Game. Leaving the organisers of an event to protest against the CAA, NRC and NRP here red-faced, a young woman on Thursday raised "Pakistan Zindabad" slogan in the presence of AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi, who denounced her action and asserted "we are for India". The woman, identified as Amulya, asked people to shout with her "Pakistan Zindabad" after the organisers of the event under the banner of "Save Constitution" invited her to address the gathering soon after Owaisi came on the stage. Soon Owaisi rushed to snatchthe mike from her hands and was joined by others who tried to remove her from the state. But the woman was adamant and raised the slogan again repeatedly. Later, the police stepped in and removed her from the dais. Owaisi then addressed the gathering, saying he did not agree with the woman. "Neither me nor my party has any link with her. We denounce her. The organisers should not have invited her here. If I knew this, I would not have come here. We are for India and we no way support our enemy nation Pakistan. Our entire drive is to save India," the AIMIM MP said. JD(S) corporator Imran Pasha claimed she was planted by some rival group to disrupt the event. The woman, he said, was not in the list of speakers and demanded that the police investigate the matterseriously. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Launched in 2007, Alden owns about 200 publications through an operating company now known as MediaNews Group, formerly Digital First Media. The chain has come under fire for sweeping layoffs at its newspapers, including major dailies such as the Denver Post, San Jose Mercury News and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, as well as smaller weeklies. A New Glasgow, N.S., nursing home believes part of the solution to a staff shortage is found at a Kenyan refugee camp. Lisa M. Smith, the CEO of Glen Haven Manor, and several other representatives from Pictou County travelled to Kenya in November on the recruiting mission. They conducted job interviews in Nairobi and at the Dadaab refugee camp, one of the largest such camps in the world. "The calibre of the candidates was truly amazing. It was certainly more than we ever expected," said Smith. Glen Haven extended 11 job offers during the trip to Kenya. The home also made four offers to refugee candidates who were interviewed by Skype from Jordan and Lebanon, for a total of 15 new offers. All the candidates have backgrounds as nurses or doctors, and will be working as continuing care assistants until they can get their Canadian credentials assessed. Steve Lawrence/CBC "They were very excited and very emotional," said Smith. "There were a few candidates that said they were thankful not only that we made the trip to Nairobi, but that we gave them their dignity back." The job offer includes the opportunity for candidates to move their families to Canada. That wasn't something all the candidates knew about during the initial application, said Janice Jorden, the home's employee relations specialist. "There was a lot of tears of excitement. It's not something I get to experience every day," she said. "Of course, I make job offers all the time, we hire all the time, we're a big organization. But to see that it makes that much of a change in their life, to see that excitement in their eyes, I don't get to see that very often." Shaina Luck/CBC The job offers depend on each candidate successfully applying to enter Canada through an economic immigration stream. That paperwork is underway right now, and Smith said she expects the first candidates will start arriving in New Glasgow within a few months. Glen Haven is owned by the towns of New Glasgow, Stellarton, Trenton and Westville. It has 222 residents and 300 staff, but more staff members are required. Story continues Although recruiters search locally and within Canada to attract continuing care assistants, the home hasn't been able to fill 20 positions. Five years ago, Glen Haven started to recruit internationally to fill the staffing gaps. So far, approximately 20 people have chosen to move from other countries to the Pictou County area, coming from as far away as the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Steve Lawrence/CBC Noel Lagumbay moved to New Glasgow in 2015 with his girlfriend after researching Canada for about a year. Both of them worked as registered nurses in the Philippines and became continuing care assistants at Glen Haven, and have transferred their credentials to become registered nurses in Canada. They have since married and are expecting a baby girl. He said the move was a big change for himself and his wife, but the people were friendly and his aunt who lives nearby helped them adjust. Lagumbay dreamed of being a registered nurse as a child. "I like talking to people and I get attached to them, so I think it helps a lot for me to pursue my profession," he said. "I like my job and I like working with different kinds of people, hearing their stories and connecting with them." Steve Lawrence/CBC Lagumbay has some thoughts for the 15 new staff members who will soon be arriving from other countries. "My only advice is just believe in yourself and continue to pursue your dream," he said. 'Unmistakable joy and gratitude' That's a point that isn't always foremost in refugee resettlement, said Simar Singh, the senior programs manager at RefugePoint, the international organization that worked with Glen Haven to put together the longlist of candidates to interview. Singh said refugees are often asked about painful memories that caused them to leave their homes. She noticed many of Glen Haven's candidates came out of the interviews pleasantly surprised they weren't asked to talk about the difficulties they've endured, but about their skills and training. "There was this unmistakable joy and gratitude that we felt, just sort of talking to all of these refugee candidates, where it seemed as though they had, even if it was just briefly, a moment to revisit aspects of their lives that they often are not asked about, or had to in some ways leave behind," she said. Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images Singh said one man came up to her after his interview and told her that "Even if this process doesn't go further, this 30-minute interview has been the highlight of my year." Glen Haven is using economic immigration instead of sponsorship, which is the method many community groups traditionally use to bring refugee families to Canada. Economic immigration doesn't require the care home to give supports to their new employees, but Glen Haven has made plans for extra support anyway. It has leased one house and recently purchased another seven-bedroom home, so that all new employees arriving from outside of Pictou County will have a furnished home a few minutes walk from work. Singh said if the Glen Haven model is successful, it could be used elsewhere in Canada. The project is being backed by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. MORE TOP STORIES Saudi petrochemicals giant SABIC has hired public relations juggernaut Edelman for help in pulling off the global business conference tied to this years G-20 summit of leading rich and developing nations in Riyadh. The contract, which runs from February until January 2021, notably calls on Edelman to help with media relations and event planning around the Business 20 (B20) dialogue forum with the international business community. The agreement is for $5.6 million, plus $1 million in estimated expenses making it the most lucrative Middle East lobbying and public relations contract in more than a year. Saudi Arabia has made the B20, now in its 15th year, a top priority of its turn hosting the Group of 20 as it seeks to attract private investment in its quest to diversify its economy away from oil. The gathering, held a month before the G-20, serves as the voice of the private sector for policymakers. The G-20 leaders' summit will be held Nov. 21-22. Edelman declined to comment about the contract. The forum is also vital for SABIC itself as the worlds fourth largest chemical company finds its place in Saudi Arabias plan to reform its economy by 2030. SABIC CEO Yousef Abdullah Al-Benyan is serving as chairman of B20 Saudi Arabia, tasked with leading the conference and finalizing B20 policy recommendations to the G-20 Presidency. The twist on it is that Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has this Vision 2030 to radically alter the economy, Simon Henderson, the director of the Gulf and Energy Policy program at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told Al-Monitor. And so the G-20 summit will serve as a showcase for this project. The centerpiece of Vision 2030, an initial public offering of a small share of Saudi Aramco stock to private investors, did not meet expectations amid slumping oil prices. But privatization still looms large in the kingdom despite international squeamishness over Riyadhs human rights record and its bloody intervention in Yemen. After the Aramco IPO, you're going to see other efforts at privatizations in the country, said Karen Young, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an Al-Monitor contributor. So, that's going to be a push for the next year or so. It's to publicize and get and draw investor interest for other state firms, whether it's in health care or chemicals or whatever that they can prove that they're able to do these kinds of offerings. SABIC is one of Saudi Arabias crown jewels as Riyadh looks to draw more foreign investment. Saudi Aramco is in the midst of a $69 billion takeover of the Saudi governments Public Investment Funds 70% stake in the company. I think it is in the interest of SABIC to keep showing that theyre a good company, a worthwhile company, so that when Saudi Aramco takes them over theyre treated fairly and honestly by Saudi Aramco and not just as a small addition, said Jean-Francois Seznec, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Councils Global Energy Center. And if [the deal] didnt go through they would still maintain their image in the world and their image in the world is very, very good at this point. SABIC is no stranger to influence campaigns in Washington, with the companys US subsidiary spending nearly $460,000 on in-house lobbying focused on Congress in 2019. SABIC also paid King & Spalding $60,000 for work on plastics and automotive applications issues in the first half of 2019, though the firm did not disclose lobbying any US government entities. King & Spalding stopped working for SABIC at the end of June. For now, only two Edelman employees are registered to work on the contract: Senior Vice President Debora Comenalli Murray and Vice President of Global Public Affairs Jere Sullivan. LONDON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- On the first day of the CoinGeek's London Conference Paul Rajchgod, Managing Director, Private Equity for Ayre Group set out guidelines for developers and business looking for investment from Calvin Ayre. To date Calvin's investment portfolio includes: Tokenized, Unisot, nChain, Kronoverse, Handcash, FRNT Financial, Streamanity, Pixel Wallet, MoneyButton, TAAL, CentBee, CoinMe, sCrypt, Planaria Corp and Core Scientific. But it is not over, Ayre Group Private Equity is ready to take on more investment. Investment and interest in BSV is growing; why? Institutional investors have been on the sidelines, waiting for a proven enterprise Blockchain. With BSV this now exists Institutional money invests in businesses they hope will scale globally, with sustainable margins; in big business, you scale or you die The various enhancements only on BSV, which all point to massive scaling, have started to attract enterprises big and small, and the investment is following Put simply: Only BSV scales and that is why Calvin Ayre is looking for further investments that can built on the BSV blockchain, the fastest-growing chain ever. Specific areas of interest to us that address factors unique to BSV: Applications that can generate high volumes of micropayment & data transactions Ventures that advance the Metanet B2B infrastructure for other BSV applications Technology that allows legacy businesses to easily integrate with BSV applications SOURCE CoinGeek Well, Nevada is always exciting. Thats what leading Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders joked on Sunday after a group of topless protesters briefly disrupted his campaign rally in Carson City to bash the dairy industry. It began when a protester walked on stage and took the microphone from Sanders, 78, and began calling on the candidate to denounce the dairy industry, as two more protesters joined her on stage without shirts on and began pouring red liquid from milk cartons on themselves. Sanders briefly tussled for the microphone before waving his hand and walking off stage while security escorted the women off the other side of the stage. Bernie, Im your biggest supporter and Im here to ask you to stop propping up the dairy industry and stop propping up animal agriculture, Priya Sawhney, the protester who took the mic from Sanders, said before the microphone was cut off. This is Nevada, Sanders joked with the crowd after he returned to the podium. Theres always a little bit of excitement at no extra cost. RELATED: Who Is Still Running for President in 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks at a campaign event in Carson City, Nevada on Sunday. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP/Shutterstock Sawhney and the group of women who joined her on stage were members of the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere. The organization put out a news release later in the day saying the incident was in protest of the dairy industrys abuse of female bodies and called on the Vermont senator to end his support of the industry, citing his friendship with Vermont-based ice cream company Ben & Jerrys. The companys co-founder Ben Cohen is a national co-chair on Sanders 2020 presidential campaign. While Sanders has shifted to criticizing factory farming giants during the 2020 campaign, the dairy industry remains notably absent from his condemnation, the organization said. Direct Action Everywhere tells PEOPLE that three protesters were arrested for indecent exposure and were each released on a $2,500 bond. Though Sawhney, who was clothed, was not among those arrested, according to The Hill. Story continues The topless women had the words LET DAIRY DIE written across their chests. Until our progressive leaders end their support for regressive and abusive industries like the dairy industry, protests are going to continue, says Direct Action Everywhere spokesperson Cassie King. RELATED: Jill Biden Helps Stop Heckler at Husband Joes Campaign Event Im a Good Philly Girl, She Jokes Bernie Sanders in Nevada on Sunday. | Rich Pedroncelli/AP/Shutterstock Protesters are a regular part of the campaign trail for the presidential hopefuls. Last week, former Vice President Joe Bidens wife, Dr. Jill Biden, stepped in to help security escort a heckler from his campaign event in New Hampshire. Im a good Philly girl, she joked afterwards. Sundays protest at Sanders rally came moments after the leading Democrat introduced his wife, Jane, 70. With two presidential nominating contests already accounted for in Iowa and New Hampshire Sanders has surged out in front of the field of Democratic candidates running to face President Donald Trump in Novembers election. The partys nominee will be decided at the Democratic National Convention in mid-July. A woman, who was allegedly gangraped in Unnao in 2017, claimed that another set of five people blackmailed and raped her repeatedly after promising to help her pursue the first case, the police said. The woman filed a case with the Bangarmau police on Thursday and the police have arrested one of the five accused, said Unnao superintendent of police Vikrant Vir. The police said the woman got married in 2012 and she alleged gang rape by her husband and two of his acquaintances in October 2017. The husband is in jail since then. The woman on Thursday filed a complaint, accusing five people Navraj Singh, Anup Singh, Dileep Yadav, Vishwanarain Singh, and Satish of the same area of rape. In her complaint, she said they had met her in February 2018 and had assured her that they will contest her case in court and get her justice in 20 days. They also took Rs 6,000 from her, she said. The woman alleged that the five had persuaded her to put her thumb impression on a blank paper, and since then they had been raping her as a blackmailing tactic, according to the police. The woman also alleged that the five men had been pressuring her to file a fake case of gang rape by two seers in the locality as the accused intended to extort Rs 4 lakh from the seers. Vikrant Vir said: One of the five accused named by her has been arrested. The others are absconding and the police will get a medical test done on the victim. Its been a while since Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and Prince Harry announced that they were stepping down from their titles as senior royals. Initially, the two still wanted to represent the Queen, but just desired a lesser role in the royal family. Unfortunately, Queen Elizabeth II determined there was no way the pair could operate in partial roles for the royal family, so they had to give up their positions as working royals altogether. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle | Anwar Hussein/WireImage Now, the details of how and when this change will go into effect have just been released. Why did Prince Harry and Meghan Markle want to step down? Meghan was used to being in the public eye. As a former model and actress, the California native had been in the spotlight for years. But nothing could have prepared her for the onslaught of criticism that would come from the British press. No matter what she did, the press wrote horrible and sometimes false stories about her. The media never let up, even after she revealed in the documentary Harry and Meghan: An African Journey that she wasnt coping well with all of the attention. Unfortunately for Harry, media attention on his family has ended tragically in the past. So, he was not willing to allow what happened to his mother, Princess Diana to happen to his new family. The decision that I have made for my wife and I to step back is not one I made lightly, he said during a speech at the dinner for Sentebale in London. It was so many months of talks after so many years of challenges. And I know I havent always gotten it right, but as far as this goes, there really was no other option. What I want to make clear is, were not walking away, and we certainly arent walking away from you. When will these changes take effect? Though Harry and Meghan have been living together in Canada recently, they have still technically been working royals. The changes wont go into effect for over a month. Starting April 1, Harry and Meghan will no longer hold an office at Buckingham Palace and will instead be represented by their U.K. charity foundation team, a spokesperson for the couple said in a statement obtained by People. The Duke and Duchess will be spending their time in both the United Kingdom and North America, the spokesperson continued. In addition to continuing to work closely with their existing patronages as they build a plan for engagements in the U.K. and the Commonwealth throughout the year, The Duke and Duchess have also been undertaking meetings as part of their ongoing work to establish a new non-profit organization. The details of this new organization will be shared later in the year. This new model might not be permanent. It is really just a trial run to see how the Sussexes can move forward. As there is no precedent for this new model of working and eventual financial independence, the Royal Family and The Sussexes have agreed to an initial 12-month review to ensure the arrangement works for all parties, the spokesperson said. Meghan and Harry have yet to comment on this new information. Belgium/IBNS: The Indian diaspora in Belgium took to streets recently to protest the continuing atrocities on religious minorities like Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan and made a strong case of India's recently passed law that grants citizenship to non-Muslims from the three neighbouring countries of Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. In the Belgian capital Brussels, also the centre of European Union bodies, the diaspora people took out rallies on Feb 15 ahead of Indian foreign minister's visit to EU on Feb 17. The Solidarity Rally in Support of CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act passed in India) at Schuman Circle, near the European Commission and European External Action Service (EEAS), Foreign Ministry of European Union (EU), was attended by about one hundred participants including men and women, students, business community people and IT workers. The presence was overwhelming despite warning of Storm Dennis (100 kms) from evening February. Participants were carrying placards and banners in support of CAA and demanded EU to take action against Pakistan for persecuting religious minorities. While the people shouted slogans in support of CAA, participants included representatives from Bangladeshi Hindu community based in Belgium. The Rally was led by Prem Kapoor, Indian origin Belgian & Chairman of Improvement Trust of Saint Josse Commune, Brussels, representing Socialist Party (PS). Among those present were Neena Mehta, Chairperson of Bharat Samaj Belgium; Harsh Soni, IT EMPLOYEE, and Vivek Dhawan, CEO of Glimpse of India (Ghent based organization propagating Indian Culture), Dr. Manish Gupta, an Antwerp based businessman and Amarjit Bhogal, Bureau Chief of PTC NEWS and Editor of Europe Samachar. University of Dayton Campus Ministry encourages all to "Pray, Fast and Give during Lent," which begins Ash Wednesday, Feb. 26. Lent is the period during which Christians prepare for Easter with prayer, abstinence and repentance, similar to Jesus' fasting in the desert. "Lent can be a time to deepen your relationship with God through prayer and other spiritual practices, to attend Mass/worship more regularly, or to engage in acts of generosity and service that benefit others," said Crystal Sullivan, University of Dayton executive director of campus ministry. The University of Dayton will mark the beginning of Lent with Ash Wednesday Masses at 10 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception, 7:30 a.m. in Curran Place, 12:30 p.m. and 4:30 p.m. at Holy Angels Church, and 9 p.m. at the Marycrest and Marianist Hall chapels. Liturgy of the Word with distribution of ashes will also be available at 8 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception and noon at Curran Place. A nondenominational Christian worship service with distribution of ashes will take place in the Kennedy Union ballroom at 5 p.m. In addition to Ash Wednesday Masses, University of Dayton Campus Ministry will offer the following free, public activities during Lent, which runs through Wednesday, April 8. Stations of the Cross will be observed at 3:30 p.m. Feb. 28, March 6, March 13, March 20 and April 3 in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. Romero Stations of the Cross will be observed at 3:30 p.m. March 27; these will begin in the Nazareth Courtyard outside St. Joseph Hall and take place outdoors. During Lent, the Sacrament of Reconciliation is available from 11 a.m. to noon Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays, 7 to 8 p.m. Tuesdays, and 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. Wednesdays in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception (there will be no confession March 17-19 because of spring break). There also will be a communal reconciliation service with individual confession and Taize music at 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 31, in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. Taize refers to the reflective music style of the monks of Taize, France. Liturgy of the Hours will be prayed at vespers (evening prayer) at 5:30 p.m. each Wednesday throughout Lent in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception beginning March 4 until April 1, with bilingual prayer (English and Spanish) on April 1. Exposition and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament will take place in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception from 5:30-8 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, and 1:30-3:00 p.m. Fridays during Lent (except for the week of March 16-20 because of spring break). Candlelight Mass in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception at 8:30 p.m. March 29. This Lenten season, Campus Ministry and the Office for Mission and Rector also will be collecting money to send to Marianist programs overseas health clinics in Togo, West Africa and India; and Marianist schools in India, Kenya and Malawi. A second collection will take place at all masses on March 29. Each serves the needs of the poor through education, encouragement and meeting basic needs. For more information, please contact the University of Dayton Office of Campus Ministry at 937-229-3339. For interviews, contact Shawn Robinson, associate director of news and communications, at 937-229-3391. Tripods are prohibited in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said that British MP Debbie Abrahams was sent back from India "bazi izzat se" (with a lot of respect), after she travelled to the country on Tuesday. Citing invalidity of her travel documents, MEA said that Abrahams' ideology was found 'anti-India' and that the BJP-led government sustained an anti-India campaign. Addressing a press brief, MEA said, "She came here without a valid visa so we sent her back "badi izzat se" from Delhi Airport. We believe that her statements and ideology are anti-India. There is a sustained campaign from her side against India." Earlier on Tuesday, Abrahams, after being denied entry into India, landed in Pakistan on Wednesday and said that she was not 'anti-India or pro-Pakistan' but wanted to 'assess' the ground situation in Jammu and Kashmir. The Labour party MP met with Pakistan PM Imran Khan on Wednesday, a day after holding a presser alongside Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi. READ| UK MP Debbie Abrahams meets Pakistan PM Imran Khan after her deportation from India Debbie Abrahams, the chairperson for All Parties Parliamentary Group on Kashmir claimed that the organisation was independent and was not 'pro-Pakistan or anti-India.' She further lauded Pakistan for showing an 'open approach' towards resolving the conflict of Kashmir. She said, "We wanted to make sure that the delegation visits Jammu and Kashmir. I have gotten no responses for my requests for a delegation visit to Jammu and Kashmir by India. Pakistan has shown an open approach towards resolving the Kashmir issue." Debbie Abrahams' visa row The BJP-led government cited the 'sovereign right of any country' on grounds for rejecting Labour MP Debbie Abrahams's entry into India on Monday. Responding to media reports, sources of the BJP-led government further added that Debbie Abrahams' visa was revoked for indulging in activities against 'India's national interest.' Similarly, the Home Ministry on Tuesday claimed that the proposed process was following in handling the case of the British MP's deportation. Representing the constituency of Oldham East and Saddleworth since January 2011, Abrahams is the Chair of the British Parliaments All-Party Parliamentary Kashmir Group. As per the website, its purpose is to support the right of Kashmiri people to self-determination and to highlight the abuses of human rights in Kashmir. After the abrogation of Article 370, she wrote to UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab asking whether UK would raise the matter at the UN Security Council meeting in September 2019. READ| Deported UK MP Debbie Abrahams posts picture of e-Visa for India that was revoked MINOT AIR FORCE BASE, N.D. - Defence Secretary Mark Esper used his first-ever visit to a nuclear missile field in frigid North Dakota to tout the Trump administrations multibillion-dollar plan for a top-to-bottom modernization of the nuclear arsenal. The costly project is necessary, he said, to keep up with Russia and outpace China. Russia and China are both modernizing and expanding their nuclear arsenals, Esper told reporters, speaking alongside a behemoth B-52 bomber, which, along with Minuteman 3 intercontinental ballistic missiles and Navy ballistic missile submarines, represent the three legs of the U.S. nuclear triad. All three legs of the triad need to be modernized, and its critical if were going to maintain a strategic deterrent that word is critical, were trying to deter war ... we need to have the confidence that our triad and related systems are effective, that are safe, that are reliable, that are credible, he said Wednesday. The weapons also are expensive. President Donald Trump recently referred to the spending of billions of dollars on nuclear weaponry by the United States, Russia and China as this craziness. His solution to controlling that expense is to get China and Russia to negotiate a new arms deal to replace a U.S.-Russia agreement, the New START treaty, that is due to expire one year from now unless extended. Trumps skepticism about nuclear weapons spending may be based on the eye-popping price tag. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated the first 10 years of the modernization plan will cost nearly $500 billion, and that over a 30-year span the total would hit $1.2 trillion, including the cost of sustaining the current and future force. The key new weapons are a replacement for the current Minuteman 3 ICBM, a new-generation Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine fleet, and a new long-range bomber, dubbed the B-21 Raider, to replace the B-2 stealth bomber that is to be retired even as the older B-52 bomber remains. The B-52, which entered service in the 1960s, is getting new engines and other major upgrades. In his 2021 defence budget proposal to Congress, Trump requested $2.8 billion for the Raider bomber and $1.5 billion for the new-generation ICBM. In all, the administrations proposed nuclear weapons budget for 2021 would approach $46 billion, divided between the Defence Department, which is responsible for operating the weapons, and the Energy Department, which maintains the warhead stockpile. That is more than the administrations proposed $41 billion for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development. Under current planning, the Pentagon alone would spend a combined $85 billion in the coming five years for the new bomber, the new ICBM, the Columbia-class submarine and modernization of the communications and warning systems that support the whole system of nuclear command and control. Esper came to Minot to get an up-close look at the Minuteman 3 missile system and the B-52 bomber. Minot, situated in the northwest corner of North Dakota, is the only military base with both weapons systems. The rest of the B-52 fleet operates from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, and the other Minuteman 3 bases are in Wyoming and Montana. Once called Americas ace in the hole, the ICBM is the card never played. None has ever been fired in anger. That is their intended role to dissuade any other nation from attacking with nuclear weapons for fear of a devastating U.S. retaliation. The ICBM is the most controversial segment of the nuclear force, in part based on an argument by critics that having the missiles constantly ready for launch on a moments notice raises the risk of miscalculation leading to nuclear war. The Trump administration, however, reaffirmed its commitment to the ICBM force in a 2018 review. The ICBM force is highly survivable against any but a large-scale nuclear attack, the review concluded. To destroy U.S. ICBMs on the ground, an adversary would need to launch a precisely co-ordinated attack with hundreds of high-yield and accurate warheads. This is an insurmountable challenge for any potential adversary today, with the exception of Russia. Trump would like Russia and China to agree to negotiations leading to broader limits on nuclear weapons, thus saving the need to keep building new ones. But with China showing little or no interest in such talks, Trump is asking Congress for tens of billions of dollars to modernize the entire U.S. arsenal. An arms control deal with Moscow and Beijing could stop this craziness, as Trump put it on Feb. 10. On the other hand, Trump has given no outward indication that he will take up Moscows offer to extend the New START treaty, which is the only treaty governing the number of strategic nuclear weapons deployed by the United States and Russia. In an interview, Esper declined to say whether he favours extending New START, which could be done without renegotiating its terms. John Rood, who on Wednesday announced he is resigning as the Pentagons top policy official at Trumps request, said in an Associated Press interview two weeks ago that he is skeptical of suggestions that Washington and Moscow extend New START, even for just one year, while also trying to get China into new negotiations. That doesnt strike me as a wise negotiating approach, Rood said. My experience is, you have to negotiate for what you really want the outcome to be. If youre addressing one partys concerns but not the other, I dont see how you get to that outcome. A woman is facing multiple charges after she allegedly beat a Cell Surgeon employee and stole over $1,000 worth of phones. Police responded to an assault call on Tuesday, with dispatch telling them a black female was beating a male in the head. On the way there, police were notified that the suspect had left the scene in a silver Nissan. When police encountered the Nissan, they pulled the vehicle over. As soon as the Nissan stopped, Kyla Jones, 22, jumped out of the vehicle and began running south, continuing to run even when told to stop. The officer was able to catch up with her and place her into custody. When police met with the victim at his workplace Cell Surgeon, he identified Ms. Jones as the suspect. He said he had communicated with her on Facebook about buying cell phones there. He said she grabbed a few phones and then ran out of the store. When he grabbed her in an attempt to stop her from getting away with the phones, he said she punched him in the face. The officer said he observed bruises on his face and scratches on his side. When a fellow co-worker tried to help him, Ms. Jones elbowed him in the face several times while she was simultaneously punching the other man, it was stated. A third employee told police that she saw another woman run up to Ms. Jones and tell her to come on because police were on the way. The phones stolen were valued at around $1,700. It was later discovered that Kyla Jones had several other warrants out for similar thefts. Papamoa Rotary has come up with a solution for anyone looking for a ute or SUV with their Beaut Ute's and SUV Whanau Fun Day. Its second time lucky for the event after it was rained out in November and the organisers had to reschedule it for Sunday, February 23. From 10am until 3pm people can head to Soper Reserve in Mount Maunganui to check out over 70 vehicles from 20 different brands. Organiser Geoff Mathis from Papamoa Rotary got the idea because he comes from a farming background, and never had the time to shop around when he needed a new ute. I thought well why dont we bring them all into one site so I can put a cross against those that I am not interested in and focus on those that am I am. It's going to be a fun day, its an opportunity for families come out for a couple of hours while mum and dad have a wander around. There's an opportunity for them to come and compare price, quality, style, legroom, all the things we individuals want in a vehicle all in one site. The day isnt just about trucks and SUVs there will be a bouncy castle and face painting for children and local musician Adam Mclean will be entertaining crowds from 11am until 2pm. The event is gold coin entry and all profits are going to three charities, I am Hope, Live for More and the Papamoa Hills Community Project. Geoff says Papamoa hills project was chosen because the hills need development and rotary has already started by planting natives. Live for More is a surf therapy programme to engage young people who may not respond to typical intervention. I am Hope is a youth and community focused support group run by The Key to Life Charitable Trust, started by Mike King. The charity provides free mental health counselling for young people as well as promoting a positive change in schools and communities. Geoff say the focus is as much about the charities theyre raising money for as it is the utes and SUVs. He says the day is the first thats ever been done in the Bay of Plenty and Waikato and possibly the first in New Zealand. Theres about 33 new motor vehicle franchises in New Zealand and weve got two thirds of them and over 70 vehicles here on Sunday. The worlds fastest production SUV the Bentley Bentayga Speed and Lamborghini Urus will be on display. Organiser Courtney Holliday says these are a drawcard because they arent sold in Tauranga so it gives people a chance to see something different. Having had to reschedule the event has enabled them to make it even better she says. It's actually given us an opportunity to up our game a wee bit and bring a bit more to the table, which is really cool. Were definitely super excited to raise as much money as we can for the charities. For more information about Beaut Ute's and SUV Whanau Fun Day visit the Facebook page. Granados and Bustos had ended their 10-year marriage in 2010, but still lived together in a Glen Ellyn apartment with their two children, though Bustos had been spending more time at her boyfriends, prosecutors said. The couple had a tumultuous relationship and Granados was unable to let go of Bustos as she began seeing another man, prosecutors said. A disgraced former campaign adviser to Donald Trump has been jailed for 40 months for lying to investigators. Roger Stone, 67, was handed the sentence at a federal court in Washington DC Thursday, amid mounting speculation President Trump will offer him a pardon. The president has branded Stones conviction a miscarriage of justice, and hit out at it on Twitter during Stones sentencing hearing, claiming former FBI bosses James Comey and Andrew McCabe had gotten away with lying. Trump tweeted: They say Roger Stone lied to Congress. OH, I see, but so did Comey (and he also leaked classified information, for which almost everyone, other than Crooked Hillary Clinton, goes to jail for a long time), and so did Andy McCabe, who also lied to the FBI! FAIRNESS? Sentencing Stone, Judge Amy Berman Jackson said the US Justice Departments recommendation that Stone serve between seven and nine years behind bars was excessive. But she also hit out at attempts to minimize his crimes, saying: The truth still exists, the truth still matters Roger Stones insistence that it doesnt, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to our most fundamental institutions, to the foundations of our democracies. She also hit out at Trumps wholly inappropriate tweets on the case. Stone was also convicted of witness tampering in November after he mislead congressional investigators probing Russian meddling into the 2016 presidential election. He then meddled with a key witness in order to make sure his obstruction would be successful. Stone arrived at court Wednesday wearing a smart navy coat, black fedora hat and sunglasses. The criminal, who was flanked by wife Nydia, has repeatedly blasted proceedings against him as politically motivated. Follow Us on Facebook @LadunLiadi; Instagram @LadunLiadi; Twitter @LadunLiadi; Youtube @LadunLiadiTV for updates KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Malaysian palm oil futures extended losses on Wednesday, dragged down by a slump in demand from second-largest buyer China due to the coronavirus outbreak. The benchmark palm oil contract for May delivery on the Bursa Malaysia Derivatives Exchange was down 19 ringgit, or 0.87%, at 2,616 ringgit ($629.45) by 0246 GMT. FUNDAMENTALS * Malaysia palm oil exports between Feb. 1 and 15 dropped 6.7%-10% from a month before, according to cargo surveyors. This is a slight recovery compared with the 20%-29.4% drop over the Feb. 1-10 period. * Prices of the vegetable oil have taken a hit this month due to slowing demand, with India, the world's largest consumer of edible oils, importing less of the commodity following restrictions on refined palm oil and as the coronavirus epidemic in China keeps businesses shut. * The death toll from the fast spreading virus in mainland China passed 2,000 on Wednesday, although the number of new cases fell for a second straight day as authorities tightened already severe containment measures in the worst-hit city of Wuhan. * The palm oil industry is bracing for additional food safety concerns after European food companies asked top palm producers in Indonesia and Malaysia to cut the amount of mineral oil hydrocarbons found in palm oil. * The industry is already trying to adjust refining processes to cut the amount of 3-monochloropropane diol (3-MCPD), a contaminant suspected to be carcinogenic, in anticipation of an upcoming EU regulation on the contaminant. * Dalian's most-active soyoil contract gained 0.03%, while its palm oil contract fell 0.5%. Soyoil prices on the Chicago Board of Trade were down 0.23%. * Palm oil is affected by price movements in related oils as they compete for a share in the global vegetable oils market. * Palm oil may bounce to 2,711 ringgit per tonne, as it has stabilized around a support at 2,615 ringgit, Reuters technical analyst Wang Tao said. Story continues MARKET NEWS * Asian shares and U.S. stock futures edged cautiously higher on Wednesday, as investors tried to shake off worries about the coronavirus epidemic after a slight decline in the number of new cases. DATA/EVENTS 0030 Australia Wage Price Index QQ, YY Q4 0930 UK CPI Jan 1330 US Housing Starts Number Jan 1900 US Federal Open Market Committee will release minutes from its Jan. 28-29 policy meeting ($1 = 4.1560 ringgit) (Reporting by Mei Mei Chu; Editing by Aditya Soni) The state Supreme Court will hear arguments next month over the life-without-parole sentence for one of Macomb Countys most notorious convicted juvenile murderers. The sentencing of Ihab Masalmani, now 28, is scheduled for oral arguments March 4 in front of the high court. Justices will listen to whether Macomb Circuit Judge Diane Druzinski properly considered various factors about Masalmani when she sentenced him a second time to life without parole for the 2009 slaying of Matthew Landry, 21, of Chesterfield Township, in an abandoned Detroit home. Masalmani and co-defendant Robert Taylor had abducted Landry from outside an Eastpointe sandwich shop. The justices ruling in the case is expected to also apply to Taylors case. Now 27, he was also resentenced to life without parole. Masalmani and Taylor initially received the same sentences in 2010 and 2011, respectively, following their first-degree felony murder convictions in separate trials in 2010 in Macomb County Circuit Court. The sentencings had to be redone following a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down juvenile lifer laws throughout the United States. The court upended automatic life-without-parole terms for defendants under age 18 at the time of the offense and the decision was applied retroactively. Many experts say a juveniles brain is too undeveloped to comprehend the consequences of his or her actions, and many youth offenders can be rehabilitated into law-abiding citizens as adults. Judges now have the option to sentence the defendants to a minimum term of between 25 and 40 years, in place of life without parole. The ruling impacted a dozen of cases in Macomb County. Masalmani, 17 at the time of the slaying, and Taylor, 16 then, were among the first in the state to be resentenced. Masalmani was about 4-1/2 months short of his 18th birthday when the incident occurred. The state Court of Appeals upheld the pairs resentencings, but the state high court last April issued an opinion agreeing to consider whether Druzinski properly considered the factors listed in Miller v. Alabama, the U.S. high court ruling, according to a synopsis provided by the state Supreme Court. The court will consider which party (the defense or prosecution), if any, bears the burden of proof of showing a Miller factor does or does not suggest a life-without-parole term, the summary says. The court says it also will decide whether Druzinski gave proper consideration to the defendants chronological age and its hallmark features, by focusing on his proximity to the bright line age of 18 rather than his individual characteristics. Also to be reviewed is whether Druzinksi properly considered the defendants family and home environment, which the court characterized as terrible, and the lack of available treatment programs in the Department of Corrections as weighing against his potential for rehabilitation, the court document states. Evidence presented at the resentencing hearing showed Masalmani, who emigrated from Lebanon, had a very difficult childhood as he went from one chaotic situation to the next in the Wayne County foster care system. He was described as a struggling, immature and yet likable boy who grew into an incorrigible teenager who committed many violent acts, culminating in a three-day crime spree in 2009 that included Landrys murder. Maslamani was also convicted for the armed robbery of a Harrison Township bank the day after Landrys abduction and a Roseville carjacking two days later that led to his arrest and linked him to the murder. Arguing on Masalmanis behalf will be his court-appointed attorney Erin Van Campen, and arguing for prosecutors will be Assistant Macomb Prosecutor Joshua Van Laan. The incident occurred the afternoon of Aug. 9, 2009, when the defendants forced Landry into the trunk of his own Honda Accord at 10 Mile Road and Gratiot Avenue. Maslamani withdrew $300 from Landrys debit card, using the money to buy clothes at Eastland Center mall in Harper Woods, gas for the stolen car, food and crack cocaine at multiple drug houses. The defendants held him for at least eight hours before walking him from one home to an adjacent one where Masalmani shot him in the back of the head. READ ALSO: RESENTENCINGS REVIVE UGLINESS OF MURDER PAIR GET LIFE WITHOUT PAROLE AGAIN FOR SLAYING OF ROSEVILLE MAN As the textile exports have plateaued, he said the government understood that one of the major issues is that 'take up the space that has been vacated by China other than this present crisis (coronavirus),' said Textile Secretary Ravi Capoor New Delhi: The textiles ministry on Wednesday said the domestic industry should take advantage of the huge $20-billion space vacated in the global apparel market by China, which is going through a tough time following outbreak of the deadly coronavirus. Addressing a symposium on emerging opportunities for Indian textiles, Textiles Secretary Ravi Capoor said domestic textile exports have plateaued during the past 5-7 years, which is a "very worrying proposition for the government". "India should step in at this stage to take the advantage although not a good way to protect ourselves. But every crisis has its own silver lining and I think while we are with China with all our emotions and financial, political and diplomatic help but still, there appears to be a big economic opportunity which is coming up our way," he said. In this background, Capoor said it would be the right time to bring the industry together and have a small dialogue to "see how the industry associations are prepared for this opportunity". As the exports have plateaued, he said the government understood that one of the major issues is that "take up the space that has been vacated by China other than this present crisis (coronavirus)". The secretary said $20 billion worth of apparel space, mostly in the man-made fibre, has been vacated by China in the past three years and taken away by Vietnam. "Now is a situation where we are in a position and the (textile) minister has just spoken to Finance Minister (Nirmala Sitharaman) also this morning. We are working towards seeing that the GST inversion on man-made fibre is also taken care of. "With all the efforts, if we are able to succeed in the removal of the inversion, then man-made fibre itself becomes a huge opportunity wherever China cedes space. India should step in a very big way," Capoor said. Textile minister Smriti Irani was also present at the symposium. The domestic textile and apparel industry, including handicrafts, stood at $140 billion in 2018, of which $100 billion was domestically consumed, while the remaining portion worth $40 billion was exported to the world market. Former Chicago police superintendent Eddie Johnson has reportedly been receiving a pension of more than $15,800 a month since he was fired by the mayor for allegedly lying about a night he was found asleep in his city-issued SUV. Johnson, 59, was awarded the pension by the Policemen's Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday, citing records it obtained under Illinois' Freedom of Information Act. The pension adds up to nearly $190,000 annually, or 75 percent of his average salary of just over $253,000 per year during his final four years with the Chicago Police Department. Mayor Lori Lightfoot fired Johnson in December after she said he lied about 'having a few drinks with dinner' on October 17, when he was found asleep behind the wheel of his SUV at 12.30am. Johnson had blamed his medication for making him drowsy, but subsequent media reports disclosed that the married father-of-three had been drinking for hours and kissing a woman on his security detail. Former Chicago police chief Eddie Johnson has reportedly been receiving a pension of more than $15,800 a month since he was fired by the mayor for allegedly lying about the night he was found asleep in his city-issued SUV Johnson, a 31-year veteran of the department, was named superintendent by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel in March 2016 and he was confirmed by the City Council the following month. He was fired on December 2, just weeks shy of his scheduled retirement on January 1, which he announced in November as the city's inspector general's office began investigating the SUV incident Pensions for Chicago police command staffers are generally calculated by looking at their highest average salary over their peak four-year period with the department. Those with CPD for more than 29 years are entitled to 75 percent of that peak salary. Had he stayed on as superintendent for a full four years through March 2020, he would also have been eligible for annual payments of just over $5,200, the Tribune reported. On January 1, 2021, Johnson will be eligible to receive a post-retirement, cost-of-living increase of more than $5,600 for that year. Johnson was fired by Mayor Lori Lightfoot in December after she said he lied about 'having a few drinks with dinner' on October 17, when he was found asleep behind the wheel of his SUV at 12.30am. Johnson had blamed his medication for making him drowsy, but subsequent media reports disclosed that the married father-of-three (above with his wife Nakia) had been drinking for hours and kissing a woman on his security detail Johnson was found asleep in a car near a stop sign not far from his home on the night of October 17 after a member of the public called 911. Responding officers allegedly took steps to keep the incident a secret and protect the superintendent by driving him home without performing a sobriety test. Johnson was said to be out drinking with Cynthia Donald (pictured) hours before he was found asleep in his vehicle Johnson later blamed his drowsiness on a mix-up with medication he was taking and said he had had a 'few' drinks at dinner. 'How can I explain it? Its just your body kind of gives you a warning with the high blood pressure thing that you may pass out, so I pulled over, stopped and I just rested myself until that feeling passed,' he told reporters. He said that he normally would have had his driver with him but that he'd given him the night off after a long day of work. It was later revealed that Johnson had been seen kissing a member of his security detail, Cynthia Donald, 44, hours earlier at Ceres Cafe - a Chicago institution known for its heavy pours. Donald, who was also married, had been assigned to Johnson's security detail since 2016 but was transferred after their rendezvous came to light. Police accused her of tampering with evidence after she allegedly returned a damaged phone as part of a probe into their evening out. Mayor Lightfoot slammed Johnson for 'repeatedly lying' during a press conference announcing his firing on December 2 (pictured). 'It has become clear that Mr Johnson engaged in a series of ethical lapses that are intolerable,' Lightfoot said After conducting an investigation into the incident which included reviewing surveillance footage of the night in question, Mayor Lightfoot said it was clear Johnson lied about what had happened. 'It has become clear that Mr Johnson engaged in a series of ethical lapses that are intolerable,' Lightfoot said at a press conference on the day of Johnson's dismissal. 'Mr Johnson was intentionally dishonest with me and communicated a narrative replete with false statements regarding material aspects of the incident that happened in the early morning hours of October 17. 'Had I known all the facts at the time, I would have relieved him of his duties as superintendent then and there.' Lightfoot, who took over from Mayor Rahm Emanuel - a solid ally of Johnson's - added: 'The old Chicago way must give way to the new reality. 'There must be no mistake about the message I am sending today.' The mayor refused to get into the details of the Inspector General's report on the subject, saying: 'I will not comment today on specific details. 'At some point, the report may become public. I do not feel that it's appropriate for his wife or children to do so at this time.' Johnson with his wife, Nakia, in November after he announced his retirement. His firing a few weeks later capped up a tumultuous year for the superintendent Johnson issued a statement the following day, saying: 'I am of course disappointed that I could not finish my career on January 1, as originally planned. However, I respect yesterday's decision of Mayor Lori Lightfoot. 'That is how it is and that's how it should be.' Johnson was named personally in a lawsuit filed by Empire actor Jussie Smollett (pictured) last November He went on to describe the night of the incident as a 'mistake', without giving specifics, but said: 'I know in my heart that I have always tried to act in a way that is in the best interests of this great city.... I have no interest in fighting a battle for my reputation.' The firing capped off a tumultuous year for Johnson, who is being sued by actor Jussie Smollett for alleging that he faked a racist attack on himself on January 29, 2019. Johnson stood in front of reporters in February to accuse Smollett of staging the attack to get a raise on Empire. It was an extraordinary step for a police chief, but he said he was furious at the way Smollett had allegedly manipulated his force. Smollett insists he is innocent and that Johnson waged a campaign of unfair treatment against him. Lightfoot was not in power at the time, but her predecessor Rahm Emanuel agreed with Johnson in his condemnation of Smollett. A review of the calculation of the amount owed by telecommunication companies (telcos) and allowing them to pay in instalments are two of the ways the government is evaluating to address the crisis in the sector without walking back on the Department of Telecommunications position that telecom companies (telcos) have to pay their dues. This position that the dues as measured by a proportion of adjusted gross revenues or AGR be paid was one upheld by the Supreme Courts October 2019 verdict that ordered telcos to pay up Rs 1.47 lakh crore. Two officials familiar with the matter said the government is considering various options because it wants to prevent any telco from going out of business, something that would, given the size and importance of these firms, adversely affect the investors sentiment, restrict consumers choice and increase stress in the banking sector. The officials, who asked not to be named, also mentioned that soft loans are another option being considered, although it wasnt immediately clear who would underwrite the cost of these. Since the telcos have raised questions about the computation of the amount, and pointed out what they think are discrepancies, there could be a recalculation of adjusted gross revenue by an independent agency, perhaps an audit firm, the officials said. The package will be absolutely within the ambit of the Supreme Courts judgement, they said. On February 14, the court had harsh comments for both DoT and the telcos for not adhering to its original order and summoned the managing directors of the latter to court on the date of the next hearing (March 17) if they had not paid up by then. The government has sought legal opinion in the light of recent verdict of the Supreme Court before it will take a final call in a day or two, one of the two officials said. According to the officials at least three senior cabinet ministers are directly involved in this matter. Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal on Thursday met telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad , they said. AGR is an unprecedented crisis for industry, which is being dealt with by government, Mittal was quoted as saying by news agency PTI. Mittal and Vodafone Idea chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla met finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman individually on Wednesday. DoT last week asked all telecom companies to repay AGR dues immediately as per the October 24, 2019 verdict of the Supreme Court. According to the verdict telcos were expected to pay AGR dues of about Rs 1.47 lakh crore by January 23, 2020. Airtel owes around Rs 35,000 crore and Vodafone about Rs 55,000 crore. Airtel paid Rs 10,000 crore on Monday and Vodafone has so far paid Rs 3,500 crore. After paying the amount on February 17, Airtel said in a letter to the DoT that the payment was made on an ad-hoc, on account basis as the company was in the process of completing the self-assessment exercise expeditiously and would duly make the balance payment upon completion of the same before the next hearing of the Supreme Court, which is on March 17. Spokespersons of finance ministry, ministry of telecom, law ministry and Airtel declined comment. A Vodafone Idea spokesperson wasnt immediately available for comment. The first official said the government is listening to specific concerns of the telecom companies and wants to help them. Closure of any telecom company would limit competition, aggravate unemployment and have adverse impact on their lenders, he said. According to industry experts closure of one of the big three Airtel and Vodfone Idea together serve around 60% of subscribers would mean direct and indirect loss of employment to about 1 lakh people and a massive financial jolt to the banking sector yet to recover from massive crisis of non-performing assets (NPAs). Former finance secretary Subhash Chandra Garg said that closure would mean NPAs will get transmitted to banks, if bank guarantees are encashed. The duopoly of Jio-Airtel would not be in the interest of country. India needs a healthy and competitive telecom sector. It would be in national interest if Vodafone survives as a strong player, he said. His reference is to Reliance Jio, which had to pay only Rs 195 crore and has already done so. At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in December, Birla had said that Vodafone Idea would have to shut shop if the company does not get any relief. If we are not getting anything, then I think it is the end of story for Vodafone Idea, he said. They (government) have publicly stated that they want three players from the private sector and one player from the public sector, so I think we can expect much more stimulus from the government because it is required by the sector to survive, he said. Despite a slight increase last year in background checks on those looking to purchase guns, Sturm Ruger absorbed a 17 percent decline in sales, which the Fairfield company attributed in part to discounts by rival manufacturers and the bankruptcy of a major distributor which conducted a fire-sale liquidation of remaining inventory. Ruger makes more than 400 standardized models of rifles and handguns at plants in New Hampshire, North Carolina and Arizona, with its headquarters in the Southport section of Fairfield near the Westport line. In CEO Chris Killoys second full year leading Ruger, profits were off 37 percent to $32.3 million on sales of $411 million. The company reduced the size of its workforce by 250 people over the past year by not filling positions of people who left as part of normal attrition. Ruger entered February with less than 1,600 employees but about to hire anew on anticipation of a rebound in sales. Weve got the help-wanted signs out at each one of our facilities for folks to help us with production, Killoy said Wednesday during a conference call. Were also looking for additional engineering talent. The South Carolina-based distributor United Sporting Cos. declared bankruptcy last June, coming under pressure on multiple fronts including the decision by Dicks Sporting Goods to pull guns from stock available for sale in many stores, as well as the bankruptcy of outfitter Gander Mountain and the merger of Bass Pro Shops and Cabelas. A lot of that has worked its way through the system, Killoy told investors and analysts on Wednesday. We saw throughout 2019 excess capacity in the ... sporting rifle category in particular, heavy discounting and in fact, saw several manufacturers exit that category completely. ... As we enter 2020, were going to be in better shape certainly at Ruger. Killoy added that the loss of any distributor can create disruptions, as liquidation prices undercut those of newly manufactured products and as territories are taken over by other companies, some of which may not have an existing relationship with Ruger and so require credit checks. The one thing that we forget sometimes about distributors is that they are more than just warehouses and salespeople, Killoy said. They also put their working capital at risk ... to provide payment terms for our independent retailers; and in Rugers case, our national accounts, our big-box stores. So that is an important function for distributors, and sometimes it takes more time than we would like. Alex.Soule@scni.com; 203-842-2545; @casoulman Fractured knee gets American woman evacuated from cruise ship Isla Mujeres, Q.R. An American woman with an exposed fracture to her left knee was removed from a cruise ship by Navy of Mexico medical personnel after the medical evacuation request from the ships captain. La Secretaria de Marina-Armada de Mexico says a female passenger from the Norwegian Dawn cruise ship was evacuated and taken to a Cancun hospital for treatment after the request for help. Navy personnel met the cruise ship approximately three nautical miles (5.5 kilometers) north of Isla Mujeres. Photo: Semar The 72-year-old American woman was taken aboard their vessel and transported to a waiting ambulance at the Naval Station of Puerto Juarez where she was taken to hospital for specialized medical care. Maharashtra Protocol Minister Aaditya Thackeray has relieved an official at the Maharashtra Sadan in New Delhi of his duties after video footage emerged of him misbehaving with Army jawans. Taking a serious cognisance of the incident, the minister has also asked the Border Security Force (BSF) that the official, who was on deputation from the organisation, be suspended and an inquiry initiated against him over the incident, an official release said. The incident took place when the regimental band of the Gorkha regiment had come to Maharashtra Sadan as part of the birth anniversary celebrations of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj on Wednesday, the release said. The jawans were having lunch at the Sadans executive dining hall, when Assistant Resident Commissioner (Protocol) Vijay Kayarkar, while asking them to sit in the public dining hall, allegedly misbehaved with the jawans. Following this, the organisers of the programme and the jawans left, an official said. A purported video of the incident went viral on social media prompting Thackeray to relieve the official of his duties. "The BSF has been asked to suspend Kayarkar and conduct a probe into the incident," the release said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) U.S. President Donald Trump desperately wanted to fire Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman the Ukraine expert on the National Security Council (NSC) on the Wednesday (Feb. 5) of his Senate acquittal. But some of his aides cautioned him that doing so would only detract from his celebration venting in the White House East Room the following afternoon. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Opinion U.S. President Donald Trump desperately wanted to fire Lt. Colonel Alexander Vindman the Ukraine expert on the National Security Council (NSC) on the Wednesday (Feb. 5) of his Senate acquittal. But some of his aides cautioned him that doing so would only detract from his "celebration" venting in the White House East Room the following afternoon. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union and a million-dollar donor to Trumps inaugural, was also sacked on Feb. 7. Evidently, telling the truth before House committee members and poking a gaping hole in the Presidents "no quid pro quo" defence was an intolerable firing offence. But it was Vindman, a decorated Iraq war hero, who had obviously gotten under the presidents skin with his biting congressional testimony about the inappropriateness of Trumps July 25 telephone call with Ukraines President Volodymyr Zelensky. Even though Vindman, sensing that a storm was brewing, requested to be reassigned at the end of February, there was just no way that Trump was going to countenance Vindman going quietly. And to pour salt in the wound, Trump also ordered the dismissal of Vindmans brother, Yevgeny, who worked as an ethics lawyer at the NSC, on the same day. Now, it certainly is the U.S. presidents prerogative to fire anyone he chooses on his personal staff. Its not illegal, and he doesnt need a legitimate reason to do so. But theres little doubt that deep-sixing Vindman was incredibly personal to Donald Trump. In two tweets that followed the firing, President Trump made his feelings about Vindman perfectly clear. "(He) was very insubordinate, reported contents of my perfect calls incorrectly" and "was given a horrendous report by his superior, the man he reported to," he wrote. As Trump then explained: "In other words, OUT." Notwithstanding the fact Vindman had outstanding job performance reviews, he failed the test of blind loyalty that Trump demands. Trump just doesnt tolerate anyone who challenges him or speaks ill of his character. Take a look at what happened to Utah Sen. Mitt Romney for his defiance. No doubt, other current State Department and Pentagon officials who testified before Congress and who criticized President Trumps actions are waiting for the other shoe to drop. They are well aware that their heads could be on the chopping block as the imperial or monarchical presidents vindictive and petty ways know no bounds. Recently, former Trump NSC senior adviser Fernando Cutz was quick to point out after the so-called "Friday night massacre": "Every career official will tell you its not just chilling but frightening." Indeed, staff in every U.S. government department will now think twice before uttering any word that could be misconstrued as criticizing Trump. The "Deep State" will almost certainly become the "Deep Freeze" in terms of the working environment. 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. Cutz went on to add ominously, "Youre seeing things happen in an unprecedented way that even Nixon didnt do. The broader message to career officials is that you cant speak up. Even if you see something illegal, something unethical, you cant speak up. Thats the message the president wants to send." What, then, will these latest firings mean for prospective whistleblowers inside the government? Will they be eager to come forward now? Hardly. And thats a shame, because those who opt to blow the whistle on government corruption, malfeasance or misconduct are a key cog in a long-standing mechanism for holding administrations to account. Now what? Moreover, the hard reality is that every White House, regardless of party stripe, has to rely heavily on the governmental bureaucracy for both the formulation and implementation of policy ideas and initiatives. It is government officials, public-sector employees, who have the expertise, experience and information, who craft the various menus of policy options and who understand intimately how the machinery of policy-making actually works. No modern government can work effectively without their buy-in. But in the wake of the Vindman and Sondland dismissals, career government officials will be constantly looking over their shoulders and wondering if their policy advice will enrage Trump. More worrisome would be the poisonous infiltration of a bureaucratic culture that couches its policy recommendations only in terms that would be perceived as pleasing to the president (or what he wants to hear). That, however, would be a recipe for U.S. policy chaos and miscalculation. Simply put, any sitting U.S. president is best served by an officialdom that is willing to "speak truth to power" that is, to be willing and encouraged to "tell it as it is" and to say "No" to the presidents worst instincts and whims. Unfortunately, thats the last thing that the Trump presidency wants to hear. Peter McKenna is professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island in Charlottetown. Iraqi city of Nasiriya has been the epicentre of the anti-government protests in the south and they want one of their own appointed as prime minister. The Iraqi city of Nasiriya has been the epicentre of the anti-government protests in the south. People there are refusing to back down despite increasing pressure from authorities. And they want one of their own appointed as prime minister. Al Jazeeras Simona Foltyn reports. Borno State Governor, Babagana Zulum has disbursed the sum of N100 million to 10,000 households displaced by flood in Rann, Kala Balge Local government area of the state. The Special Adviser on Public Relations and Strategy to the governor, Mr Isa Gusau, disclosed in a statement on Wednesday, February 19, 2020. Gusau said the governor had on Tuesday inaugurated the disbursement exercise in Rann, a border community between Nigeria, Cameroon and Chad Republics. According to him, each of male headed households received N15,000 while their female counterparts got N10,000 each, respectively. Gusau explained that the gesture was to mitigate the sufferings of the people who were earlier displaced by the insurgency before flood dislodged them in July 2019. Gov. Zulum flew from Maiduguri to Kala Balge on board a helicopter because it is currently impossible to access the area by road due to massive water-log caused by discharge of excess water from a dam in Cameroon in July 2019. The governor supervised the distribution of N100 million in cash to the residents in Rann, whose only option is to trek about 10 kilometres to border communities in order to buy food and other basic needs. Each of the 10,000 households in the community was given between N10,000 and N15,000 cash due to lack of available banking services in the area. More than 10,000 households in the agrarian community have been trapped while crops planted last year were destroyed by a herd of 250 elephants sighted by officials of the UN Humanitarian Air Service (UNHAS) from their helicopter in December 2019. Farmlands still flooded cannot be cultivated by the residents forcing them to completely depend on aid transported to them through humanitarian air services. Rann is considered Nigerias most severely disadvantaged local government headquarters despite 25 years of existence. It is usually inaccessible during rainy season as there is neither road nor bridge linking the council headquarters with the rest of Borno State. The council is also not connected to the national grid, the statement partly reads. Gusau recalled that the governor is in Kala Balge for humanitarian visit for the third time since June 2019. According to him, Zulum had paid similar visit to Rann on June 9 and Dec. 8, 2019, respectively, where he supervised distribution of food and non-food items to displaced people in need of critical lifesaving assistance. He added that the governor was accompanied on the visit by Dr Zainab Gimba, member representing Kala Balge, Bama and Ngala Federal Constituency, as well as other officials. This is coming barely one week after Governor Zulum has blamed the Nigerian army for the attack by Boko Haram insurgents that killed over 30 stranded travellers in Auno town, near Maiduguri. KanyiDaily had reported that Boko Haram insurgents killed and kidnapped many travellers who were stranded outside the military entrance city gate around 9:50pm on Sunday, in Auno town, Konduga local government area of Borno state. Gwendolyn Glenn in WFAE Radio: Henry Louis Gates, a renowned and award-winning filmmaker, author of two dozen books, a professor and director of African American studies at Harvard University, has written about race in America. He explores the Civil War, Reconstruction to Jim Crow, the civil rights movement and the state of race relations today. Gates spoke at UNC Charlotte Tuesday for the schools 2019 Chancellor Speaker Series and at the uptown campus to school donors and city leaders. WFAEs All Things Considered host, Gwendolyn Glenn, caught up with him to talk about race, voting, economics and other issues. Gwendolyn Glenn: Lets talk about the message that you want to leave people with. Youll be talking with students, faculty from UNC Charlotte and also a lot of city leaders here in Charlotte. Whats the message you want to leave today? Henry Louis Gates: Its very important for people to understand the history of Reconstruction, the period following the Civil War and its rollback because it is a precursor to the period that were experiencing today. Between 1870 and 1877, 2,000 black men were elected to public office, including Chris Rocks great-great-grandfather, who was elected to the House of Delegates in South Carolina. But within a few years, poof all that disappeared. Glenn: And I was going to ask you about that because you talk about that in your book and I think in an interview I heard you compare that roll back after Reconstruction to Jim Crow and on to whats happening now with the Trump administration and that rollback. Gates: Reconstruction was 12 years of unprecedented black freedom followed by an alt-right rollback. And were living through a period of eight years of a beautiful, brilliant, black family in the White House. A brilliant black president followed by an alt-right rollback. So the lesson of Reconstruction is that rights that we think are permanent, the right to vote, birthright citizenship, and the right of a woman to determine the fate of her own body. We think that these are inviolable. But theyre not theyre subject to the interpretation of the courts and sometimes the executive orders and that is the crisis that were facing today. So what happened in Reconstruction can happen again. The most important way, the most devastating way that Reconstruction was rolled back was through voter suppression. More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will honor The Black History Month. This years theme is African Americans and the Vote. Readers are encouraged to send in their suggestions) Fitch Ratings on Thursday said it has taken Bharti Airtel off 'watch negative' and affirmed the telecom operator's long-term foreign currency issuer default rating at 'BBB-' with a stable outlook New Delhi: Fitch Ratings on Thursday said it has taken Bharti Airtel off 'watch negative' and affirmed the telecom operator's long-term foreign currency issuer default rating at 'BBB-' with a stable outlook. "The Stable Outlook reflects our view that an equity injection of $2 billion in January 2020 and EBITDA growth for the financial year ending March 2020 (FY20) and FY21 will be more than sufficient to offset the increase in debt to pay regulatory dues of up to $4.9 billion, which stem from a dispute over adjusted gross revenue (AGR)," the rating agency said in a statement. Bharti paid Rs 10,000 crore on 17 February to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) after the Supreme Court rejected telcos' petition to ascertain with the DoT the amount and timing of payment of regulatory dues related to the AGR dispute. #JustIn | Fitch affirms Bharti Airtel long-term foreign-currency issuer default rating (IDR) at 'BBB-' & senior unsecured rating 'BBB-'. Outlook on IDR is Stable. Watch Negative is removed from all the ratings pic.twitter.com/sdAqw7FZXT CNBC-TV18 (@CNBCTV18Live) February 20, 2020 "Bharti's management estimates the regulatory dues will not exceed the provision amount of $4.9 billion," it said. The Supreme Court's original ruling in October led the DoT to seek hefty unpaid dues on licence fees and spectrum-usage charges from telcos. The DoT demand relates to a 14-year-old dispute regarding the definition of AGR, which the Supreme Court agreed should include all kinds of income generated by the telcos. "The Rating Watch Negative is removed from all the ratings," Fitch said. It estimated that funds from operations (FFO) adjusted net leverage will improve to 2.3-2.4 times in FY20 and to around 2.0x in FY21 - excluding $6.3 billion in deferred spectrum costs - below 2.5 times, the threshold above which it may consider negative rating action. The $2 billion (over Rs 14,000 crore) equity injection alleviated pressure on the balance sheet resulting from high regulatory dues obligations and the company says it is committed to an investment-grade rating. It raised about $7.6 billion in equity through a rights issue and the sale of equity in its African subsidiary, Airtel Africa Plc, in last 18 months. "We estimate Bharti's consolidated EBITDA will increase by 20-25 percent a year in FY20 and FY21 due to easing competition in the Indian wireless market and continued strong growth in its African markets and Indian enterprise segment," Fitch said. The rating agency said Bharti is poised to gain at least 30 million subscribers from Vodafone Idea in FY21. "We believe that Bharti and Jio will gain market share, given Vodafone Idea has limited financial flexibility to raise at least $6 billion in debt to pay regulatory dues in the short term," it said. Vodafone Idea is struggling to improve its EBITDA amid a rapidly shrinking subscriber base and significantly high leverage. The company's chairman publicly stated that it may shut down if it does not receive any relief on regulatory dues from the Supreme Court. (CNN) Larry Tesler, a pioneer of personal computing credited with creating the cut, copy and paste as well as the search and replace functions, has died. He was 74. Tesler was not nearly as well known as computing giants such as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But he played an early, central role in making computers accessible to people without computer engineering degrees, i.e. most of us. Xerox, the company for whom he developed the functions, tweeted out news of his death. "Your workday is easier thanks to his revolutionary ideas," the company's tweet said. Cut, copy and paste and search and replace functions are used millions of times a day without users thinking twice about how they were developed or by whom. But before Tesler's work, computer users had to interact with clunky programs in different "modes," where the same commands meant different things depending on how they were used. Even an expert like Tesler found that to be a problem. "Most interactive programs had modes, which always tripped me up," he wrote in a 2012 paper about the development of copy, cut and paste. Tesler became a champion of eliminating modes from computer programs. His personal web site was nomodes.com. The elimination of modes opened the door to how computer users have interacted with personal computers for the last 40 years. Much of that work was done not at one of today's tech giants, but at a computer lab at Xerox. Today most people know Xerox only as a maker of copiers, but in its heyday the company developed much of the technology that led to the personal computer: the mouse, a graphical user interface that allowed for more than lines of text on a screen. The work was done at the company's Silicon Valley-based Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or Xerox PARC. Tesler was at the center of those efforts, and is credited with coining the terms "friendly user interface" and "browser" during his time at Xerox. When Jobs visited Xerox PARC in 1979, he met with Tesler. "You're sitting on a gold mine!" Tesler later recalled Jobs telling him. "Why aren't you doing something with this technology? You could change the world!" Jobs was right: Xerox was not taking advantage of the pivotal research being done at Xerox Parc. So Apple to became the first to make broad use of the graphic user interface, as well as the mouse and other features. Tesler left Xerox for Apple in 1980, where he rose to the position of vice president and chief scientist. While there he helped to design the Macintosh computer, QuickTime and the Lisa computer, one of the first personal computers to use a graphical user interface. It was the Lisa that popularized the now-familiar copy, paste and undo shortcuts. (That's C to copy, V to paste and Z to undo). "I have been mistakenly identified as the 'father of the graphical user interface for the Macintosh,'" Tesler wrote on his website. "I was not. However, a paternity test might expose me as one of its many grandparents." Tesler stayed at Apple until in 1997. In 2001 he joined Amazon, where he served as vice president of shopping experience. He then went to Yahoo in 2005, where he was vice president of user experience and design. He was issued numerous patents while working at those firms. Until his death, Tesler served as a consultant to companies like Western Union and note-taking app Evernote on how to improve their user experience on desktop and mobile. He was dedicated to innovating, simplifying, improving. "As is my personality, if I ever hear somebody say something's impossible or extremely difficult, almost impossible, it's a challenge and I always try to do it," he said in an interview at Silicon Valley's Computer History Museum in 2013. One thing he never overcame -- his hatred of modes. He drove around California with the personalized license plate "NOMODES." US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday closed a three-nation Africa tour with a thinly-veiled swipe at China as he talked up Washington's ability to stimulate growth and entrepreneurship on the continent. "Countries should be wary of authoritarian regimes with empty promises. They breed corruption, dependency," Pompeo said in a speech to diplomats and business leaders at the UN's Economic Commission for Africa in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. "They run the risk that the prosperity and sovereignty and progress that Africa so needs and desperately wants won't happen." Pompeo in his remarks did not explicitly mention China -- Africa's largest trading partner -- but analysts predicted ahead of his trip that he would attempt to pitch the US as an alternative source of investment. On Wednesday Pompeo name-checked US companies operating in all three countries on his Africa tour, the first by a US cabinet-level official in 19 months: Bechtel in Senegal, Chevron in Angola and Coca-Cola in Ethiopia. He also hailed the free market generally, blasting "failed socialist experiments of years past" in places like Zimbabwe and Tanzania. And he criticised a proposed constitutional amendment in South Africa that would allow private property to be expropriated without compensation -- a plan that seeks to overcome inequalities set down in the apartheid era. The amendment would be "disastrous for that economy and most importantly for the South African people," he said. Pompeo left later for Riyadh. -Mixed messages- Pompeo's attempt to lay out a positive vision for US cooperation with Africa has been undermined by President Donald Trump's Africa policy so far, analysts say. Critics are quick to cite Trump's widely-reported remarks in 2018 when he used a profanity to describe African and poorer Western Hemisphere nations whose citizens migrate to the United States. Washington is currently discussing military cuts in Africa, and the US recently announced tightened visa rules targeting Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, as well as Tanzania, Sudan and Eritrea. "Pompeo is unlikely to undo the damage from the Trump administration's travel bans, the proposed budget cuts, or the president's disparaging comments about the region," said Judd Devermont, Africa director at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think-tank in Washington. But African leaders would nonetheless "welcome his long-overdue engagement and focus on the positives as much as possible," Devermont said. Even so, countries like Ethiopia have benefitted from Chinese engagement, rendering Pompeo's message less effective, said Abel Abate Demissie, an Ethiopian political analyst. "It is undeniable that Chinese investment was quite crucial in keeping Ethiopia on track as one of the world's fastest-growing economies for many years," Abel said. He added that much Chinese money has gone toward tangible projects like roads and buildings, while American money is more often funnelled to "less visible" fields like education and health. "The fact that Chinese loans and sometimes grants have less bureaucracy also makes it quite convenient for Ethiopia and Africa at large," Abel said. China has funnelled cash and loans into infrastructure projects across the continent. However Beijing has faced accusations, which it denies, of saddling poor nations with debt, siphoning off mineral resources and leaving environmental damage. Pompeo insisted Wednesday that Trump was eager to play a bigger role on the continent. "If there's one thing you should know about our president a- my boss a- you should know that he loves deals," he said, drawing laughs from the audience. "He wants more to happen between the United States and nations all across Africa." Flash China deplores and rejects the wrong decision of the United States to designate five Chinese media outlets as "foreign missions," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang said Wednesday. According to reports, the U.S. government will require these media outlets to register their properties and employees in the U.S. Media play an important role like a bridge or bond facilitating communication and understanding between people of different countries, Geng told an online press briefing. Chinese media's resident offices in the U.S. have long been covering news following the principle of objectivity, impartiality, truth and accuracy, and have helped to promote mutual understanding, communication and cultural exchange between the two countries, he said. Geng said while the U.S. takes great pride in its press freedom, it is wantonly restricting and thwarting Chinese media outlets' normal operation there, which is unjustified and unacceptable. "We urge the U.S. to discard its ideological prejudice and Cold War zero-sum game mentality, and stop ill-advised measures that undermine bilateral trust and cooperation," said Geng, adding that China reserves the right to take further measures in response. By Daren Butler and Ali Kucukgocmen ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's judiciary drew international criticism on Wednesday after a prominent businessman was re-arrested over charges related to a failed 2016 military coup, hours after being acquitted over his alleged role in landmark protests in 2013. Osman Kavala, a Turkish businessman and philanthropist, was among nine people acquitted on Tuesday of charges related to the Gezi Park protests seven years ago which threatened the grip on power of then-premier, now President Tayyip Erdogan. By Daren Butler and Ali Kucukgocmen ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Turkey's judiciary drew international criticism on Wednesday after a prominent businessman was re-arrested over charges related to a failed 2016 military coup, hours after being acquitted over his alleged role in landmark protests in 2013. Osman Kavala, a Turkish businessman and philanthropist, was among nine people acquitted on Tuesday of charges related to the Gezi Park protests seven years ago which threatened the grip on power of then-premier, now President Tayyip Erdogan. Their acquittal was a surprise for many observers of a case that had caused alarm among Western allies, opposition lawmakers and rights groups and which had been seen as a test of Turkey's justice system under Erdogan's increasingly authoritarian rule. Kavala's re-arrest at the request of prosecutors was in connection with an event three years later: according to a document seen by Reuters, he is accused of attempting to overthrow the constitutional order in the 2016 coup attempt. The Gezi Park unrest was one of the most serious challenges faced by Erdogan since his AK Party (AKP) came to power in 2002. On Wednesday, Erdogan described the protests as one of a series of attacks that he said culminated in the coup bid. "The Gezi events were a heinous attack targeting the people and state, just like military coups," he told AKP lawmakers. "Yesterday they set out to acquit (Kavala) with a manoeuvre," Erdogan added, and later told reporters the new arrest order must be respected. The European Parliament rapporteur on Turkey, Nacho Sanchez Amor, criticised the move. "No way to believe in any improvement in Turkey if the prosecutor is undermining any step ahead. Back again in dark period," he said in a tweet. Kerem Altiparmak, a lawyer and deputy head of Turkey's Human Rights Association, said similar actions by the judiciary had prevented several others, including Kurdish opposition figure Selahattin Demirtas - who has been in jail for more than three years on terrorism-related charges - from being released. Altiparmak pointed to coordination between different courts, judges and prosecutors who "on paper have nothing to do with each other" but whose actions keep defendants in jail. "This naturally makes you think that this is very organised," he said, noting that judges and prosecutors were effectively appointed by Erdogan's party. State-owned Anadolu news agency reported later on Wednesday that the Board of Judges and Prosecutors had begun an inquiry against the judges who ruled for acquittals in the Gezi trial. In the Gezi case, Kavala was accused of trying to overthrow the government by organising the protests, during which hundreds of thousands marched across Turkey against Erdogan's plans to redevelop a major park in Istanbul, which has few green spaces. Kavala denied the accusations. COURT ORDERS PRE-TRIAL DETENTION OF KAVALA Late on Tuesday, police detained Kavala immediately after his release from a sprawling prison in Silivri, west of Istanbul, and took him to police headquarters after routine health checks, a police spokeswoman said. Late on Wednesday he was placed in pre-trial detention by order of an Istanbul court, a police spokeswoman said, and was expected to head back to prison. Kavala spent more than two years in jail over the Gezi case. Elaborating on its decision, the court said Kavala had been in contact with one of the organisers of the coup attempt, and added that they had met with people with links to the militant Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Kavala is cited by the court as stating that assertions he supported the coup attempt are "baseless." German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said the new accusations against Kavala were "not justifiable in any respect." In its December ruling, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) said evidence was insufficient to justify the accusation that Kavala had been involved in the abortive 2016 coup. Ankara says the coup attempt was carried out by supporters of U.S.-based Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen. Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania since 1999, has denied any involvement. Since the putsch, authorities have carried out a sustained security crackdown, jailing about 80,000 people and dismissing 150,000 civil servants, military personnel and others and closing some 180 media organisations. The purges escalated again this week with another 700 people detained on allegations of links to Gulen. Ankara defends the clampdown as necessitated by the scale of the threat faced by Turkey. (Additional reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay in Ankara, Michelle Martin in Berlin; Editing by Jonathan Spicer and Mark Heinrich) This story has not been edited by Firstpost staff and is generated by auto-feed. After months of talks and poring over ledger sheets, the board that oversees East Jefferson General Hospital on Wednesday night unanimously approved a deal to sell the financially distressed hospital to New Orleans-based LCMC Health. LCMC will pay $90 million to buy the hospital and will commit to spending another $100 million in capital improvements over the next five years. Little of that money will go to the parish, however. The $90 million will be combined with the hospital's cash and investment reserves to pay off the hospital's $135 million in debt and fully fund its pension plan at a cost of approximately $50 million, as well as meet other obligations. Any money left over after that will remain with the parish. In return, LCMC Health will get the 420-bed hospital just off West Esplanade Avenue and other EJGH assets. LCMC has committed to keeping it open as a community hospital. The deal is necessary to keep the hospital alive, according to board chairman Dr. Donald Bell. "East Jefferson General Hospital is not economically sustainable," Bell said during Wednesday's meeting. Bondholders have told the hospital's leaders that they had two options: Get the LCMC deal done or face foreclosure, he added. Gerald Parton, the hospital's CEO, said selling to LCMC would allow the hospital to upgrade its aging facilities, including the plumbing, heating and air conditioning systems. It would also allow the hospital to save money on information technology and other items that would make it more efficient, he said. The board's approval is the first of several that must be garnered before the deal can officially close. It next moves to the Jefferson Parish Council, which will decide whether to put the proposed sale before voters on the east bank of Jefferson Parish. The deal must also still win the OKs of the state Attorney's General Office and Bond Commission, as well as the Federal Trade Commission. Officials have targeted the already scheduled May 9 election as the date to put a referendum on the ballot. If voters approve, the closing date for the sale would be targeted for June 30. Wednesday's meeting also began the public phase of a process that has proceeded in secrecy for months. 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 "Hopefully, the Parish Council and voters will agree that we have done our due diligence" in vetting the sale, Bell said. East Jefferson hospital deal will erase debt but net no cash for parish, officials say The proposal to sell publicly owned East Jefferson General Hospital to LCMC Health would erase approximately $185 million in public bond debt Parish leaders have tried for years to find a private operator for the hospital, which has struggled to compete with larger health care providers nearby, such as Ochsner. In recent years, revenues have fallen short of expenses, forcing the hospital to dig into its reserves to pay off bonds. Credit rating agencies have downgraded the hospital's bonds and published grim outlooks for its future. EJGH was first offered as part of a package deal with its West Bank counterpart, West Jefferson Medical Center, also owned by the parish. Three companies LCMC Health, Nashville-based healthcare giant HCA and Ochsner made bids. But the latter two pulled out after a bitter, public debate. The parish ended up awarding LCMC Health a 45-year lease of just the Marrero health care facility, for $200 million in rent payments and more than $300 million in capital improvements over 15 years. That left East Jefferson as a shrinking asset surrounded by voracious competitors. In 2018, talks with HCA began and then broke down months later. Then, in April, LCMC and EJGH leaders announced they were in discussions again. Wednesday's vote prompted a brief statement from LCMC Health leaders, who said they were "excited" by the vote. "We now look forward to the Jefferson Parish Councils consideration and pending approval of the plan, an important step toward the preservation of a vital community asset," the statement said. The Parish Council is expected to schedule a special meeting next week to hear from the public on the proposal. Fifteen months after investigators uncovered a $35 million scheme involving the former publishers of Newsweek and The Christian Post, a Christian college, and a tech vendor, the accused parties have been convicted of money laundering, conspiracy, and fraud. IBT Medias former owner Etienne Uzac and Christian Media Corporation Internationals former CEO William Andersonwho was also the CEO and publisher of its flagship site, The Christian Postentered guilty pleas before the Manhattan district attorney last week. Today, California-based Olivet Universityrepresented by its president Tracy Davispleaded guilty to falsifying business records and engaging in conspiracy, and was fined $1.25 million, according to the DAs press officer. Andrew Lin, who resigned as Olivets board chair earlier this month, was convicted of fraud and has been barred from leadership for the next two years. While maintaining claims of their independence from each other, each of the entities and leaders has ties to controversial Korean American pastor David Jang. Considered the Second Coming Christ by some followers, Jangs expansive global network founded Olivet, The Christian Post, Christian Today, and the International Business Times, whose parent company bought Newsweek in 2013. In the criminal scheme, as CT reported in 2018, the media companies and Olivet inflated their financial standing to secure $35 million in loans to purchase high-end computer servers. They instead obtained cheaper servers (or none at all) and used the loans for their own operations as well as transferring funds to each other, according to the Manhattan DAs office. The defendants pointed out that the loans they obtained were repaid in fullwhich posed a challenge for prosecutors to prove fraudulent intent if no money was lost. Ultimately, IBT Media and the now-defunct Christian Media Corporation (CMC) each had to pay $50,000. In December, CMC pleaded guilty to falsifying business records by providing fraudulent information in the scheme and criminal contempt over its response to a subpoena in the investigation. While we had hoped for a non-guilty decision, this misdemeanor resolution lets CMC put an end to this long and tiring process and move on, CMC said in a statement to CT. While the CMC and The Christian Post are separate legal entities, both were headquartered at the same Washington DC address and shared leadership. Former World Evangelical Alliance COO Christopher Chou, who was listed as the North American director of CMC, succeeded Anderson as CEO of The Christian Post. (The address for Olivets Washington DC campus is in the same complex as The Christian Post.) Earlier this week, CMCs websiteCMCIGroup.comwas taken offline. It had described the company as the leading Christian media network worldwide. The company told CT that CMC has been under new management for over a year, and we look forward to now putting this chapter behind us. When asked about the new management, CMC stated that it was no longer in operation. A New York campus of Olivet (no relation to Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois or Olivet College in Michigan) had been raidedalong with Newsweek officesas part of the investigation. Anderson, who led CMC and The Christian Post from 2010 to 2018, was a former Olivet board member. Others from CMC have served as board members and professors at the school. The schools former board chair, Lin, pleaded guilty on charges of a scheme to defraud in exchange for a non-jail sentence. Olivet University has reached a resolution with the New York District Attorney that allows the school to resolve all matters. The school will undergo a process that, when successfully completed, allows for a resolution with two misdemeanor charges related to commercial loans, said Ronn Torossian, spokesperson for Olivet University. We have taken this opportunity to improve the schools functions to prevent any recurrence of these types of issues in the future. Olivet offers 21 degree programs, including multiple journalism and IT degrees, to a student body of a few hundred mostly international students on visas from Korea and China. The university remains accredited through the Association for Biblical Higher Education (ABHE). When asked whether the criminal case would threaten its standing, an ABHE spokeswoman said, No comment. For several years, Christianity Today has followed Jangs expansive evangelical connections across the globe, including his followers previous involvement in the World Evangelical Alliance and his approach to using media properties as missional tools, and has highlighted concerns around the bizarre theological claims around Jang. Multiple former members of Jangs community told CT that Lins wife, Borah, was the key promoter of the idea that Jang is a messiah chosen by God to complete Jesus earthly mission. The sentencing for the case is scheduled for April, and Olivet must provide an update on the terms of its plea in September. The school has two years to pay its $1.25 million forfeiture. This story has been updated to include comment from Olivet University and to clarify Andrew Lins position as a former board chair. He resigned from the board on February 7. There's no such thing as a free bus (D-Mass.) recently told a progressive audience at Howard University that, Public transit should be free. This is just the latest call for free transit; the issue has been bubbling up around the country in the past few months, started in large part by some misreporting of events in Kansas City, Missouri. from a local policy expert offers some greatwhilst representing the right-wing tax fighter think tank position on this topic.Meanwhile, we're waiting for any data-driven evidence that this plan might work besides hopeful chatter from politicos amid election year.You decide . . . The UKs creative industries have received a huge boost in adapting to the modern patterns of media consumption through a new 30 million competition for key industry sectors to prepare for the availability of 5G mobile networks. The UK government has committed to a 200 million investment in testbeds and trials across the UK to explore new ways that 5G can boost business growth and productivity, improve the lives of people in rural areas and maximise the productivity benefits of new technologies.As part of its stated commitment to level up infrastructure across the UK, the UK governments nine projects across the country will each receive a share of 35 million from rural and industrial 5G competitions.We're determined to make the UK a world-leader in 5G and deliver on our promise to improve connections for people and businesses across the country, commented UK digital secretary Oliver Dowden. Today were announcing new funding to seize the new opportunities this technology will offer us. This includes seeing how it could create new jobs in the countryside, make businesses more productive and unleash even more ideas in our cutting-edge creative industries.The 30 million 5G Create competition has been launched to develop new uses for 5G in a variety of industries, including our creative sectors such as film, TV and video games. The Government says that from enabling remote production to supporting the expansion of the increasingly popular world of eSports, 5G has the potential to revolutionise the UKs booming creative industries.The Creative Industries Council is delighted that DCMS is launching 5G Create, said Tim Davie, co-chair of the Creative Industries Council and CEO of BBC Studios. We have been advocating a funded competition along these lines, as an exciting opportunity for UK creative companies to develop innovative products and services using this transformational technology. 5G offers innovative opportunities right across the sector from film and TV, to games, to music, fashion and advertising. We hope that start-ups and well-established companies alike will bid for the available funds.The 5G Create competition will open in early March and run until the end of June. It was as if the past literally reached out and touched him. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Parks Canada diver Brandy Lockhart picks up a decanter bottle recovered from the HMS Erebus during a dive in August of 2019 in this handout photo. It was as if the past literally reached out and touched him. Parks Canada archaeologist Marc-Andre Grenier spent last summer diving into the wreck of the HMS Erebus, the flagship of the Franklin expedition, which sank around 1848 in the waters of what is now Nunavut while searching for the Northwest Passage. This day, he and his colleagues swam into the pantry of Captain John Franklin himself. THE CANADIAN PRESS/HO, Charles Dagneau, Parks Canada *MANDATORY CREDIT* It was as if the past literally reached out and touched him. Parks Canada archaeologist Marc-Andre Bernier spent last summer diving into the wreck of the HMS Erebus, the flagship of the Franklin expedition, which sank about 1848 while searching for the Northwest Passage in the waters of what is now Nunavut. That day, he and his colleagues swam into the pantry of Captain John Franklin. There on a counter, under a coat of sediment, was a block of sealing wax, the mark of its London maker still legible. On the end, where you would snuff the flame after dripping closed a letter, was a thumbprint the lingering mark of an individual seaman, dead for 170 years. "It's what the work of an archaeologist is about," said Bernier. "We get to touch history and touch individuals. You're down there and you remove things, uncover the sediments, and they slowly appear. To see this unfold before your eyes, it is quite the charge." The Erebus and its sister ship, the HMS Terror, set out from England in 1845. Franklin and his 129 men never returned. More than 30 expeditions tried to find them. A few artifacts, graves and horrible tales of cannibalism is all they uncovered. But with a blend of Inuit oral history and systematic, high-tech surveys, the Erebus was found in 2014 and the Terror two years later. In 2019, the team produced extraordinary images of the HMS Terror when they guided a robotic camera through its sunken passageways. Last year, taking advantage of continued good weather and diving suits heated with hot water piped from the surface, the team was able to visit the Erebus for dives as long as three hours. They focused on three rooms on the port side, seemingly untouched since they were abandoned. "All three had areas where you would find things on shelves as they had been left," Bernier said. Divers used an underwater vacuum to remove decades of silt, documented the precise location of any artifacts, then brought them to the surface. There, the items were cleaned further and catalogued by Jonathan Puqiqnak from the nearby community of Gjoa Haven. Slowly, among 350 artifacts hauled to the surface, traces of individual lives began to emerge. A hairbrush, hairs still in it. A toothbrush. A pair of epaulets in the bottom of a drawer. China plates stacked up like at an antique sale. Coffee beans. Pencils. Bits of an accordion. A bottle of what once held brandy or port, liquid still sloshing inside. A lead stamp with the name of Franklin's steward, Edmund Hoar. A wool mitt "you could put your hand into it and wear it tomorrow," Bernier said. Intriguingly, objects belonging to sailors posted to Terror were found on Erebus. "How come this is on board the Erebus?" asked archaeologist Ryan Harris. "Was he transferred? Did he die and the object (was) recovered? "We don't know. But we can start in just one season to have that type of information to understand and link them to individuals, to try and tell personal stories and try to identify the movement of individuals." Time may be running short. Since the Erebus was found, the team has noticed significant deterioration. Parts of the deck are shifting and collapsing. Bernier, in dives to the wreck, has heard beams bumping into planks driven by large swells on the surface. Erebus is in shallower water than Terror, and shrinking ice cover may no longer be protecting it from storms, which seem to be getting larger. One storm this season had three-metre swells large enough for the troughs to nearly expose the wreck. "That's why there's this urgency," said Bernier. "We can see the changes." Parks Canada's conservation lab is deciding which objects are in most urgent need of preservation or study. The hairs from the brush, for example, have been extracted and will go for DNA analysis. Next year, the team plans to expand excavation into neighbouring cabins of the Erebus. They'll try to map the lower spaces on both wrecks. And there's always a return to the Terror, where officers' cabins are so well-preserved that Harris jokes the excavation will be more like housekeeping. "Dusting the shelves and raising things to the surface." Future plans for both ships will be decided between Parks Canada, the government of Nunavut and Inuit. Meanwhile, they are being guarded by local Inuit. "It's going to be a challenge to apportion our time between these two amazing shipwrecks," Harris said. "One thing we can say: if the ice and the weather co-operate, we fully expect next season to be even more productive." This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 20, 2020. Follow Bob Weber on Twitter at @row1960 Carrying the Weight: Fire and Ice, on display at the ArtRage Gallery, features pieces by two artists who work in different media, explore very different landscapes, and view climate change from different perspectives. Yet, both Stuart Palley, a photographer, and Zaria Forman, creator of hyper-realistic pastel drawings, fully engage with the climate crisis. Both are involved with long-term projects, and both communicate a sense of urgency and a love of the earth. For more than five years, Palley has documented forest wildfires at various California sites: in the San Bernardino and Sierra national forests, in Yosemite National Park, near Thousand Oaks and Santa Rosa. In shooting fires exclusively at night, Palley has built up a large portfolio and done it with nuance and emotion. At ArtRage, for example, theres clearly variety in his work. In one image, fire has completely blown out a hilltop and is now headed downward. In a photo of a truck abandoned on Interstate 15, the cab is burned into ashes, and the trucks main body is stripped down to metal beams against walls. Elsewhere, Railroad Fire, shot in 2017, captures a scene where fire has almost died out. Embers still smolder on one last tree, but most of the trees portrayed in the photo still survive. Things are very different in El Portal Fire. There fire has covered two hillsides, and a flicker of lights extends over them. In the middle of the image, a tiny remnant of trees survives. Another photo, taken in 2017, provides a panoramic view of a valley fire. Hillsides burn, smoke covers the sky, and a long stretch of highway is shut down. The eight images on display at ArtRage represent only a sampling of Palleys portfolio, and the gallery has taken steps to provide greater access to his work. Theres a copy of his 2018 book, Terra Flamma: Wildfires at Night, on display. It contains a bunch of images and a stirring dedication. Palley dedicated the book to firefighters and civilians who died during forest fires and to all those who fight on the firelines. In addition, several videos feature his photos. In one, a man is barefoot, clad only in jockey shorts and a tee-shirt. His house is burning down, and hes fleeing for his life. That image intersects with Palleys photographic mission. His work is intended to be documentary, informative and compassionate. Indeed, his photos, and captions, speak to acres lost, to human and ecological costs, to the impact of drought, human sprawl, and higher temperatures. Put simply, the American West is getting hotter and drier, with deadly consequences. Forman, meanwhile, creates huge, pastel drawings of icebergs, glaciers and oceans. In order to do her work, she travels to Greenland, Antarctic and the Arctic Ocean, appreciating the sheer beauty of nature. She admires the curves of glaciers, the sight of icebergs shaped by wind and water, the visual appeal of ice in various forms. Because her drawings are huge, it would have been difficult to ship them to the gallery. Therefore, Forman sent digital files to ArtRage where the staff converted images into mural-style artworks hung on walls. Some of them stretch from the floor to the ceiling. Viewers can see works such as Whale Bay, Antarctica No. 4, with its majestic view of ice formations, and Jakobshavn Glacier, Greenland, which details the glaciers ridges and slopes and emphasizes blue and white colors. Beyond that, ice crumbles in Lincoln Sea, Greenland, and Gelz Ice Shelf, Antarctica sees ice from a horizontal view. Forman clearly made a wise decision to work in pastel: that medium helps communicate a sense of ice as soft rather than harsh or forbidding. Even as Forman celebrates glaciers and icebergs as sublime, she acknowledges the threat climate changes pose to them. In interviews with CNN, PBS and other media, shes discussed the impact of diminished sea ice. It encompasses not only the loss of habitat for polar bears but also widespread global effects. As sea ice is lost, the earth warms more quickly. Clearly, one exhibition showcasing work by two artists isnt intended to address the climate crisis in depth. Yet, the show both illustrates how visual artists are reacting to the crisis and serves as a catalyst for more extended discussion. In addition, ArtRage has scheduled a series of workshops and presentations in conjunction with the exhibit. On Feb. 29, from noon to four p.m., there will be an open-house event giving participants an opportunity to learn about and possibly get involved with climate-justice organizations in Central New York. The event is free and open to the public. So is a March 3 presentation by Oren Lyons, Onondaga Nation faithkeeper and a longtime environmentalist with contacts around the world. That presentation begins at seven p.m. For information about the complete slate of events and workshops, call 315-218-5711 or go to www.artragegallery.org. Carrying the Weight: Fire & Ice is on display through March 14 at ArtRage, 505 Hawley Ave. in Syracuse. The gallery is open from two p.m. to seven p.m. Wednesday through Friday and Saturdays from noon to four p.m. Carl Mellor covered visual arts for the Syracuse New Times from 1994 through June, 2019. He continues to write about exhibitions and artists in the Syracuse area. Read More YMCA writing center to present author Cheryl Strayed March 12 Berlin Philharmonic Piano Quartet to play in Syracuse Feb. 23 Symphoria shines spotlight on the 20th Century in February concerts Thanks for visiting Syracuse.com. Quality local journalism has never been more important, and your subscription matters. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work. Photo: The Canadian Press A group of Coquitlam-area residents were among the 250 Canadians to be evacuated from the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan today. Margaret Tong, an 85-year-old Coquitlam resident, is one of the travellers who will be returning to Canada Friday on a government-chartered flight but her trip is still far from over. The plane is expected to land in Cornwall, Ont., where passengers will be taken to a hotel and kept in isolation for another 14 days. "Thanks for your prayers and good wishes," Tong said in a WhatsApp message to her son, Brian Tong, Wednesday night. "Passed the Canadian medical screening. Packing to disembark tonight at 9 p.m. Will contact you upon arrival at Cornwall Ontario." Her son said Tong left B.C. Jan. 18 and was supposed to be home within two weeks. He said information was limited, but thankfully his mother had the internet and was able to communicate with him throughout the ordeal. "The [Japanese] government was very slow in decision making on what to do," he said, noting his mother was traveling with a group of people from the area, "so it was many days of uncertainty while the head count of the infected kept rising." Tong was tested and does not appear to have been affected by the virus, her son said. Thermometers were handed out on the ship and anyone who registered a temperature of 37.5 C or higher was asked to go to the medical centre, he said. His biggest concern was getting his mom her medication, which she was running short of during the quarantine period. "I told her that the Japanese government is responsible for them and they have to top up whoever needs medication," he said. "They were able to do that." The chartered Canadian flight was expected to take off from Japan at 3:30 a.m local time and land at CFB Trenton at around 1:30 a.m. EST Friday. There, further screening will be conducted and another two-week quarantine will be imposed. But federal Health Minister Patty Hajdu said there is a chance those who test negative for the virus and show no signs of symptoms may be released from quarantine early under the discretion of Canada's top public-health doctor. Forty-seven of the 250 Canadians will not be on the flight, after testing positive for the virus. They will continue their treatment in Japan. Lloyds Banking Group's chief executive Antonio Horta-Osorio. (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images) The chief executive of Lloyds Bank (LLOY.L) has had his pay cut after criticism of his 6.5m ($8.4m) remuneration package. Lloydss annual report, published on Thursday, showed Antonio Horta-Osorio earned 4.7m in 2019, which was 28% lower than his take home pay in 2018. The drop in pay came as Lloyds reported a 26% slump in annual profits due to PPI mis-selling charges. Stuart Sinclair, chair of Lloydss remuneration committee, wrote in the banks annual report that the reduction in pay package reflected the fact that performance and conduct do have material consequences. The total that Horta-Osorio could potentially earn in 2020 has also been reduced by 29%, although he could still take home a maximum of 8.3m if everything goes his way. Horta-Osorio earned 6.5m in 2018 when bonuses and incentive schemes are included. It made him Britains best paid bankers that year. Read more: Shareholder rebellions over executive pay surge at UK companies The bumper pay package attracted scrutiny last year. The chief executive was forced to defend his pay to MPs on the Work and Pensions Committee, who said frontline staff at the bank had complained about the disparity between staff and chief executive pay. We have listened to feedback and the external sentiment around executive remuneration, Sinclair wrote in the banks annual report on Thursday. We are very focused on addressing the pay gap from the bottom up and not just from the top down, in other words, by taking action to increase pay and pensions for more junior colleagues. The pay gap between Horta-Osorio and the average Lloyds employee reduced from 169:1 in 2018 to 128:1 last year. The committee has also overhauled its executive pay structure to make it simpler and to reign in controversial pension arrangements. Read more: Lloyds Bank profit dives 26% as PPI costs bite Horta-Osorio received 33% of his base salary as a cash payment in lieu of pension in 2018. That was out of line with the vast majority of Lloyds staff, who are entitled to only 13% of salary as pension. Story continues Investment Association (IA) guidelines state that pension contributions for staff and executives should be aligned and total pension contributions for CEOs should be capped at 25%. The IA criticised Lloyds for failing to heed its guidelines. Lloyds said on Thursday it was reforming its pay system to align it with the IAs recommendations. Horta-Osorios pension contributions reduced from 45% of salary to 33% in 2019 and will drop to 15% in 2020. Horta-Osorio told journalists on Thursday he was absolutely fine with the pay cut. He said his pay was a decision for the board and the remuneration committee who are totally independent. Considering all the situation in the bank, they decide what should be done, he said. The growth of FIEs in Vietnam has recently raised increasingly complicated tax concerns. These problems arise primarily from the practical issues of determining the transaction price between FIEs and their related parties. Le Khanh Lam - Partner and head of Tax and Consulting Services RSM Vietnam Due to affecting the tax base and the tax amount payable, the establishment of appropriate prices for transfer of goods, intangibles, and services between FIEs and their related parties, commonly referred to as transfer pricing (TP), is a great concern for both tax authorities and the enterprises themselves. In the meantime, many FIEs have reported continued losses while still carrying out business expansions. This has aroused suspicions that they have been involved in TP. However, FIEs may sustain genuine losses due to many business reasons such as heavy startup costs, unfavourable economic conditions, poor management, deliberate business strategies, and more. For example, they may follow their groups business strategies by setting their prices especially competitive for market penetration, in order to increase their market share, and expect to earn potential profits in the foreseeable future. Generally, other independent enterprises are also expected to carry out the same strategies in comparable circumstances. According to United Nations Practical Manual on Transfer Pricing for Developing Countries 2017, and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Transfer Pricing Guideline for Multinational Enterprises and Tax Administrations, such strategies may be acceptable if the business and economic circumstances require the FIEs and other independent enterprises to determine prices in the same comparable manner. Therefore, tax authorities should not automatically assume that FIEs with related party transactions were planning to manipulate their profits, especially in the case of these enterprises incurring losses that continue for a long period of time. Maintaining updates Given this, proper TP regulations are crucial in dealing with problems for both tax authorities and taxpayers. In the case of taxpayers, they need to comply with regulations and administrative reporting requirements. For tax authorities, specific matters arise at both policy design and practical implementation. In Vietnam, TP guidance was written in tax regulations starting from 1997 by the Ministry of Finance (MoF), with simple terms to define the related parties. Today, due to the great public concern, these TP regulations have become more complex and included a large number of reporting requirements. With the efforts to tackle tax evasion and implement international best practices, in early 2017, the Vietnamese government released Decree No.20/2017/ND-CP on providing tax administration applicable to enterprises with related party transactions. It introduced new concepts and principles from the OECDs TP guideline, as well as implemented certain actions from the Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) Action Plans. Through this decree, Vietnam has taken a significant step forward in dealing with TP issues in line with international practice. From 1997 to the present, the designing of a legal framework and formulating regulations on TP have been improved strongly. During this period, it has been observed that there are two major issues in designing TP regulations in Vietnam. Firstly, regulations were designed with the ability to apply to all types of enterprises. However, in reality, these regulations are not suitable to a number of enterprises in some specific industries. For example, many enterprises in capital-intensive industries such as real estate or construction have given comments to the Vietnamese government that they are facing difficulties with the regulation on the 20 per cent cap on earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortisation, on the tax deductibility of total interest expenses written in Decree 20. Therefore, last December, the MoF circulated a draft decree to amend and supplement this regulation, and will seek public and specific comments from the affected entities. Secondly, the pace of regulation update is not in line with the speed of the transformation of the economy, which creates new issues that cannot adopt the current regulations in many cases. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that the prevailing regulations shall be regularly updated to deal with new issues that arise. To keep TP regulations updated and comparable with the latest development of international tax practice, the Vietnamese authorities should closely watch the development of TP rules elsewhere in the world. According to the aforementioned 2017 UN practical manual, it also provides guidance on the mechanisms available for developing countries to obtain training and information updates, and to engage in international tax dialogue as below: - Regional co-ordination through existing intergovernmental agencies such as the International Organization of Tax Administrations, Inter-American Centre of Tax Administrations, the African Tax Administration Forum, Study Group on Asian Tax Administration and Research, and the Commonwealth Association of Tax Administrators; - Engage with institutional stakeholders such as the UN, the OECD, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; - Create a clearing house for information and capacity development with like-minded countries; - Participate in the south-south dialogue for capacity development. Vietnam should, through participation in regional and global dialogues, be able to benefit from the use of existing consultancy bodies, used by countries with similar legislation, or countries located within the same geographic region. Considering outside funds As a developing country, overseas investments are important and integral to the Vietnamese economy. These funds have contributed to boosting technological transformation, improving the quality of human resources, increasing product quality, and maintaining economic growth in the country. Therefore, the consideration of continuously attracting foreign investment is one of the key concerns for the government. In respect to this, TP rules which have significant impacts on the activities of multinational enterprises may act as barriers for such investment. Before the government released Decree 20, the concerns from enterprises on TP requirements were not high. But currently, FIEs intending to invest into Vietnam need to pay high attention to, and be in compliance with, the stricter requirements laid out in Decree 20. In other words, the stricter control in TP will create hindrances to attract the flow of foreign investment. With the beneficial effects of international investment on the efficiency and growth of the Vietnamese economy, the government should consider updating TP rules to control, but also attract, such funding. Besides this, the rules are necessary to compare with neighbouring competitors and international standards. Unreasonable corporate income tax rates, high compliance costs, and uncertainty in TP rules could discourage foreign investors from pouring money into one country, redirecting the flow of that investment to other nearby nations. The next step The fast and wide spread of digitalisation, and development of the liberation in trade policy, have advanced the pace of globalisation and created the continuing transformation of the global economy. As a result of digital transformation, customer-facing and/or user-facing activities will be carried out by more and more enterprises from a remote location, with zero or minimal physical presence in the market. The challenges of how taxing rights on income generated from cross-border activities should be allocated among jurisdictions are of high concern. To resolve these problems, the OECD has recently suggested many new proposals which could lead to important changes in fundamental international principles in TP rules. In a statement released after a meeting held on January 2930, member countries joining the inclusive framework on BEPS also adopted the OECDs proposed unified approach. Therefore, it is also expected that domestic TP regulations in these countries, of which Vietnam is one, will be updated soon to reflect the changes. New amendments to the Law on Investment 2014 Last week, the National Assemblys Economic Committee held a meeting to discuss the latest draft amendments to the Law on Investment 2014 to reach an agreement on some issues before submitting it to the legislature for approval in May. According to these amendments, the government could work with independent consulting units to assess and appraise foreign-invested projects, in addition to the banned business lines and the list of conditional business lines. Under the resolution, Vietnam will deny proposals to expand or extend operation schedules of projects using outdated technology that constitute risks to the environment or waste natural resources. Projects with a high possibility of transfer pricing (TP) or illegal investment will be dealt with comprehensively. The resolution urges to add a regulation on appraising investment capital of foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) when necessary as a foundation for tax assessment, thus preventing TP and tax evasion. It is expected to be implemented as soon as Vietnam this month issues the action plan to implement the Politburos Resolution 50 on the directions to complete the legal framework to increase the quality of foreign direct investment attraction towards 2030, with a number of concrete solutions and tasks for ministries and agencies to sustainably improve the business climate, and also to fight against TP. Accordingly, the Ministry of Finance (MoF) is tasked to build a mechanism to apply investment incentives, with requirements to meet concrete conditions and commitments as well as post-inspection to be integrated. Moreover, the regulation should amend and supplement the regulations on anti-TP in the Law on Tax Administration and its guiding decrees. The MoF will also assess the efficiency of double taxation avoidance agreements and their impacts on Vietnams tax policies to suggest possible adjustments. Vietnam has introduced a simple guidance of TP in tax regulations starting from 1997. In the wake of tax evasions and international best practices, in early 2017, the Vietnamese government issued Decree No.20/2017/ND-CP on providing tax administration applicable to enterprises with related party transactions. Since then, the countrys legal framework on TP has been much improved. However, it proves unsuitable to a number of enterprises in some specific industries and is yet to keep up with the economical transformation. To this end, the MoF in late 2019 introduced a draft decree to amend and supplement some regulations in Decree 20, and will seek comments soon from related parties. Over the past 30 years, FIEs have greatly contributed to Vietnams socio-economic development. However, problems still remain, including TP, tax evasion, and the application of outdated technology, among others. Coca-Cola, Metro Vietnam, and Adidas are brands that are suspected of TP activities. Coca-Cola was once named on top of the list of suspects by Ho Chi Minh City Taxation Department. By 2012, the company continuously reported losses but still expanded its operations. As a result, in late 2019, Coca-Cola Vietnam was fined over VND821 billion ($36 million). Suntory PepsiCo Vietnam is also suspected of TP. Since 1991, PepsiCo has continuously reported losses to not pay corporate income tax. Meanwhile, it invested in new factories to increase its local market share. Metro Vietnam started its business in Vietnam in 2002 with an initial investment sum of $120 million. After 12 years of operation, the company has changed its business licence six times, thus increasing its total investment to over $301 million and expanding its operation nationwide. In spite of this, Metro Vietnam constantly announced losses, except for 2010 when it made a profit of VND173 billion ($7.52 million). In a move to prevent tax losses, local tax agencies including Hanoi Taxation Department and Ho Chi Minh City Taxation Department have announced to intensify activities to fight against TP this year, considering it a focus in their tasks. Accordingly, the agencies will concentrate their investigations into FIEs that have reported losses for years but still expanded their operations, as well as any others with suspicious transactions. VIR WESTPORT An 18-year-old Guilford teen accused of trying to stab a woman to death outside a beauty salon had also planned to ambush victims inside of their homes and kill them, according to newly unsealed search warrants. After his arrest on Jan. 6, Ellis Tibere told detectives he had entered at least two Westport homes in an effort to lie in wait for victims to kill, according to search warrants. In the warrants, Detective Marc Heinmiller wrote that Tibere pointed out the homes in photographs shown to him by police. Video PlayerClose Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, visits Suizhou City in central China's Hubei Province, February 16, 2020. Sun is leading a central government team guiding the coronavirus epidemic control work in Hubei. [Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu] WUHAN, February 17 (Xinhua) Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan has stressed the importance of prevention in the fight against the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, noting that the fight will be won only if prevention and control measures are put in place in every community. Sun, who is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, is leading a central government team guiding the coronavirus epidemic control work in central China's Hubei Province, the center of the outbreak. The guiding team visited local communities, a supermarket, and a backup medical facility as well as medical staff in the province's Suizhou city on Sunday. Sun urged efforts to ensure the supply and distribution of living materials for community residents. When learning that there remained a shortage of medical personnel, Sun instructed the national health authorities to immediately send more medics to assist Suizhou. While visiting Wuhan-based Tongji Hospital on Monday, Sun talked with frontline medical personnel and called on them to do everything possible to save lives. (Source: Xinhua) 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. India has been engaging with the US for quite some time, and we do hope to reach an understanding with an outcome that strikes the right balance for both sides, said Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) spokesperson Raveesh Kumar, while answering a question on India-US trade deal during the weekly press briefing here on Thursday. "We have been engaging with the US for quite some time. We do hope to reach an understanding with an outcome that strikes the right balance for both sides. We would not like to rush into a deal as issues involved are complicated. We don't want to create an artificial deadline. For us the interests of people are paramount," said Kumar. Regarding the H1B Visa issue, he said: "We have remained engaged with administration and (US) Congress on the movement of Indian professionals. The matter is very important to us. We do expect that the movement of Indian professionals is part of the agenda that could come up for discussions." Speaking about the upcoming trip of US President Donald Trump, the MEA spokesperson expressed the hope that the visit will go on smoothly and India's sensitivities are well known. Kumar also highlighted the "strong" India-US cooperation regarding counter-terrorism and referred to the "strong support" by Washington in the aftermath of the Pulwama terror attack. The MEA spokesperson noted that there has been consistent growth in India-US trade over the last few years while adding that efforts have been made by the Indian side to address concerns regarding the Balance of Trade. The US President Donald Trump will be arriving in India on February 24 for a two-day official visit. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani met on February 19 to discuss a U.S. deal with Taliban militants on a seven-day reduction in violence. Ghani the previous day was declared the winner of a hotly contested presidential poll, the outcome of which was rejected by his main rival, Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah. Ghanis office released a statement saying he and the U.S. diplomat had held effective meetings with local leaders on how the Afghan government would handle the peace process to eventually end the nearly two-decade war. Likewise, Josep Borrell, the European Unions chief diplomat, congratulated Ghani on retaining the presidency while pushing for an inclusive peace process in a phone call the same day. Borrell stressed the priority will now be to ensure unity in support of an inclusive peace process, an EU news release said. He continued: The European Union stands ready to support the peace process, which is an opportunity not to be missed. Abdullah on February 17 told a meeting of government ministers that the Taliban had agreed to a seven-day reduction of violence ahead of a peace deal with the United States that was finalized a week earlier and may be signed as soon as February 29. The New York Times reported last week that President Donald Trump had given his conditional approval of a peace deal. Based on reporting by Reuters and The New York Times Local residents are rallying against the arrival of the evacuees from Wuhan. Ukrainian citizens and foreigners evacuated from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak, are arriving in the town of Novi Sanzhary, Ukraine's Poltava region, while police are dispersing protesters to unblock roads. The evacuees will be accommodated at the National Guard's medical center in Novi Sanzhary. Local residents have blocked roads in protest against the arrival of the evacuees from Wuhan. Earlier, a truck blocked the entrance to the medical center. Poltava region's governor said that if people did not clear the way, then the evacuated Ukrainians would walk from the buses to the center. At 18:50 Kyiv time, police started pushing protesters away from the road to let the buses with the evacuees pass. According to a UNIAN correspondent, residents of Novi Sanzhary are trying to resist, but are outnumbered by the police. Clashes have begun. Meanwhile, the protesters have been pushed back from the main road to the side. Law enforcement authorities have cleared the road. The most active protesters in the rallies have been detained by the police. Residents of Novi Sanzhary are shouting: "Shame!" At 19:40 Kyiv time, residents in Novi Sanzhary started burning tires, firewood and began throwing stones at the police. According to a UNIAN correspondent, the police tried to detain the violators. Clashes began again. However, then the police were ordered to retreat, and fire engines started extinguishing the fire. One of the men felt ill and protesters blamed the police, claiming they had killed the man. Yet, an ambulance was unable to drive through because of the clashes. Doctors had to walk to get to the victim and provide medical aid to him. At 19:50 Kyiv time, the buses arrived at the destination. According to a UNIAN correspondent, residents of Novi Sanzhary tried not to let them get to the medical center and even started throwing stones at the buses. The residents were also shouting protest slogans. As many as seven buses arrived. Their drivers were wearing protective suits, and the passengers had protective masks on them. The police pushed the protesters back. They started detaining those who had thrown stones at the buses, which was followed by clashes. The drivers drove into the center's territory. The local protesters continued arguing with the police. Read alsoPolice to act under law to unblock roads amid coronavirus evacuation protests in Novi Sanzhary interior ministry (Photo) As UNIAN reported, chartered flight PQ 7302 with Ukrainian citizens and foreigners evacuated from China landed at Kharkiv Airport on February 20. Then the evacuees were taken to the National Guard's medical center in Novi Sanzhary. Ukraine's Health Ministry reported there were 45 Ukrainians, 27 foreigners and crew members, including three doctors, on board the plane. They all will be placed under 14-day observation with a strict regime of sanitary-epidemiological control and safety. On 11 February, IndiGo had launched the sales on domestic routes with all-inclusive fares starting at Rs 999 and offered 10 lakh seats IndiGo, the largest airline in the country by passengers carried and fleet size, extended its flight ticket offer on domestic routes for three more days. Accordingly, the offer will be valid till 23 February, the airline informed on its website. On 11 February, IndiGo had launched the sales on domestic routes with all-inclusive fares starting at Rs 999 and it had offered 10 lakh seats under the offer. The sale was open till 14 February. IndiGo's offer is valid for travel between 1 March and 30 September and tickets have to be booked 15 days prior to departure. The starting flight ticket prices on some of the IndiGo routes include Rs 1,699 on Delhi-Ahmedabad, Rs 1,699 on Delhi-Amritsar, Rs 2,799 on Delhi-Bengaluru, Rs 2,999 on Delhi-Bhubaneswar, Rs 3,999 Delhi-Goa , Rs 2,049 Delhi-Hyderabad, Rs 2,699 Delhi-Kolkata, Rs 2,599 on Delhi-Mumbai, Rs 1,999 on Delhi-Patna and Rs 3,799 on Delhi-Vizag sector. From Mumbai, the airline is offering tickets to Kozhikode starting at Rs 1,653 while the fare on the Mumbai-Hyderabad and Mumbai-Chennai route would cost Rs 1,858 and Rs 2,022, respectively. On Tuesday, the budget carrier started a four-day sale on its international flights starting at Rs 3,499 for a travel period from 1 March to 30 September. The sale period will close on Friday. The low-cost airline has a fleet of 255 aircraft including 96 new generations A320 NEOs, 124 A320 CEOs, 25 ATRs and 10 A321 NEO aircraft. Besides this, IndiGo operates 1,500 daily flights to 63 domestic destinations and 24 international destinations. Cuba Gooding Jr. was snapped visiting an electronics store in Santa Monica, California on Wednesday, leaving with a clear bag that appeared to contain a camera. The 52-year-old actor wore a grey polo shirt with green cargo shorts and grey sandals on the wintry day. Gooding was seen out a days after news broke that his Boyz n the Hood co-star Esther Scott died at her home in the seaside Southern California town last week at the age of 66 from a heart attack, according to Variety. Out and about: Cuba Gooding Jr., 52, was snapped visiting an electronics store in Santa Monica, California on Wednesday, leaving with a clear bag that appeared to contain a camera In a scene in the 1991 motion picture, which marked a breakout in Gooding's career, Scott played the grandmother of a girl named Tisha that Gooding's character Tre Styles shared a romantic encounter with. Following the film, Gooding went on star in films such as Gladiator and A Few Good Men before his Oscar-winning turn in Jerry Maguire. Gooding is about two months away from his April 21 trial, as he faces six groping charges over three alleged incidents that took place at New York City nightlife hot spots in 2018 and 2019. Last month, prosecutors sought to introduce claims from as many as 19 other women who also claim he has abused them to back up their case. (Those women would have been presented as what are known as Molineux witnesses whose purpose is to demonstrate a pattern of behavior to support the charges in the case.) Casual: The actor wore a grey polo shirt with green cargo shorts and grey sandals on the wintry day Gooding arrived at Manhattan Criminal Court on January 22 for a judge's decision in his groping trial on how many women will be able to testify against him Judge Curtis Farber said he will allow two of the witnesses but he blocked the others. The judge said it would be unfair to include the witnesses who could not give specific dates, times or locations for the alleged incidents. He is however allowing two: Molineux Witness number 8 is a woman who says Gooding grabbed her buttocks and licked her neck at the Chatwal Hotel in New York on November 7, 2013, when she was at a work event. The other witness, Molineux Witness number 12, said that on August 16, 2018, she met him at the Shore Bar in Santa Monica and he said to her: 'Damn, you're hot!' after being introduced to her through a mutual acquaintance. The woman said she tried to speak to him about appearing on her radio show and he asked her if she were married. When she said she was divorced, she claimed he told her: 'All you divorced women are the same.' The actor and his team of lawyers tried get the case dismissed but the judge denied their motion Gooding arrived at court with one of his attorneys Then, she alleges, he asked her to lean in closer to him, at which point he 'grabbed her buttocks and her breast and forcibly kissed her, inserting his tongue into her mouth, all without her consent.' The others' allegations include claims that Gooding bit them, berated them after they rejected him and that he sloppily groped them dating back to 2001 across multiple states. Gooding denies all of the charges. The case began last year after he was reported to police for allegedly groping a woman at Magic Hour Rooftop in Manhattan. After her case took off, prosecutors piled more charges on top including one involving him allegedly groping a woman in Tao in New York in October 2018. A third set involves an incident in New York City in September 2018. Gooding and his legal team arriving at the courthouse ahead of Wednesday's decision Gooding walks behind his lawyer Mark Heller, who has claimed the charges are the result of malicious prosecution The actor and his girlfriend, Claudine De Niro, have been weathering the scandal by publicly attending parties together and going on vacation. His attorney, Mark Heller, says he is the victim of a malicious prosecution that should never have been launched. A trial date has not yet been set. The women involved in the incidents in the criminal case have not been named, nor have the women cited by prosecutors. A handful who have spoken out in media reports to air their allegations, including a hairdresser from Spokane, Washington, have agreed to be named. A nthony Martial's strike was enough to salvage a 1-1 draw for Manchester United away at Club Brugge in the Europa League last-32 round first leg. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer fielded a strong line-up although January arrivals Odion Ighalo and Bruno Fernandes were only named among the substitutes. The Norwegian opted to keep the 3-4-3 shape that worked a treat against Chelsea on Monday but it was the hosts who looked more energetic and hungry for the opener. Emannuel Dennis, who scored twice against Real Madrid in the Champions League earlier this season, was causing problems for Harry Maguire and Victor Lindelof at the back. The Belgian side started brightly and were rewarded with the opener after a horrendous piece of defending from United. AFP via Getty Images Simon Mignolet sent a long goal-kick high up the field and with Maguire and Lindelof still retreating, Dennis raced past Brandon Williams and with Sergio Romero way off his line, produced a fine lob to put the Belgian side in front. United quickly found themselves on the backfoot and Dennis, along with Mats Rits, both had chances to double the lead. AFP via Getty Images The visitors were really struggling to put together any clear-cut chances but as it turned out, Brugge were willing to gift them one. Maxim De Cuyper's throw caught Brandon Mechele off guard and Martial raced onto it before slotting past Simon Mignolet. Martial nearly grabbed a second, shooting from range, but Mignolet produced a fine save to tip it onto the post. Dennis continued to cause problems for the United backline in the second half and Romero had to be on guard to beat away his near-post effort. Manchester United via Getty Imag Ighalo finally got his chance to impress with 20 minutes to go, replacing Martial, but the Nigerian was starved of service up top. Brugge had a golden chance to win it late on when Dennis' low cross found Odilon Kossounou but the defender somehow struck wide. Fernandes entered the fray and nearly set up Juan Mata for a late winner but the offside flag was raised. United kept the pressure up late on but were unable to find a winner, although the away goal puts them in control ahead of the second leg at Old Trafford. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Lawson W. Magruder III grew up with a close view of a decorated war hero his father, Col. Lawson W. Magruder Jr. Magruder Jr. served as an infantry leader in World War II, a battalion commander during the Korean War and an inspector general for Gen. William Westmorelands command in Vietnam. As an ROTC cadet, Magruder III witnessed his fathers impact as a professor of military science at the University of Texas at Austin. And he knows his father traveled at his own expense to Travis AFB in California to escort the casket of a fellow student killed in the Vietnam War to his family in Dallas. Magruder Jr. retired after 31 years of service. He focused his energy on volunteering in the community, including tutoring students in math. Magruder III recalled that his father raised the flag every morning at the VA hospital all the way to the end. My dad lived a purpose-filled life, he said. It was service to others. On ExpressNews.com: Countdown to Fiesta 2020: Are you ready? Magruder III is one of five retired military leaders who will be guests of honor at the Battle of Flowers Associations 2020 oratorical contest today at the Witte Museum, 3801 Broadway. The 95th annual contest will feature students from Texas colleges and universities giving speeches on the theme Texas Tough How Texas Military Leaders Shaped the State, Nation & World. The preliminary round will start at 9:30 a.m., with the final round at 1:30 p.m. Its a free event and the public is invited to attend. Magruder, retired Maj. Gen. William E. Klein, retired Col. Carol Huebner, retired Air Force Col. Joseph David Morgan III and retired Air Force Lt. Col. Judith A. Rhone will talk about their experiences and observations of valor Friday as part of the competition. Prizes for the contest include $5,000 for first place, $2,500 for second place and $1,500 for third place. The first-place winner will deliver their speech to more than 500 dignitaries and association members at the Battle of Flowers luncheon April 23. The next day, the contest winner will ride as a guest in the associations 129th parade. Part of the mission is to teach the history of Texas, said Betsy Zachry, chairwoman of the oratorical contest committee. On ExpressNews.com: Battle of Flowers Association names 2011 oratorical winners At a recent preplanning event, the military leaders gathered to talk about the heroes they will each showcase for the audience on the day of the contest, as everyone waits for the judges decisions after the contestants speak. The leaders arrived at the Army Residence Community in pristine uniforms from their respective military branches. Klein will tell about a young corporal named Jeff Bannister. He saw great potential in the man who was his driver and encouraged him to go to college and get an ROTC scholarship. Klein watched Bannister graduate with honors and rapidly rise through the ranks to major general. I want to encourage these young people, he said. Its a real success story. If you work hard the way Jeff did, you can do great things. Huebners hero was a colleague, Maj. Gen. Nancy R. Adams. She was the first Army nurse to be the deputy surgeon general for the Army. Huebner said Adams, a clinical nurse specialist, developed a great way for a team to care for injured soldiers That mantra of teamwork and including front-line workers all the way through her career to major general was her hallmark, Huebner said. She never forgot the front-line soldier. Morgans heroes are the Buffalo Soldiers. He became intrigued with the soldiers history after seeing the Bexar County memorial chapter at an event. Morgan said he was impressed with the group, whose members study history, give presentations and dress in period uniforms. On ExpressNews.com: Buffalo Soldiers instrumental in shaping the American West, experts say He said Native Americans named the men Buffalo Soldiers because like the buffalo, they never backed down when challenged, but faced their attackers. They made a big contribution to the West, particularly Texas, he said. Not just in fighting the Native Americans, but in building roads, telegraphs and towns. Rhones hero is her husband of 52 years, retired Air Force Chief Master Sgt. James M. Rhone. During her career, Rhone held several roles including general duty nurse of labor/delivery and gynecology; charge nurse of premature nursery and pediatric clinic; and supervisor of the obstetrics/gyn clinic. She was one of the first in the Air Force allowed to remain in the service through her pregnancy and delivery. James Rhone said he felt that his wife, as one of the few female officers of color at the time, needed some help. He was helping me to go from where I was to where I am today, she said, and then beyond. Magruder closed their remembrances by paying tribute to the heroes at home: the service members spouses and family members. All of your stories resonate, education consultant Kathi Oppenheimer said, and have such wonderful life lessons for everyone to take away. Vincent T. Davis is a reporter in the Greater San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | vtdavis@express-news.net | Twitter: @vincentdavis Tension brewed at a private hospital here on Thursday, after a family member of a woman, who died following childbirth, apparently slapped one of the doctors, alleging medical negligence. A video footage sent to PTI by the hospital showed a grieving man assaulting a doctor, who tried explaining the situation to them, in the presence of several people and a police personnel. According to hospital sources, the woman, in her 30s, had delivered her child on Wednesday morning. Both the mother and the child were in stable condition throughout the day. However, the woman's health deteriorated early on Thursday, following which she died of cardiac arrest, the sources said. "This is an unfortunate incident. The doctor, who tried to explain the situation to the family members and also suggested a postmortem, was assaulted. We express our condolences to the family. However, physical violence is unacceptable," the spokesperson at the hospital said. A relative of the deceased woman claimed she died due to medical negligence. The relative, while talking to TV channels, also said that the family would seek legal help. "We will not seek any compensation, but take the legal route... We will also approach the medical council," she added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police officers securing the area after a shooting in Hanau near Frankfurt, Germany, on Wednesday. REUTERS/Kai Pfaffenbach The German newspaper Bild reported that at least nine people were killed and five were injured in shootings in Hanau, Germany, late Wednesday night. The suspect was found dead in his home in Hanau along with another body. The shootings happened in two hookah bars, according to reports, and the motive is still unclear. Visit Insider's homepage for more stories. Shootings in Hanau, Germany, left at least nine people dead and five wounded, according to the local police. The suspect was found dead in his home in Hanau along with one other body. The police said they did not think any gunmen were at large. The German newspaper Bild reported that the shootings took place in two hookah bars in the city center. Hanau is located about 15 miles, or 25 kilometers, east of Frankfurt. "A terrible evening," Mayor Claus Kaminsky of Hanau told Bild. "It will certainly occupy us for a long, long time, and it will remain in our sad memories." The German broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk reported that the gunman or gunmen drove from the first location to the second. The shootings occurred late Wednesday night local time, and the motive was not immediately clear. Read the original article on Insider VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lexington Biosciences, Inc. (CSE: LNB) (the Company or Lexington) provides the following corporate update to shareholders. HeartSentry Technology The Company had been unable to secure the necessary financing to advance the development of the HeartSentry technology including the payment of the minimum annual royalty fees due, in August 2018 and August 2019, to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. As a result, on February 12, 2020, the company received final notice of license termination from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories due to non-payment of these minimum annual royalty fees. Change in Business The Company has called for a Special and Annual General Meeting to be held on March 30, 2020, where, amongst other items, the shareholders will vote on amending the Companys Notice of Articles and Articles to create several classes of tracking shares in order to facilitate the Company becoming a Private Investment Platform Company (the New Business). Once complete, the New Business will allow investors, to use their Registered Plans (including registered retirement savings plans, registered education savings plans, tax free savings accounts, registered retirement income funds, and registered disability savings plans), at their own direction, to invest in private companies by purchasing tracking shares in the Company, which will in turn use these proceeds to invest in the specific private company chosen by the investor. The Company will charge investors fees for the initial investment and redemptions as well as an annual fee based on amount invested. Additional information on the New Business will be included in the Information Circular for the Special and Annual General Meeting which will be mailed to shareholders in early March, 2020. To reflect the New Business, the Company will be changing its name to Registered Plan Private Investments Inc.. Non-Brokered Private Placement The Company announces that it intends to sell, by way of a non-brokered private placement up to 10 million units of the Company (Units) at a price of $0.05 per Unit for gross proceeds of up to $500,000 (the Offering). Each Unit will consist of one common share of the Company and one common share purchase warrant (each, a Warrant). Each Warrant will be exercisable to buy one common share of the Company for a period of 24 months at a price of $0.07. The Company intends to use the net proceeds of the Offering to complete the necessary steps to convert to the New Business. The Offering is subject to the receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including the approval of the Canadian Securities Exchange. All securities issued pursuant to the Offering will be subject to a four-month hold period in accordance with applicable Canadian securities law. Conversion of Unsecured Demand Loans into Units The Company previously announced that it had reached agreement with third parties as well as certain directors and officers (collectively the Lenders) of the Company to convert previous advances and unpaid amounts for services received and interest accrued therein for approximately $800,000 including interest into demand loans. Subject to shareholder approval at the upcoming Special and Annual General Meeting, the Lenders have agreed to convert the full amount owing in to Units on the same terms as the upcoming Non-Brokered Private Placement. Change in Directors and Management The Company also announces the resignation of Eric Willis as CEO and Director of the Company. The Company wishes to thank Mr. Willis for his service. Canadian Securities Exchange Listing As part of the Special and Annual General Meeting, shareholders will be asked to vote on a resolution to de-list the Companys shares from the Canadian Securities Exchange. On Behalf of the Board, Doug Janzen Doug Janzen Chairman & Director 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. Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements This news release contains forward-looking statements relating to the potential sale of the HeartSentry technology 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 Company's expectations include those relating to the ability to complete the sale 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. NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- CyberMDX, a leading provider of medical cyber security solution, delivering asset visibility and threat prevention for medical devices and clinical assets, announced today that it has completed integration certification for the Microsoft Azure Security Center for IoT. Integrating CyberMDX visibility and detection capabilities with Microsoft Azure Security Center for IoT, healthcare organizations are equipped with cross-cloud and devices visibility, classification and incident response capabilities. Azure Security Center for IoT provides adaptive threat prevention, and intelligent threat detection and response across workloads running on on-premises, on edge, in Azure. CyberMDX delivers its granular Internet of Medical Things visibility into the single pane of glass of Azure Security Center to provide continuous visibility and threat protection across device types and network layers. All on-premises hospital assets are auto-identified and classified by CyberMDX's DPI and AI engine. The classified assets are then pushed to Azure Security Center for IoT, with security recommendations and threat detection. When further integrated with Azure Sentinel, healthcare organizations receive intelligent clinical context security analytics, coupling CyberMDX device identification and clinical context, with the drill down capabilities Sentinel. "Today's world of hyper-aware hospitals requires total visibility, operational insight, and protection for every networked device," said Amir Magner, CEO of CyberMDX. "We are thrilled to partner with Microsoft Azure Security Center for IoT, joining forces to bring true end-to-end security for healthcare delivery organizations, helping transform medical device and IoT/OT security." As hospitals continue to connect millions of new devices to the internet, IT and security operations teams must ensure their security strategies evolve quickly enough to cover each new attack surface. Like any other system, to comprehensively secure your IoT solution, it requires visibility and protection at every stage of implementation. "The Microsoft Azure Security Center dashboard provides a single pane of glass for on-prem and cloud assets, delivering comprehensive device context and supporting, further risk management and incident response efforts," said Michal Braverman-Blumenstyk, CTO and GM, Cloud and AI Security Division at Microsoft Corp. "We are pleased to welcome CyberMDX to the Azure Security Center for IoT, enabling us to deliver a best-in-class visibility and incident response solution for healthcare organizations." Learn more at the Azure Security Center for IoT Theater at the RSA Expo. When: Tuesday, February 25, 2020 10:30 AM-10:50 AM Where: Microsoft Booth on the RSA Expo Floor (Booth #6059); About CyberMDX A pioneer in medical cybersecurity, CyberMDX is the company behind the leading IoMT visibility and security solution. CyberMDX identifies, categorizes, and protects connected medical devices ensuring resiliency as well as patient safety and data privacy. With CyberMDX's continuous endpoint discovery & mapping, comprehensive risk assessment, AI-powered containment & response, and operational analytics, risks are easily mitigated and assets optimized. For more information, please click here . Contact: Jon Rabinowitz, VP Marketing, CyberMDX +1-646-794-4241 SOURCE CyberMDX Related Links http://www.cybermdx.com/ NorthWestern should stop trying to sell Montana ratepayers a pig in a poke. There are more hidden costs in the proposed $1 Colstrip deal. One of the units is in dire need of an expensive multi-million dollar overhaul. The ash ponds that have been created over the decades are leaking. Will the current corporate owners pay the hundreds of millions of dollars for these after they have cut and run from Montana? Probably not. Too many companies take the profits out of our state and leave their mess for us to deal with. We need to be on the right side of history this time. The states that buy power from Montana have made it clear that after 2025 they will only purchase energy from renewable sources not coal-generated power. Since you cannot separate coal power from clean power on the electrical grid, owning Colstrip jeopardizes our states ability to be an energy exporter in the future. This is why all Colstrip owners except for Northwestern Energy are ready to shut Colstrip down. Since NorthWestern Energy gets an inflated subsidy to keep Colstrip open, the company is spending millions of ratepayer dollars for advertising that attempts to convince us to support their $1 scheme to buy the leftovers at Colstrip. They make it sound like its too good of a deal to pass up. Fact is, its only good for them. Photo editor Rick Wiley is the photo editor of the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson. From 1995-2004, he was director of photography at the East Valley Tribune in Mesa. From 1988-94 he was a photographer at the Tucson Citizen. He is a graduate of ASU (yes, that ASU). SAN ANTONIO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- ATP Flight School's newest Texas training center will open March 2, 2020, at the San Antonio International Airport. Part of a nationwide network of 40 locations, this new facility is ATP's seventh in the state, including operations in Austin, Dallas, and Houston. ATP Flight School instructor trains student pilot. The new San Antonio training center will be solely focused on the development of future airline pilots, which ATP has specialized in for over 35 years. Starting from zero experience, students at the San Antonio location can earn their pilot certification in just nine months through the Airline Career Pilot Program. This airline career solution provides aspiring pilots in the area with the training resources and airline connections needed to become an airline pilot at a fixed cost, in the shortest time frame possible. Students graduating from the San Antonio location can benefit from ATP partnerships with over 20 U.S. airlines. In conjunction with ATP's airline-oriented training, these agreements provide graduates with up to $17,500 in airline-paid tuition reimbursement and accelerated career tracks to the major airlines. For example, ATP students can chart their path to American Airlines through the Envoy Air Cadet program or, with ATP's United Airlines partnership, can take advantage of a tailored, direct career path to the airline. "As the leading supplier of pilots to the nation's airlines, ATP has placed nearly 700 graduates in the last 12 months," said Michael Arnold, Director of Marketing, ATP Flight School. "We are excited to open our San Antonio training center and provide aspiring airline pilots the training solution that has been proven by so many successful graduates." ATP's fleet of 398 aircraft will support San Antonio operations, with Airline Career Pilot Program students training in Cessna 172 Skyhawks, Piper Archers, and multi-engine Piper Seminoles. While ATP has the largest training fleet in the country, it is also one of the youngest, with deliveries of aircraft from Piper and Cessna throughout 2020. These new aircraft provide students with not only a reliable platform to keep their training on-time but also equips them with the latest in glass-cockpit technology. San Antonio class dates start March 2 and begin each Monday. For more information, visit ATPFlightSchool.com. Media Contact Michael Arnold Director of Marketing ATP Flight School 904-595-7950 [email protected] Related Images training-at-atp-flight-school.jpg Training at ATP Flight School ATP Flight School instructor trains student pilot. Related Links ATP Flight School Program Information ATP Flight School San Antonio Information SOURCE ATP Flight School Related Links http://www.ATPFlightSchool.com The man charged with the rape of two Houston women contends the debit card that led to his arrest believed stolen in January from one of the victims was lying in a field when he found it. The plastic came with a note, he said, and on that note was a PIN. Crazy, isnt it, said Brandon Carter, arrested last week on two counts of aggravated sexual assault and debit card abuse. Carter, whose decade-long rap sheet has hinted at a pattern of predatory behavior, is accused of sexually assaulting three women in June, December and this January. He professed his innocence to the rapes, while speaking to the Chronicle from the Harris County Jail, but did not dispute that he used the debit card. He often cited his stash of court documents outlining the accusations, paperwork he plucked from his pants right pocket. When Carter found the card, he was low on cash and needed the money after recently losing his job, he said. He never considered turning the card over to the authorities. "I told myself, let's give it a try, Carter said. . According to charging papers, Carter withdrew $400 in cash in three transactions on Jan. 5 at a Greenspoint gas station. He would not disclose what he did with his new-found wealth. The card was reported stolen by a woman who said she was ambushed hours earlier as she left for work, investigators said. A man put a gun to her head as she stepped outside and forced her back into her home. He told her not to look at him, wrote Houston police detective Reagan Daniel in court documents, adding that the man then covered her head with a cloth hood and zip-tied her arms behind her back. Charging papers state the attacker rummaged through her home, found the debit card and demanded the PIN from her. The documents do not say that the woman was sexually assaulted but Daniel said at a recent news conference that she was. She reported the theft while undergoing a hospital examination, according to documents. Use of the card was also how Daniel said he linked Carter to a months-long crime spree in west Houston and the Greenspoint area where investigators had been struggling to find physical evidence. The attacker in the December and June assaults forced the women to wash away any traces of DNA evidence after the assaults, police said. Bag was for paintball Among the allegations that Carter discussed was the since-scrutinized bag of possessions that police last April found him with. Investigators now believe he was stalking a prospective victim when a man reported him for possible trespassing and that his bag contained tools to carry out the crimes. The contents were identified in court documents as a bb-gun, a set of gloves, two sets of blacked-out goggles, 9 large zip-ties, a pair of pruning shears, rope and a trash bag. According to police, a man spied Carter loitering close to where his sister lives and he was apprehended on outstanding traffic tickets. Carter offered a more innocent explanation: He was waiting for a friend so the two could go play paintball. Carter would not reveal who he was waiting for or why his gear did not include a clean set of goggles. Both goggles, he said, had been recently smeared with paint from another scrimmage. The bag was seized and taken to an HPD property room, where it was logged as usual and kept until January when investigators linked him to the assaults. In response to why he never returned for the bag, Carter said he tried but officers told him they could not find it. Carter cited the earlier words of police, who said it was not a crime to carry the goggles and BB gun. Goggles are mentioned at least once more in court documents. A woman in the June attack which Carter has been charged with told police a man broke into her apartment and initially placed dark goggles on her eyes. The goggles would not stay put so he then used a shirt to blindfold her. Same suspect behind suspicious event After the Feb. 11 news conference, where police handed out an old booking photo of Carter, a woman reported having seen him last fall at her west Houston apartment complex, near where the other attacks happened, HPD spokesman Kese Smith said this week. Smith described the encounter as a suspicious event and said a sexual assault did not happen. She believes it involves the same suspect, he continued. Police have said Carter could be charged with additional crimes, including the December assault that investigators believe is also behind but also unsolved ones. A fresh DNA sample was taken after his arrest to compare to unsolved complaints, Smith said. He is slated to return to court next Tuesday. Last month, investigators spent about a week looking for Carter, writing in charging papers that they visited his fathers home and a friends residence, where he often stays. After failing to find him, the Harris County District Attorneys Office on Jan. 23 signed off on three warrants demanding his arrest. Carter claimed to not know he was a wanted man until authorities identified him at the news conference. Carter said he had planned to turn himself in calling a bail bondsman, who he would not identify, for help, rather than dialing HPD directly. He decided it could wait. The next morning, an anonymous tip pointed U.S. Marshals Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force to a Spring-area apartment. They beat me to it, Carter said. nicole.hensley@chron.com INVESTOR ALERT: Law Offices of Howard G. Smith Announces Investigation of JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. (JELD) on Behalf of Investors Law Offices of Howard G. Smith announces an investigation on behalf JELD-WEN Holding, Inc. ("Jeld-Wen" or the "Company") (NYSE: JELD) investors concerning the Company and its officers' possible violations of federal securities laws. On October 15, 2018, after the market closed, Jeld-Wen reported a $76.5 million charge for third quarter 2018 related to ongoing litigation concerning Jeld-Wen's anticompetitive behavior. The Company also announced the resignation of its Chief Financial Officer, BrooksMallard. On this news, the Company's stock price fell $4.03, or 19%, to close at $17.28 per share on October 16, 2018, thereby injuring investors. If you purchased Jeld-Wen 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 Howard G. Smith, Esquire, of Law Offices of Howard G. Smith, 3070 Bristol Pike, Suite 112, Bensalem, Pennsylvania 19020 by telephone at (215) 638-4847, toll-free at (888) 638-4847, or by email to [email protected], or visit our website at www.howardsmithlaw.com. This press release may be considered Attorney Advertising in some jurisdictions under the applicable law and ethical rules. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005843/en/ Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 19) A senior official at the Bureau of Corrections (BuCor) who had wanted to testify in the Senate on the alleged freedom for sale scheme at the New Bilibid Prison was shot dead Wednesday near his agency's headquarters in Muntinlupa City. Police said two gunmen shot Fredric Santos dead at around 2 p.m. on board his Toyota Hilux pick-up in front of Southernside Montessori school in Barangay Poblacion. They said Santos was about to fetch his daughter from school when the two men shot him point blank, and immediately left. Metro Manila police chief BGen Debold Sinas told reporters that investigators have retrieved six empty shells and a slug of a .45-caliber pistol, and CCTV footage of the area where the shooting occurred. However, Sinas said the video does not clearly show Santos' fatal shooting. "Ang nakuha ng CCTV na pinakamalapit doon, hindi po clear kung isa o dalawa ba [ang bumaril,]" he said. "Ang nakikita lang doon, area lang, yung lugar, highway. [Yung pagbaril,] hindi na. Not so clear." [Translation: It's not clear if one or two people shot him, based on CCTV footage nearest the area ... What we saw there was the place, the highway. The shooting, we didn't see it. It's not so clear.] Sinas said they still do not have persons of interest in the killing of Santos. He added that they have coordinated with the BuCor for the security of Santos' family and a joint investigation on the shooting. "Maganda po 'yung joint investigation para mawala po ang ating agam-agam na iisang view po iisang pananaw sa ating investigation," BuCor spokesperson Gabby Chaclag told CNN Philippines. [Translation: A joint investigation would be good so that we wouldn't have any worries that our investigation is only heading one direction.] Senate President Vicente Tito Sotto III told CNN Philippines that Santos was ready to tell all about the supposed anomalies surrounding the implementation of the expanded Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) policy under the Revised Penal Code before the Senates last hearing on the issue. Santos, however, backed out, Sotto said. Senate Blue Ribbon committee chairman Richard Dick Gordon, who led the probe on supposed anomalies in the BuCor, condemned the killing, calling it a rubout. Gordon added that Santos is the 15th BuCor official to be killed within the vicinity of its headquarters in Muntinlupa since 2011. It is a warning to all in this country na kapag ikaw may nalalaman at ikaw nagsalita, kaya ka naming patayin, Gordon told reporters at the Senate. [Translation: It is a warning to all in this country that if you know something and you speak up, we can kill you.] The Office of the Ombudsman suspended Santos in September for six months after finding that he, along with 29 other officials of the bureau, allowed the questionable release of prison convicts in violation of the expanded GCTA policy. He called on President Rodrigo Duterte, the National Bureau of Investigation and the Philippine National Police to immediately probe the killing. Gordon also noted that "death and violence seems to follow" Nicanor Faeldon, who previously headed the BuCor. Santos is the fifth BuCor employee to be killed after Faeldon was appointed to the helm of the prisons bureau in November 2018. President Rodrigo Duterte sacked Faeldon in September 2019 for supposedly disobeying his order to stop the release of more convicts under the expanded GCTA policy. Santos was suspended without pay for alleged grave misconduct, gross neglect of duty, and conduct "prejudicial to the best interest of the service. These could have led to his dismissal from service. Faeldon, during a Senate hearing, pointed to Santos as the one who advised him that there was no legal basis to stop the release of convicted rapist and murderer Antonio Sanchez through the expanded GCTA policy. He also confessed during a Senate investigation that convicts and wardens cover each other's backs by doing favors while behind bars. He cited examples where prison guards would relent on the punishment that should be meted out to inmates caught using mobile phones or contraband items in their cell, opting for a settlement rather than filing a complaint against the prisoner in trouble. Senator Panfilo Ping Lacson also accused Santos of jamming or using illegal drugs with Chinese drug lords detained at the national penitentiary. The alleged corruption in the BuCor came to light after reports warned of the impending release of convicted rapist and murderer Antonio Sanchez through the expanded GCTA policy. CNN Philippines Correspondents Gerg Cahiles, Joyce Ilas and Xave Gregorio contributed to this report. New Delhi, Feb 20 : Dinesh Gundu Rao who had resigned as Congress' Karnataka unit President two months back after the bypoll debacle, met party interim chief Sonia Gandhi and demanded an early appointment to the post. Rao, after the meeting, said that he has asked Gandhi that a regular president to the post should be appointed soon. "I have met Sonia ji as it has been two months since I resigned and there is a lot of confusion among workers. She has assured that it will be done soon." According to sources, the party has zeroed in on senior leaders H.K. Patil and D.K. Shivakumar. While, former Chief Minister Siddaramaiah is backing Patil, the party on the other hand wants Shivakumar as the unit chief. Congress' media head Randeep Surjewala said, "When the party unit decides the person for the state president's post, it will be made public." Rao is still the President of the state Congress without any executive. Congress has not been able to finalise suitable names for state presidents in three states where the party has to replace the current Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) chiefs in Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Maharashtra. Congress sources said that deliberations are on and soon the party will announce names of the state chiefs. New Delhi: Actress Yami Gautam on Wednesday reacted strongly on being snubbed at the recently-held Filmfare Awards for her performance in the hit film 'Bala', headlined by Ayushmann Khurrana. In a statement posted on social media, Yami wrote that she has been receiving several messages for getting 'overlooked' and not being nominated for 'Bala' and hence, she 'felt compelled' to express her views on the same. The 31-year-old actress said, "Honestly, winning an award does feel like a strong sense of achievement and confidence. But more than that, a nomination in itself, is a mark of acknowledgment, love and respect towards your hard work and talent. Having said that, the esteemed jury are some of the most noted and senior members of the fraternity who have made important contributions in cinema. Hence, I shall respectfully accept their perspectives." Yami, who earlier won the Screen Award for Best Comedian for 'Bala', further expressed that the snub has made her more 'determined' and she feels that one 'doesn't need to seek validation for their work from anyone'. "The kind of love that I have received this year, from the industry, critics, media, my talented fellow contemporaries and most importantly YOU - my audience, for always showing unconditional love - selfless support, means the world to me and is enough to boost me to keep working harder. It doesn't matter where you come from, who you are, just don't ever give up and keep walking ahead. It's a long journey and I am a hustler, for life," she concluded. Stars such as Ayushmann Khurrana, his wife Tahira Kashyap, Varun Dhawan, Vikrant Massey were among the many others who commented on Yami's post and said that they are 'proud' of her. 'Bala' earned three nominations at this year's Filmfare Awards for Ayushmann Khurrana (Best Actor), Seema Pahwa (Best Supporting Actress) and Niren Bhatt (Best Dialogue Writer). The Republican party needs to focus on the future -- our districts change, and the GOP needs new faces and new perspectives. Voters should nominate me if they want a strong Constitutional Conservative who will defend conservative values on a national level. I want to be a lion for conservative principles, not a backbencher who is just 1 of 435. Republicans need more fresh faces who are not afraid to get out to the American public and explain why conservatism is best for this country, and help expand our base. My establishment opponents have made a career out of not standing for their values, this includes voting Present on things like the gas tax and voting for Red Flag laws - their values and candidacy are a way of the past. I'm running for Congress because I believe it's time we unite the Party and look towards the future and defended the promise of the American Dream against those who do away with it for their own political agenda. Turkey blamed the Syrian regime for the deaths of two of its soldiers on Thursday in the rebel stronghold of Idlib, as tensions also escalated with Moscow which accused Ankara of "supporting terrorists". The situation in Idlib province in northwestern Syria has grown increasingly volatile in recent weeks, with a Syrian offensive triggering a humanitarian crisis as close to a million civilians flee the violence. Turkey built 12 military observation posts in the region as part of a 2018 deal with Russia to prevent a regime onslaught, but its forces have come under increasing attack. Turkey blamed the two deaths on Thursday on a Syrian jet. It brings the number of Turkish personnel killed in clashes with Syrian forces this month to 16. Five others were wounded on Thursday, the defence ministry said. Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned this week of an "imminent" operation against Damascus unless it pulled its forces back behind Turkish positions by the end of February. The defence ministry said it retaliated against regime forces on Thursday, with "over 50 regime elements, five tanks, two armoured personnel carriers, two armoured pickups and one howitzer destroyed." Clashes were also reported between regime forces and Turkey-backed rebels in Nayrab, between the provincial capital of Idlib and the town of Saraqeb, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. The UK-based war monitor said at least 11 fighters on the pro-regime side and 14 on the pro-Turkey side were killed in the flare-up. Turkey backs certain rebel groups in the region and is determined to prevent a fresh flood of displaced people into its territory, where it is already hosting 3.6 million Syrian refugees. Despite being on opposing sides, Turkey and Russia have worked in the past to find diplomatic solutions to the conflict, but recent talks over the Idlib offensive have failed to yield results. "There has been a little more convergence in the last meetings, but we are not at the point we wish to be," Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told state broadcaster TRT on Thursday. Moscow repeated its claims that Ankara was supporting extremist groups in the region, which it denies. "We urge the Turkish side, in order to avoid incidents, to cease support of the actions of terrorists and handing them arms," the Russian defence ministry said. It said it had spotted Turkish artillery firing on Syrian units, wounding four soldiers. "We note this is not the first case of support for rebel fighters by Turkey," it added. Idlib is held by an array of rebels dominated by the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) jihadist group, which is led by members of the country's former Al-Qaeda franchise. More than 400 civilians have been killed since mid-December in bombings that have also hit hospitals and schools, according to the Observatory. Around 900,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in the largest displacement since the civil war in Syria broke out almost nine years ago. The UN said 170,000 of those were living out in the open as the organisation's refugee agency appealed to Turkey to take in more refugees. French President Emmanuel Macron also condemned the regime attacks on civilians in Idlib, warning of an impending humanitarian disaster. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-19 21:44:22|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close Representatives of the ASEAN Defence Ministers' Meeting (ADMM) Retreat pose for group photos in Vietnam's capital Hanoi, Feb. 19, 2020. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Defence Ministers' Meeting Retreat was held here on Wednesday, with a joint statement on defense cooperation against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak released, stressing the ASEAN unity and solidarity and pledging further cooperation against the epidemic. (Xinhua/Wang Di) HANOI, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Defense Ministers' Meeting Retreat was held here on Wednesday, with a joint statement on defense cooperation against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak released, stressing the ASEAN unity and solidarity and pledging further cooperation against the epidemic. In the statement, the defense ministers expressed their great concern over the COVID-19 outbreak, saying they share and value China's efforts in fighting the epidemic. Noting that regional and international collaboration is required to deal with the outbreak, the statement emphasized the importance of ASEAN unity and solidarity in response to the disease, and reaffirmed ASEAN members' commitment to promoting defense cooperation, including that in military medicine cooperation and information sharing. It also reaffirmed the chairman's statement on ASEAN collective response to the outbreak of COVID-19 released on Feb. 15, which called for cohesion and responsiveness in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak. In his opening speech at the meeting Wednesday, Vietnamese Defense Minister Ngo Xuan Lich said the ASEAN Defense Ministers' Meeting created a foundation to promote and formulate practical cooperation initiatives in many fields, especially non-traditional security issues such as military medicine, humanitarian aid and disaster relief. Vietnam, as the rotating chairman of the ASEAN 2020, has also asked the ASEAN's partner countries to further strengthen cooperation to enhance the response capacity for ASEAN countries' military medicine, Lich said. Your browser does not support the audio element. Strong-willed, ambitious, and studious are just a few of the words Deos teachers and family use to describe the driving factors behind his academic success in spite of his physical disabilities. Vo Ngoc Deo was born with a congenital disorder that has caused a sharp curve in his spine, but the tenacious high school senior has refused to allow his physical defect to stand in the way of striving toward a future career as an IT engineer. Currently enrolled at Lap Vo 2 High School in Lap Vo District, Dong Thap Province an area with a staggering high school dropout rate Deos success in the classroom has been nothing less than inspiring for his community. Indomitable will Deo starts each day at 6:00 am with a baguette breakfast and a painful climb onto the back of a motorbike. For the past 12 years, his father and paternal grandfather have taken turns driving him to school each morning. "The trio is a fixture here, Nguyen Dinh Khanh, a local motorbike taxi driver who often waits for fares outside the school explained. Many of Deos healthy peers quit school as soon as they learn how to read. Its rare for anyone with a disability to finish high school. Hes got an iron will. Deos parents say he was about the size of a fully grown cucumber when he was born. His limbs began contracting only a few days after birth and I couldnt ask for help from any pediatric hospitals until a few months later because I had no money and wasnt really sure what was happening, his father, Vo Ngoc Quyen, said. By the time Deo finally made it to a pediatrician, his parents had been told there was little that could be done. Doctors said his bones had become too stiff to fix, said Quyen. The next few years was a haze of trips to a hospital in nearby Ho Chi Minh City so doctors could regularly monitor Deos condition. For a family from a poor town in the Mekong Delta, the medical bills were a heavy burden. Still, the hardship of handing over the familys meager income to the hospital paled in comparison to the agony of watching doctors pull the young boys twisted limbs and fit his bones with braces. There were times I almost gave up, but Deos grandfather and I were determined to get him walking even with difficulty, no matter how hard it was to watch, Quyen said in tears. Vo Ngoc Deo works on a homework assignment in Lap Vo District, Dong Thap Province, Vietnam. Photo: T.N. / Tuoi Tre Foreign doctors often visit Dong Thap Province to offer free medical treatments to low-income families in the province, and Vo Van The, Deos grandfather, made sure to have Deo examined by each doctor who came through. They all told us to give up on the treatment, but we didnt, The said. When he was five years old, Deos family had a local carpenter build a walker. His parents and grandfather were in tears when he used it to take his first painful steps. A thirst for knowledge Deo was never shy about his desire to attend school and, eventually, his family reluctantly agreed, despite their fears his disability would put him at a disadvantage against his peers. As the years went by, Deo learned how to write using his tiny hands and quickly became known as one of the strongest students in class. By middle school, he was outperforming most of his classmates and has topped his class ever since. Im not as fortunate as my peers, but I believe I can do everything my heart desires as long as Im confident, Deo shared. I want to set an example to those like me and prove that people with disabilities can still contribute to society." IT engineer dream The first few years after Deo began attending school, teachers and classmates would offer to carry him to class on their backs. Of course, the strong-willed teen politely refused. Nguyen Van Kiet, the principal of Lap Vo 2 High School, explained that he had once advised the family to send Deo to a school for students with disabilities so that he might have an easier time getting around. Once again, Deo politely refused. If my friends can do it, I can too, he told Kiet. Kiet has arranged for Deos class to study in a classroom on the ground floor of the school and has had desks and chairs built especially for him. Our school has several other disabled students, and Deos strong will and aspirations set an example to all of them. He has set a shining example to his schoolmates, the principal remarked, adding that Deo has won several scholarships from philanthropists. So, what is next for Deo? I wish to major in IT engineering but have yet to decide on a university, Deo shared, adding that he plans to study either in Can Tho City or Ho Chi Minh City, but his parents want to keep him close by in case he needs their care. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! A bee learning to associate a reward with a specific shape (a sphere) in a 'look but don't touch situation' in the light. A lid prevented bees from feeling the shape. Credit: Lars Chittka How are we able to find things in the dark? And how can we imagine how something feels just by looking at it? It is because our brain is able to store information in such a way that it can be retrieved by different senses. This multi-sensory integration allows us to form mental images of the world and underpins our conscious awareness. It turns out that the ability to recognise objects across different senses is present in the tiny brains of an insect. Researchers at Queen Mary University of London and Macquarie University in Sydney have published new work in the journal Science showing that bumblebees can also find objects in the dark they've only seen before. In the light, but barred from touching the objects, bumblebees were trained to find rewarding sugar water in one type of object (cubes or spheres) and bitter quinine solution in the other shape. When tested in the dark, bees preferred the object that was previously rewarding, spending more time exploring them. Bumblebees also solved the task the other way around. After bees learned to find a particular shape in the dark, they were tested in the light and again preferred the shape they had learned was rewarding by touch alone. Video of test in light, but barred from touching objects. Bee spends more time exploring cubes, the shape they previously learned in the dark was rewarding. Credit: Joanna Brebner This ability is called cross-modal recognition and it allows us to perceive a complete picture of the world with rich representations. Dr. Cwyn Solvi is the lead author on the paper who was based at Queen Mary University of London and is now at Macquarie University in Sydney. She said: "The results of our study show that bumblebees don't process their senses as separate channelsthey come together as some sort of unified representation." A bee solving the task of recognising the same shape (a sphere) in darkness when it could feel but not see the shapes. Credit: Lars Chittka Professor Lars Chittka, head of the lab at Queen Mary University of London in which the study was performed, said: "We've long known that bees can remember the shapes of flowers. But a smartphone can recognise your face, for example, and does so without any form of awareness. Our new work indicates that something is going on inside the mind of bees that is wholly different from a machinethat bees can conjure up mental images of shapes." Video depiction of training, bee learns in dark to find sugar water in cubes (and not in spheres). Credit: Amelia Kowalewska and Joanna Brebner Selene Gutierrez Al-Khudhairy, co-author on the paper, and now Ph.D. student at the University of York, said: "This is an amazing feat when you consider the miniscule size of a bee's brain. Future investigations of the neural circuitry underlying this ability in bees may one day help reveal how our own brains imagine the world as we do." Dr. Solvi cautions: "This doesn't mean bees experience the world the same way we do, but it does show there is more going on in their heads than we have ever given them credit for." Explore further Smart single mother bees learn from their neighbors More information: C. Solvi el al., "Bumble bees display cross-modal object recognition between visual and tactile senses," Science (2020). C. Solvi el al., "Bumble bees display cross-modal object recognition between visual and tactile senses,"(2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi 1126/science.aay8064 G. von der Emde at University of Bonn in Bonn, Germany el al., "Cross-modal sensory transfer: Bees do it," Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi 1126/science.aba8519 Journal information: Science Story Highlights 77% trust the U.S. government to handle a coronavirus outbreak Current trust exceeds that for prior global or U.S. disease threats Two in three expect coronavirus to negatively affect the global economy WASHINGTON, D.C. -- About three in four Americans say they are very (31%) or somewhat confident (46%) in the federal government's ability to handle an outbreak of the coronavirus. This is a higher level of confidence than Gallup has found for the government's handling of previous health scares. Americans' Confidence in the Government's Ability to Handle a Coronavirus Outbreak, Compared With Previous Diseases/Health Threats How confident are you that the federal government will be able to handle an outbreak of the coronavirus in this country -- very confident, somewhat confident, not too confident or not confident at all? Very/Somewhat confident Not too confident/Not confident at all % % Coronavirus, 2020 77 22 Zika virus, 2017 64 33 Ebola virus, 2014 58 40 H1N1/Swine flu, 2009 67 32 Bird flu/Avian flu, 2005 54 45 Figures for bird flu (two polls in 2005), swine flu (two polls in 2009) and Ebola (three polls in 2014) represent averages Gallup These results are from a Feb. 3-16 Gallup poll, which began just days after the Trump administration announced it would suspend entry of foreign nationals into the U.S. among those who had traveled to China in the prior two weeks. The first U.S. case of COVID-19, the disease caused by a member of the coronavirus family, was discovered in late January, and the first American died of the disease in China in the middle of Gallup's polling period -- though no one has died from the disease within U.S. borders. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) currently puts the number of confirmed cases in the U.S. at 15. The combined 77% of Americans who are generally confident in the federal government's ability to handle a potential coronavirus outbreak tops the confidence Americans had that it could handle the Zika virus, the Ebola virus, the H1N1 virus (swine flu) and the bird flu at the time of those medical crises, between 2005 and 2017. This high level of confidence may be related to the fact that all deaths from COVID-19 have occurred abroad, rather than on U.S. soil. Americans Expect Coronavirus Outbreak to Harm World Economy Two in three Americans anticipate what many economists project: that the global coronavirus outbreak will negatively affect the world economy. About one in six Americans (16%) believe it will have a "very negative" effect, while about half (49%) expect it to have a "somewhat negative" impact. Thirty-four percent do not foresee the outbreak doing any harm to the global economy. U.S. Perceptions of the Coronavirus Outbreak's Effect on the Global Economy Do you think the coronavirus will have a negative effect on the world economy, or not? (If yes) Do you think it will have a very negative effect, or only a somewhat negative effect? Very negative effect Somewhat negative effect No negative effect % % % U.S. adults 16 49 34 Gallup, Feb. 3-16, 2020 However, large corporations -- including Apple, who said its reduced iPhone production in China due to the outbreak will eat at its quarterly revenue -- are bracing for a possible impact on their bottom line. An analysis by Dun & Bradstreet estimates that over 5 million companies globally have one or more direct/Tier 1 or Tier 2 suppliers in a Chinese region impacted by the coronavirus outbreak. Worries About Coronavirus on Par With Previous Fears About SARS and Anthrax Americans' level of worry about being exposed to coronavirus is at about the same level as it was for two of three other health risks Gallup measured previously. More than one in three Americans report being very (12%) or somewhat worried (24%) that they or a family member will be exposed to coronavirus. This combined 36% is on par with Americans' worries about severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, in 2003 (37%) and exposure to anthrax in 2001-2002 (32%). The West Nile virus outbreak in 2002, however, sparked more concern, with a slight majority (53%) worried about being exposed to it. This higher level of concern is likely due to the nature of West Nile, which first appeared in the U.S. in 1999. U.S. cases of West Nile never topped 100 in the years between 1999 and 2001, but exploded to more than 4,000 in 2002, when Gallup polled on the topic. Americans' Historical Worries About Various Diseases/Health Threats How worried are you that you or someone in your family will be exposed to [virus/health threat] -- very worried, somewhat worried, not too worried or not worried at all? Very/Somewhat worried Not too worried/Not worried at all % % Coronavirus, 2020 36 65 SARS, 2003 37 62 West Nile, 2002 53 46 Anthrax, 2001-2002 32 68 Figures for SARS (three polls in April 2003) and anthrax (four polls in 2001 and 2002) represent averages Gallup Nonwhites, Low-Income Households, Women Most Worried About Coronavirus Americans' level of concern about themselves or a family member being exposed to coronavirus varies by subgroup: Half of nonwhites (49%) versus less than a third of whites (29%) are worried. Residents of low-income households (43%) are more worried than those in middle-income (34%) and high-income households (25%). Women (40%) are more worried than men (30%). There is a 10-percentage-point gap in worry between the youngest adults (40% among those aged 18 to 29) and the oldest (30% among those aged 65 and older). Americans' Worries About Exposure to Coronavirus As you may know, many people in Asia have recently died from a new disease known as the coronavirus. How worried are you that you or someone in your family will be exposed to coronavirus -- very worried, somewhat worried, not too worried or not worried at all? Very/Somewhat worried Not too worried/Not worried at all % % U.S. adults 36 65 Gender Men 30 70 Women 40 60 Race/Ethnicity Whites 29 71 Nonwhites 49 51 Age 18-29 40 60 30-49 37 63 50-64 35 66 65+ 30 71 Household income $100,000+ 25 75 $40,000-$99,999 34 67 <$40,000 43 57 Gallup, Feb. 3-16, 2020 Bottom Line Americans' concerns about the coronavirus outbreak are fairly measured, with their reported level of worry on par with previous outbreaks. But their confidence in the government's ability to handle the COVID-19 disease is uniquely robust, with a higher level of confidence than Gallup has recorded for other viral outbreaks over the past two decades. Still, most Americans anticipate a negative effect on the global economy as a result of the outbreak -- and their expectations are backed up by economists and industry earnings reports alike. With so few U.S. residents infected by coronavirus at present, but consumer attitudes about the economy riding high, the potential for economic setbacks may be the biggest threat the virus poses to Americans at the moment. View complete question responses and trends. Learn more about how the Gallup Poll Social Series works. Kerala is eyeing a robust growth in domestic tourist arrivals in 2020 as it undertakes a slew of initiatives, including Tourism Trade Meets in ten cities in the country, to make the state a 365-day destination. In the first nine months of 2019, the state witnessed 1.32 crore domestic tourist arrivals. Kerala has commenced the second phase of national partnership meets in January which will go on till March, Kerala Tourism said in a statement. The increase in domestic tourist footfalls is a firm reiteration of the fact that the powerful promotional campaigns connected with the people instantly, Tourism Secretary Rani George said. Travellers from across India will find the state not only heritage-rich and enchanting but also a welcoming destination, especially with Vishu, Thrissur Pooram, and a host of other festivals lined up, she added. Kerala has added an array of new and exciting products and experiences that are tailor-made for the domestic traveller and would also make the state a 365-day destination, Tourism Director P Bala Kiran said. In a bid to make tourism a sustainable enterprise, Kerala has also introduced the concept of village life experience under the responsible tourism mission, the statement said. The customised experiences include serene backwater cruises, calm boat rides, thrilling canoe cruises, and silent walks through lush greenery and paddy fields, it added. The state has taken other initiatives such as Muziris Heritage Project, Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Spice Route Project to hard sell the state as a preferred tourist destination. (This story has been published from a wire agency feed without modifications to the text.) Follow more stories on Facebook and Twitter SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON El Salvadors transparency authority called on the army Wednesday to open its archives as part of a new investigation into an ambush which killed four Dutch journalists in 1982. TV journalists Koos Koster, Jan Corenlius Kuiper, Hans ter Laag and Johannes Willemsen were covering El Salvadors civil war when they were killed with rebels accompanying them in Chalatenango, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of the capital San Salvador. The Salvadoran Institute for Access to Public Information (IAIP) has given the defense ministry 30 days to hand over documents detailing military operations at the time of the ambush. The IAIP said it was looking for precise information on helicopter flight plans as well as the identities of crew members arriving or departing from the 4th Infantry Brigade headquarters at El Paraiso. Nobody has ever been prosecuted for the killings. In 1993, a United Nations Truth Commission investigation concluded the journalists were deliberately killed in an ambush set up on the orders of 4th Infantry Brigade Commander, Colonel Mario Reyes Mena along with other officers. A woman medico, who was India's first novel coronavirus patient being treated at the Government Medical College hospital here, was discharged today, official sources said. The decision to discharge her from the hospital was taken by the Medical Board, which met and examined the results of the woman's samples that had tested negative for the second time, they said. The discharge of the student marked the recovery of all three cases of infection in India reported from Kerala. To other students - one from Alappuzha and another Kasaragod - had been discharged recently after they too tested negative for the virus in fresh tests days after being infected by it. The woman, India's first coronavirus patient, had been undergoing treatment in the isolation ward of the Medical College Hospital here since her return from Wuhan in China last month.All the three Keralites had earlier tested positive for the coronavirus on their return from Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly outbreak that has left over 2,000 people dead in China, triggering a scare in the state. "The health condition of the third patient at Thrissur Medical College Hospital is satisfactory. The second consecutive test result of the blood sample of the student, sent to the National Institute of Virology in Pune, has returned negative," Health Minister K K Shailaja had said in a release on Wednesday. The health department has said a total of 2,242 people are under observation across the state, out of which, eight are in isolation wards of various hospitals and other under home quarantine.The student admitted to the isolation ward of Alappuzha Medical College was discharged on February 6 while the patient from Kasargod sent home five days later. Earlier, after the three students tested positive, the government had declared the coronavirus as a state calamity, but withdrew it after effective quarantine and no fresh cases being reported. Also read: Coronavirus scare spreads to South Korea; China reports drop in new cases The day after President Donald Trump was acquitted in his impeachment trial, he held a celebration in the White House with a few hundred of the weakest yes men and women ever assembled. It reminded me of film clips Ive seen of the North Koreans in their adoration of their leader Kim Jong Un. So while Trump insulted, cried and whined about good Americans, his loyal followers stood and clapped on cue, sat on cue, laughed on cue and even laughed when they shouldnt have. Trump then spoke to Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and insulted his fellow Sen. Mitt Romney, and Lee sat there with a smirk on his face and took it. For this room full of so-called Republican leaders, this had to be the most humiliating meeting they ever had to sit through. I dont know how these people can face each other the next day knowing how pitifully weak they each are. John B. Walsh, Avon Lake Pune: A local court has sentenced a former manager of Bank of Maharashtra (BoM) to 10 years rigorous imprisonment and pay Rs 24 lakh fine for misappropriation of funds worth Rs 25 crore. Special Judge for CBI cases judge Pralhad Bhagure on Wednesday sentenced Shaliwahan Solegaonkar, then branch manager, Bank of Maharashtra, Pune to undergo 10 years rigorous imprisonment with total fine of Rs 24 lakh.. Rakesh Jadhav, another accused in the case, was sentenced to undergo three years rigorous imprisonment with fine of Rs 10,000. According to statement released by CBI, the probe agency had registered a case on June 28, 2018 based on the allegations that during 2009 to 2017, Solegaonkar, working in different branches of Bank of Maharashtra in Pune, entered into a criminal conspiracy with Jadhav and other unknown persons. In pursuance of the said conspiracy, both the accused fraudulently misappropriated total amount of Rs 2,56,15,998 (approximately) from the banks funds. It was also revealed that Solegaonkar while posted in different capacities, as clerk, deputy manager at Sahakarnagar branch; as deputy manager at Lavale and Lasurne branches; as manager at Hadapsar Industrial Estate and Talegaon Dhamdhere branches, transferred various amounts from bank general ledger (BGL) account to a savings account opened in the name of Jadhav (private person) which was maintained at Sahakarnagar branch of Bank of Maharashtra at Pune. Later, Solegaonkar transferred the said amounts from the account of Jadhav to his own savings bank accounts maintained at Vadgaon Budruk branch and Sahakarnagar branch of Bank of Maharashtra, respectively and thereby misappropriated a total amount of Rs.25.65 crore which was entrusted to him as banker. After investigation, five charge sheets were filed before the special judge by CBI under Sections 120-B of IPC r/w 409 and under Section 13(2) r/w 13(1)(d) of P.C. Act, 1988 against the accused. The trial court found the accused guilty and convicted them. Credit: CC0 Public Domain Arthropod passions will soar along Florida's coastal waters in March and April as we reach peak mating season for horseshoe crabs. The state wildlife service is requesting reports of any mating horseshoe crabs so it can track these primitive but important creatures. Just as Spanish moss is neither Spanish nor a moss, horseshoe crabs aren't actually crabs. They're more closely related to spiders and scorpions. Ancient survivors from the period before the dinosaurs, they have declined in the past few decades from the loss of coastal habitat to construction. Mating pairs and clusters can be easily recognized. The male hooks onto the larger female, often joined by other males hoping to help in fertilizing her eggs. They're most easily seen at high tide within a few days of a new or full moon. You can report sightings to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission at horseshoe-crabs" target="_blank">myfwc.com/research/saltwater/c aceans/horseshoe-crabs. Horseshoe crab eggs are an important food for migrating birds. The adult crabs are food for fish, sea turtles, alligators and other creatures. And if you see one on its back, you can help it. Never pick them up by the tail. Just grip it gently on its sides and flip it over. Explore further Humans threaten Asian horseshoe crabs 2020 Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, Fla.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC. EXCITING OPPORTUNITY TO JOIN OUR BOARD OF DIRECTORS TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) is an aid-for-trade organisation that was established with the aim of growing prosperity in East Africa through increased trade. TMEA operates on a not-for-profit basis and is funded by the development agencies of the following countries: Belgium, Canada, Denmark, European Union, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, United Kingdom, and United States of America. TMEA works closely with East African Community (EAC) institutions, national governments, the private sector and civil society organisations. TMEA, with an annual expenditure of around US$100 million, is now the leading aid-for-trade facility in the world. TMEA has its headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya with vibrant and successful operations in EAC (Arusha), Burundi (Bujumbura), Democratic Republic of Congo (Bukavu), Ethiopia and the Horn (Addis Ababa & Hargeisa), Rwanda (Kigali), South Sudan (Juba), Tanzania (Dar es salaam) and Uganda (Kampala). The first phase of TMEA delivered exceptional results which directly contributed to substantial gains in East Africas trade and regional integration environment in terms of reduced transit times, improved border efficiency, and reduced barriers to trade. We are now in the second phase and we aim to deliver even more large-scale impact to maximise the potential benefits of aid-for-trade interventions which lead to sustainable and inclusive prosperity through job creation, poverty reduction and enhanced economic welfare. To find out more, please visit our website www.trademarkea.com TMEA is seeking to recruit a dynamic and visionary individual with strategic leadership experience, professional networks and regional influence to join TMEAs Board as a Non-Executive Director. The Board oversees the strategy, policy, and direction of TMEA to facilitate the achievement of its mission, objectives, and impact. TMEA aims to have a diverse board and is therefore seeking an individual with expertise in audit, financeand/or risk. APPLICATION DETAILS The detailed job description and more information about TMEAcan be found on our website www.trademarkea.com. If you have the relevant qualifications and experience, please apply online through https://oxfordhr.co.uk/candidates/all-roles/africa-roles/ by 5.00pm East African time on Monday, 16 March 2020, noting to attach your cover letter and CV. In your letter, please indicate your specific area of expertise and interest, as well as your nationality. Preliminary interviews will be conducted on 26 and 27 March and final interviews on 23 April 2020. All interviews will be conducted by telephone, video conference or through Microsoft Teams. The successful candidate will be offered a three-year contract, with the possibility of renewal for a further three years. The successful candidate will be expected to attend induction between 2 and 5 June and a Board of Directors meeting scheduled for 23 and 24 June 2020. Both events will be in Nairobi. Please note that we will only consider applications received on-line through the link provided above. Applications received after the deadline will not be accepted. We reserve the right to accept or reject any application. Only short-listed candidates will be contacted. Qualified women, persons living with disabilitiesare particularly encouraged to apply. There is already very good representation on the Board from Kenya, and we would particularly welcome applications from nationals of TMEAs other countries of operation. ******************************************************** Diversity & Inclusion is our pulse! TMEA is an equal opportunity employer and is committed to open and transparent recruitment processes. We are committed to a culture that supports, celebrates and respects the unique and authentic self of each of our employees and partners. We believe that our work is better accomplished, success achieved, and mission realised when we fully embrace the value in our differences by establishing a workforce that reflect the communities we work with. We are therefore committed to diversity across race, cultures, ethnicity or national origins, religious and political beliefs, age, disability, gender and gender identity, sexual orientation, social or economic class, marital status or educational background; so that all are free to be who they are, and freely express their views and beliefs. We do so knowing that diversity and inclusion have tangible benefits not only to our organisation, but also to the communities we work with. ST PAUL Pleading for a second chance for Minnesotans who serve their time, advocates and lawmakers filled the Capitol Rotunda on Wednesday, Feb. 19, to call for criminal justice reform this legislative session. The Minnesota Second Chance Coalition hosted its 12th annual Second Chance Day in St. Paul, aiming to shine a spotlight on five specific criminal justice bills up for consideration this session: bills that would reform the state's clemency process, restore voting rights to Minnesotans on probation, eliminate driver's license suspensions for unpaid traffic fines, end life sentences for juveniles and offer judges sentencing alternatives for parents who are primary caregivers to their children. At a Wednesday news conference, Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said the state's criminal justice system "has actually failed" many incarcerated people, following them long after they finish their prison sentences and rippling out into their communities. "At some point, punishment has to end," he said. "We are a state of second chances. We are a country that believes in redemption." Advocates say the five bills highlighted Wednesday would help formerly incarcerated Minnesotans move on with their lives and stop the cycle of recidivism and generational trauma: A refined clemency process would make it easier for deserving Minnesotans to expunge their records; restoring voting rights to those who served their time would allow them to participate in democracy; offering alternatives to imprisonment for parents could keep families together, they said. ADVERTISEMENT For Tonja Honsey, founder of the advocacy group We Rise, said she "never remember(s) having a choice" whether to enter the criminal justice system. She grew up in an unstable home that struggled to put food on the table, and she began selling drugs as a preteen. Now out after years in prison, she said she's still working to mend her bonds with her children and community. "When we look at incarceration and what it does to families what it does to the children, what it does to communities what it does is separate us," she said. "It keeps us from connecting with each other." With this year's bills on the table, she said legislators have an opportunity "to empower people, rather than just continue to lock people up." House Speaker Melissa Hortman, D-Brooklyn Park, noted Wednesday that House Democrats passed last year's bill to restore voting rights to felons after incarceration, but House File 40 did not make it past the Senate. This year, Hortman said she foresees the House passing it again. First lady Gwen Walz joined the rally to call legislators to "do better" and push for committee hearings on all of the bills on the table. "We have research. We have ideas. We have stories that will tell us how to do better," she said. "If we fail to listen ... shame on us." The deputy speaker of the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, Pyotr Tolstoy, told Sputnik he was planning to discuss the situation with Sputnik Estonia outlet with Thomas Greminger, the secretary general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) VIENNA (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th February, 2020) The deputy speaker of the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, Pyotr Tolstoy, told Sputnik he was planning to discuss the situation with Sputnik Estonia outlet with Thomas Greminger, the secretary general of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). The meeting is expected to take place Thursday in Vienna. "I am afraid we will not achieve anything [talking to] the Estonians, but we will have to draw the attention of the European society to this. I will talk to the OSCE secretary general today, we will see in what format we can do it," Tolstoy said. A meeting with OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Harlem Desir cannot be excluded, Tolstoy added. "I do not know yet how to arrange this technically, so that [we would] understand if this meeting could happen or not. Desir said he was monitoring the situation. Let him do it," Tolstoy said. The employees of the outlet were told by the Estonian authorities that they were facing criminal investigation unless they stopped working for Sputnik Estonia by January 1, 2020. Tallinn cited the 2014 EU sanctions as the reason for its actions. However, the restrictions in question did not target Rossiya Segodnya information agency, of which Sputnik is a part, but the agency's director general, Dmitry Kiselev. [February 20, 2020] Gymshark Selects Radial to Support Expansion in United States and Canada KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Radial, the leader in omnichannel commerce technology and operations, today announced that leading conditioning brand Gymshark selected Radial's eCommerce fulfillment and transportation solutions to deliver world-class service and order fulfillment to U.S. and Canadian customers. One of the fastest growing UK retailers, Gymshark is rapidly expanding across borders. Following a successful partnership during the 2019 holiday season in the Canadian market, Radial will now support Gymshark in the U.S., leveraging its broad fulfillment center footprint to improve client satisfaction by radically reducing click-to-door time frames. Gymshark's 'disruptive' approach to social media and marketing has been a catalyst in propelling the brand to become a globally recognized name in the fitness and conditioning industry. With Gymshark's community and customer-base spanning the globe, Radial will leverage its fulfillment centers in Groveport, Ohio, Rialto, California and Mississauga, Ontario to assist in providing an improved, more consistent customer service. That shared customer-first culture gravitated the companies together and Radial's expertise in online retail for the world's biggest brands made the two an optimal fit. "Gymshark is a perfect example of the high-growth rate that can be enabled by leveraging Radial's shared service fulfillment network," said Tim Hinckley, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer at Radial. "Today's consumer is demanding yet eager to embrace brands that are forward thinking, agile, responsive and aligned with their trusted social brand ambassadors. Gymshark can now provide a radically enhanced click-to-door experience for their entire North American market and initial results show that their customers are rewarding them with increased orders and positive feedback on social feeds which is driving accelerated growth." Gymshark and Radial first united to launch Gymshark's Canadin hub on October 22, 2019. The companies initially focused on preparing for peak retail season, including support for Gymshark's major Blackout sale. Considered an expert in scaling retail operations and labor support for peak, Radial leverages a multi-node fulfillment model to ensure optimal staffing and support during periods of high demand. As a result, Gymshark was able to transform their original 7-9-day delivery window in Canada to just three days for 98% of deliveries. During the Blackout sale (a two-week period from November 25 to December 6), Radial processed a record-breaking number of orders and units for Gymshark's Canadian business. Together, the companies delivered on approximately 60K total orders and processed nearly 160,000 units during the 2019 holiday season. "Our customers are our community at Gymshark, so building and maintaining our relationships with them is always our top priority, and our global eCommerce experience is no exception," said Steve Hewitt, Chief Executive Officer at Gymshark. "When we engaged Radial, we could tell immediately that they share our vision, could guide our expansion strategy and have the footprint, flexibility and resources to support our growing global community." The shorter delivery windows and enhanced customer satisfaction seen in Canada prompted Gymshark to move forward with a U.S. fulfillment expansion plan in partnership with Radial. Efforts to launch services and further build out infrastructure in Radial's Ohio and California centers are already underway, with Radial reserving more than 200K square feet specifically for Gymshark operations. Radial and Gymshark anticipate comprehensive U.S. fulfillment support to go-live in the second half of 2020. Radial is a leading omnichannel commerce partner to top retail brands, helping them to seamlessly execute omnichannel orders while scaling fulfillment, freight and customer care needs. The company has 21 multi-tenant fulfillment centers in North America and six abroad. To learn more about Radial's fulfillment and transportation solutions, please visit: https://www.radial.com/fulfillment-transportation About Radial Radial, Inc., a bpost group company, is the leader in omnichannel commerce technology and operations. Premier brands around the world confidently partner with Radial to deliver their brand promises, anticipate and respond to industry disruption, and compete in a rapidly evolving market. Radial's innovative solutions connect retailers and customers through advanced omnichannel technologies; intelligent payments and fraud protection; efficient fulfillment, supply chain services; and insightful customer care services especially where high-value customer experiences are critical. We are flexible, scalable, and focused on our clients' business objectives. Learn how we deliver today's retail for you at radial.com and follow us on Twitter @radialcorp. About Gymshark Gymshark is a conditioning brand, dedicated to creating functional training apparel, designing innovative performance technologies and building passionate, empowered communities. Formed in 2012 in a garage in Birmingham, UK, Gymshark has emerged as a leading brand in our industry, with a worldwide family from over 170 countries. We exist to unite the conditioning community. Press Contact for Radial: Dana Trismen [email protected] 617-502-4396 Press Contact for Gymshark: Stephanie O'Neill [email protected] +44 7387 265894 View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gymshark-selects-radial-to-support-expansion-in-united-states-and-canada-301007884.html SOURCE Radial [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] California school to be named for Michelle Obama A San Francisco Bay Area school district voted Wednesday to name an elementary school after former First Lady Michelle Obama. The board of the West Contra Costa Unified School District unanimously voted to rename Wilson Elementary School in Richmond as Michelle Obama Elementary School. The wife of President Barack Obama is known for her support of educational and child health programs. ADVERTISEMENT She is a role model for our children and we strive to serve our students with the same kind of love, advocacy, and courage that she served our country,`` Board President Stephanie Hernandez-Jarvis said in a statement. The schools PTA had proposed the name change. It will be the first school in Northern California and the second in the state to be named in Michelle Obamas honor, the district said. The other school is in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Panorama City. Wilson Elementary was named for Woodrow Wilson, the 28th president of the United States. The school currently is closed for reconstruction and its 430 students have been using a temporary campus in El Cerrito. A new state-of-the-art school facility bearing Michelle Obamas name is expected to open in time for the 2020-21 school year, according to the district. The Syrian government troops covered by Russian warplanes on Thursday (local time) repelled several massive attacks of militants supported by Turkey in Idlib, according to the Russian military. Militants supported by artillery fire of the Turkish Armed Forces managed to break through the defense of the Syrian army, the Russian Center for Reconciliation of the Warring Parties in Syria said in a statement. To prevent the militants from moving deeper into the Syrian territory, Russia's Su-24 attack aircraft delivered a blow against them, the statement said. The airstrikes allowed the Syrian government troops to repel all the militant attacks and destroy one tank, six infantry fighting vehicles and five pickups armed with large-caliber weapons, it said. According to the statement, the Turkish troops stopped shelling after receiving Russian information that four Syrian soldiers were injured by their artillery fire. The Russian military urged the Turkish side to stop supporting the militants and halt supplying weapons to them in order to avoid future incidents. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The Allahabad High Court has asked the principal secretary (forest) to pay a fine of Rs 25,000 for the delay in preparing UP Special Tiger Protection Service rules and wasting time of the court. A Lucknow bench of justices MN Bhandari and Manish Kumar passed the order on a pending PIL moved in 2016 for protection of tigers. The Tiger Protection Force was constituted way back in 2013 but the rules have not been framed till date. On January 7, 2020, the court had issued directions for completing process of preparing the rules, else the principal secretary forest and Chief Conservator of Forest/Field Director of Dudhwa Tiger Reserve Kheri, Sanaji Kumar would appear before it. Kumar appeared before the court and informed it that the rules were not framed as yet. When the court inquired about the principal secretary, the government lawyer intimated the court that he was busy in the assembly. Angered on this, the court intended to issue him contempt notice. But the bench was apprised that the principal secretary was on the way to appear before the court and it was requested that the petition may be taken up after half an hour. The bench said, "The court cannot run on the dictum of the officer rather the principal secretary was required to remain present when the case was called". The court granted the principal secretary time on the condition of paying fine of Rs 25,000 for his default and wasting the court's time. The cost would have to be deposited with the State Legal Services Authority, Lucknow within 15 days. Later, the principal secretary appeared before the court and informed it that the process of framing rules was taking time due to involvement of other departments like finance, personnel, home and legal. He sought three months to complete the process. Accepting his request, the bench granted him three months to prepare and place the rules for approval before the cabinet. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) HARTFORD After a year of prodding the Democratic majority in the General Assembly, Gov. Ned Lamont on Wednesday abruptly slammed the brakes on his plan for trucks-only highway tolls, admitting defeat and lambasting the legislature for its reticence. But even as he hastily called a news conference in his Capitol office, Democratic leaders insisted that they could muster the support for a dozen tolls next week. Lamont said he was tired of their procrastination, and vowed that his plan to fix highways and railroad lines will go forward, with state taxpayers shouldering the full freight rather than gathering revenue from interstate trucks. Speaker of the House Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, blamed the Senate Democratic caucus for the latest failure of the plan, and Senate leaders pointed fingers at threatened filibusters from House and Senate Republicans. I have a legislature that doesnt want to make a choice at this time, a terse, visibly frustrated Lamont told reporters after 4 p.m. Ive lost patience. I think its time to take a pause. If these guys arent willing to step up and vote, Im going to solve this problem. Right now were going to go back to the way weve done it for years in this state. We both agree, we need $19 to $20 billion. Im going to do that out of pocket. I hate to do it this way. Lamont said that the estimated $200 million in annual truck-toll revenue would be subtracted out of the long-term capital bonding legislation. Is it the best way to fund it? No, Lamont said. But its a plausible way to get it going. At around the time that Lamont was venting to reporters in the Capitol, Democratic leaders said they still hold out hope for a vote on tolls next week. So its not entirely clear whether tolls are dead for the year, depending on what Lamonts bonding alternative turns out to be. Two of the biggest opponents of tolls, House Minority Leader Themis Klarides, R-Derby and Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, told reporters that parking the toll legislation is politically expedient, especially at this point in the first month of the short, 13-week budget-adjustment session of the General Assembly. Nothing is dead in this building, Fasano said, adding hed be surprised if this issue was revived this session. In 2021? I think you can bank on it. I think and Im hoping that the House Democrats understand what the Senate Democrats seem to have understood for a while and thats that this is not a good vote and its a very risky vote for them because the people of Connecticut dont like it and they do not want their hands stuck in their pocket one more time, Klarides said. More for you Maybe anti-toll group is right: Getting There Lamont proposed a 10-year, $19-billion transportation infrastructure program, but in an election year amid a vociferous anti-toll movement, support has been soft among Democrats who have a 90-61 majority in the House and a 22-14 edge in the Senate. Optimistically, Senate Democrats have planned for an 18-18 tie on the issue, with Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz expected to cast the winning vote for tolls. Aresimowicz admitted that the governors toll plan has been in a slow-motion car wreck for a month. Over the past four weeks of trying to coordinate the scenario and date to pass a truck-only tolls transportation plan, it has become very clear that the political will to act was not there, Aresimowicz said in a statement. We were poised to act in the House tomorrow, but we need our colleagues in the Senate as well and apparently their ability to also act was tenuous. In light of a potential unprecedented two-day, 30-hour-long debate, the Senate Democrats asked for five more days for our Senators to prepare and make necessary family arrangements, said Senate President Martin Looney and Majority Leader Bob Duff in a statement released while Lamont had reporters in his office. We are still confident that Senate Democrats have the votes to pass a comprehensive transportation plan which includes 12 toll gantries on 18-wheeler trucks only, Looney, D-New Haven and Duff, D-Norwalk. We are prepared to hold a session next week to vote on a bill to make the necessary transportation investments for Connecticuts economic development, residents, and businesses. Patrick Sasser of Stamford, a firefighter who is the informal leader of the No Tolls CT movement, was optimistic at the apparent death of the proposal. Im happy the governor will be moving away from tolls, Sasser said. I am hopeful that lawmakers from both sides of the aisle can come together to find a solution that works for the people of Connecticut. Asked by reporters about his opinion of the opposition to tolls, Lamont snapped: Its a grassroots movement to do nothing. Told about Lamonts comment, Sasser, took a different view. The voice of the people has been heard, he said. Its been clear from day one that the people of Connecticut were not in favor of tolls coming into the state, and part of that is that they just dont trust another source of revenue, Sasser said. Weve seen this before, where these other things were supposed to save Connecticut and weve been spiraling out of control. What people really want to see in Connecticut is reformand thats what this movement has been about. Dan Haar contributed to this report. AI-driven Wire Service Aims to Boost News Coverage of Local Government Census Bureau Shares Information About Privacy Efforts Rural Indiana County Adopts New Digital Equity Plan Tennessee Launches an All-in-One Mobile App Developers have created a new dashboard to visualize state-level Census hiring data as employment efforts for the forthcoming count begin to ramp up.The dashboard was created within the Tennessee State Data Center, which is part of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The information it visualizes, however, is not just limited to that state. Instead, the new dashboard features state-level Census hiring data for the entirety of the United States.The key visualization on the dashboard is the current number of temporary workers that have been employed for the Census. Users can view this data holistically for the entire country, or they can click on individual states to view the data in those jurisdictions. In addition, the visualization also conveys hiring progress by showing users how many temporary workers were employed in an area for the Census the prior month and breaking that down by percentage increase over the past month.The Census, which begins in earnest in April, requires a massive hiring effort to recruit temporary workers. Conducted every 10 years, the Census holds the distinction of being the largest peacetime mobilization of the U.S. government, and the mass hiring of the temporary workers is a significant part of that.This years Census is also likely to include more training than the last Census 10 years ago did, owing to its status as the nations first high-tech Census . While there are still analog options such as pen and paper mailings available, the onus this time is on having respondents complete the Census digitally. This, of course, will require training temporary employees on how to help people go about this.A new content wire service born out of a collaboration between California Polytechnic State University and the University of Miami is aiming to help news organizations do a better job of covering state and local government with a process driven by artificial intelligence.The work, which will now be pushed forward by a $200,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, is called AI For Reporters, and the goal at present is to take it from the ideation phase into a functional prototype. The goal of the project is to generate narrative content about state legislatures automatically from primary data sources, thereby distributing it to the state and local news organizations that would then publish it.In a press release, developers noted that the ambition is to empower hometown media to receive articles specifically covering the activities of their state representatives and issues of local/regional significance they currently lack because of limited reporting resources and/or being overlooked by traditional wire services.In addition to the two academic institutions working on the project, other partners include Google, as well as the Institute of Interactive Systems and Data Science at Austrias Graz University of Technology. The prototype will first work to generate content about the state legislative process in California and Florida.In announcing the new project, stakeholders noted that statehouse reporting nationwide has reached an all-time low, citing statistics that show a 30 percent decrease in full-time newsroom staffing between 2003 and 2012. Resources to cover statehouses have, as a result, dropped, with less than one-third of newspapers in the United States now assigning reporters to statehouses.Having a simplified and relevant way to discern what the state legislature is doing is, for obvious reasons, important to those who work in both local and state government, and this project has the potential or at least the goal of ensuring that.In other Census news, the U.S. Census Bureau is sharing more information about its plans to ensure that the massive amount of data it collects and stores stays safe and also cannot be used to violate the privacy of individuals.Questions about the Census privacy and data practices have swirled in the lead up to the count, and now the Bureau has started to shed some light on what will happen come April. The Census will be adopting differential privacy to ensure confidentiality. This is a process that involves making small tweaks to the data to ensure that individuals cannot be identified within it. At the same time, the Census Bureau is grappling with a set of expectations that the data will be comprehensive enough to inform the nation. For many years, everyone from private businesses to policymakers to analysts have relied on Census data to help inform critical decisions.As the count approaches, Census officials say they are now counting on input from our data users to help ensure our 2020 Census data products retain the same high quality and utility the nation has come to depend upon. To date, the Census Bureau has solicited this input by releasing a set of demo products and also holding a workshop for input.As the Bureau continues refining its data products, it plans to update interested parties through its blog , and it also asks that any who have feedback reach out via email at dcmd.2010.demonstration.data.products@census.gov An increasing number of local governments nationwide have started to create digital equity plans aimed at bridging the digital divide so that more of their residents can benefit as technology continues to accelerate.These governments, however, have largely included cities, but now a rural county government in Indiana has rolled out its own digital equity plan as well. That jurisdiction is Rush County, Ind., and its new digital equity plan was created by Broadband Connect, a Rush County Task Force Broadband Connect is an all-volunteer group formed under the leadership of Robert Gallardo, the assistant director for the Purdue Center for Regional Development and its new plan is the "Rush County Digital Inclusion Plan 2020 - 2025 ."The plan is similar in nature to those implemented by many large cities, including goals such as improving broadband connectivity, increasing the number of computing devices owned throughout the county, and bolstering digital literacy, which means making sure that more residents have the skills they need to use technology in meaningful ways.What makes this plan notable is not the nature of its goals, but rather the size and location of the jurisdiction that is adopting them. Organizers noted in a recent press release that Rush County which is home to roughly 17,000 residents is among the first in the state to adopt such a plan, and it is entirely possible that it is also the first primarily rural jurisdiction in the country where the local government has created an official effort to stem the digital divide.Tennessee citizens can now access a bevy of services and sift through a wealth of information with the free MyTN smartphone app , which was released Tuesday.Strategic Technology Solutions, housed under the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration and led by state CIO Stephanie Dedmon, created the app in coordination with different state agencies. Dedmon cited one of the main functions of the app in a press release.State government services are utilized by every citizen, and we want to provide access to those services where its most convenient on your mobile device, she said. The one service used by almost everyone at some point is renewing your drivers license, and beginning today, that service is mobile.Users can also access services or information related to children and families, the state business climate, hunting and gun licenses, vessel management, farmers markets and businesses throughout the state, convicted felons and more.Government Technology LANSING, MI -- Michigan marijuana packaging will become a little more crowded with warnings and other required information. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Wednesday, Feb. 19, signed into law new safety requirements for marijuana sales. The laws, sponsored by Reps. Thomas Albert, R-Lowell, and Daire Rendon, R-Lake City, require marijuana products to now include warnings regarding risks to unborn children, children who are breastfeeding and mandate that marijuana shops make pamphlets explaining underage use health risks available to all customers. As marijuana has become more readily available, the industry has successfully changed peoples perceptions of the drug. Many people believe its perfectly safe and thats just not true, Albert said. These labels will better inform parents of risks they may not have previously considered and serve as an added safety measure to protect vulnerable children. A 2017 American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists report on marijuana use during pregnancy is used to support the needs for warning labels. The studies found children who were exposed to marijuana while in the womb had lower scores on tests of visual problem solving, visual-motor coordination and visual analysis. Additionally, prenatal marijuana exposure is associated with decreased attention span and behavioral problems and is an independent predictor of marijuana use by age 14 years, the report says. Effects of prenatal marijuana exposure on school performance are less clear. Robin Schneider, director of the Michigan Cannabis Industry Association, a trade organization made up of 200 licensed marijuana businesses, said her members are supportive of the warning labels and educational pamphlets. On the topic of medical marijuana use during pregnancy thats a decision to be made between a patient and their doctor, Schneider said. As with any medication the doctor must evaluate potential benefits and risks associated with treatment. Opposition to the laws felt more warnings might water down the overall effectiveness of a warning label by making the warnings so common that they are largely ignored, the House Fiscal Agency analysis said. " ... The medical and recreational marijuana products that will be manufactured and sold in Michigan will be in small packages," the analysis said. "Other information, such as date of harvest, the concentration of THC or CBD, and the name of the safety compliance facility that performed any test, among other things, are already required to be attached to each product. Each product also must be stamped with the universal symbol designating it as a marijuana product and contain warnings to keep it out of the reach of children and not to drive under the influence of marijuana. New labels must include the following statement surrounded by a continuous heavy line: Warning: Use by pregnant or breastfeeding women, or by women planning to become pregnant, may result in fetal injury, preterm birth, low birth weight, or developmental problems for the child. The yet-to-be-printed pamphlets must be made available to every customer, must measure 3.5 inches by 5 inches and contain safety information related to use by minors and the Poison Control Hotline phone number. The laws wont create any significant cost to government. This new law requires the Marijuana Regulatory Agency to institute the requirements and stores wont need to have new packaging or pamphlets in place until that happens. -- Gus Burns is the marijuana beat reporter for MLive. Contact him with questions, tips or comments at fburns@mlive.com or follow him on Twitter, @GusBurns. Read more from MLive about medical and recreational marijuana. More on MLive: New warning labels could be coming soon Marijuana weed labels gain traction Marijuana regulators forbidden from looking at their own data Michigan recalls Savage Sticks vaping products K bank CEO Shim Sung-hoon closes his eyes while participating in a National Assembly audit in Seoul, on Oct. 16, 2017. Yonhap By Lee Min-hyung BEIJING, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- China's all-round progress in both the aerospace manufacturing and air transport sectors of the aviation industry is adding wings to the fight against the coronavirus epidemic. A series of China's domestically-developed airplanes and the enhanced transport aviation capabilities are joining efforts to meet the unprecedented anti-epidemic challenges. LARGE TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT APPEAR From Feb. 13 to 17, two batches of Y-20 large transport airplanes landed at Tianhe international airport of Wuhan, the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak in Hubei Province. It represented the first round of appearances of China's domestically-developed large transport aircraft model to take part in non-military action. Their mission on Feb. 13 also marked the first time for China's Air Force to send large and medium transport aircraft on active service to carry out urgent air transport tasks on a large scale. The Y-20 large multi-role transport aircraft was developed by the state-owned Aviation Industry of China (AVIC) and entered the military service in July 2016. The development and application of the Y-20 marked a breakthrough of China's capability in the design and manufacturing of large aircraft, and also represented a major step forward of China's Air Force, said the AVIC. Together with the Y-20, the domestically-developed Y-9 medium transport airplanes were in the fleet to send medical staff and emergency supplies in the emergency mission. According to the AVIC, technical professionals from multiple units of the group have joint the service, support and training works in fighting against the epidemic, contributing to the unique roles of the Chinese aviation industry. CIVIL AVIATION TAKES OFF The fast-growing civil aviation industry of China also moves fast in echoing the country's demands in emergency transports, thanks to the constant growth in the civil aviation sector over the past decades. The civil aviation authorities and Chinese airliners showed their capability in coordinating and carrying medical personnel and supplies nationwide to the virus-hit regions. As of Feb. 14, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has arranged and coordinated 21 Chinese air carriers to conduct 241 flights with 29,000 passengers. Among them, nine flights carried more than 1,100 Hubei passengers stranded overseas back to China, and 48 charter flights conducted overseas transport missions. The Chinese civil aviation authorities had coordinated 50 charter flights within two days to carry more than 6,200 medical personnel to rush to support Wuhan. To lower the risks of infection on airplanes, flights with high passenger numbers will transfer to bigger aircraft to space out travelers, or more flights will be added, according to the CAAC. China has become the world's second-largest civil aviation market, thanks to the country's constant economic growth and persistent efforts in cultivating the sector. It has created a remarkable record of double-digit growth in the civil aviation sector over the past decades. The expanding fleet, extended route network and capability in air transport empower the Chinese civil aviation industry to meet the intense challenges alongside the outbreak of the epidemic. AVIATION EMERGENCY RESPONSE A comprehensive aviation emergency response could generate the power and functions of various aerial vehicles. The anti-epidemic fight is testing and manifesting the country's strengthening aviation industry. "The aviation emergency response system could play unique roles to tackle those challenges ahead of the traditional transport and supply systems, such as the large scale transportation in limited time and those missions of point-to-point delivery," said Zhang Haochi, an official at the Aviation Industry Development Research Center of China. "Fixed-wing airplanes can meet the demands for the large-scale transport of people and cargo supplies. General airplanes are capable of facilitating short- and medium-range deliveries," Zhang said. Flexible vehicles like helicopters are perfect for missions such as precise deliveries to hospitals and other key sites, patient transfers, and the delivery of rare emergency supplies. "Aviation authorities and industry players are collaborating closely to meet challenges with quick response," said Li Jian, deputy head of the CAAC. "In the following phase, we will encourage more carriers to exploit their capabilities, and ensure the smooth operation of the air transport corridor in the fight against the epidemic," Li said. Artists perform for India's Union home minister Amit Shah as he arrives to attend the 34th Statehood Day of Arunachal Pradesh in Lakhimpur district on February 20, 2020. (PTI) New Delhi: Union home minister Amit Shah is in Arunachal Pradesh for attend its 34th statehood day festivities, and as might be expected whenever a major personality visits that border state, China has objected to it. Asserting sovereignty over the territory, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Beijing that China is "firmly opposed" to the Indian Union home minister's trip as it apparently violated Beijing's "territorial sovereignty and sabotaged political mutual trust". China claims Arunachal Pradesh is part its territory of southern Tibet. It was in 1986 that Arunachal became a state of the Indian Union, prior to which it was a union territory. Amit Shah was welcomed with traditional pageantry in Lakhimpur district of Arunachal Pradesh on February 20. He's there to launch a number of road and power projects. He is accompanied by Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal and Assam finance minister Hemanta Biswal. China routinely objects to Indian leaders' visits to the northeastern state to assert its claims over it. "China's position on the eastern sector of the China-India boundary, or the southern part of China's Tibet region, is consistent and clear," China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told an online media briefing in Beijing on Thursday while replying to a question. "The Chinese government has never recognised the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' and is firmly opposed to the Indian politician's visit to the southern part of China's Tibet region as it violates China's territorial sovereignty, undermined stability of the border area, sabotaged political mutual trust, and violated relevant bilateral agreement," he said. "The Chinese side urges the Indian side to stop taking any action that may further complicate the border issue and take concrete actions to uphold peace and tranquillity of the border area," he said. The India-China border dispute covers the 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC). China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of southern Tibet and the two countries have so far held 22 rounds of talks between special representatives to resolve the border dispute. George Trefgarne is CEO of Boscobel & Partners, an adviser to the Heathrow Hub extended runway consortium. The Swedes, like the Germans, are good at inventing compound words, and here is a new one: Flygskam. It translates as flight shame and it is already having an impact, with the Swedish airports trade association reporting a four per cent decline in passenger numbers last year. The Conservative Party is suffering from a British strain of this disease: Heathrow shame. Its symptoms include hiding behind a political face mask and nervously washing your hands with anti-bacterial gel at the mere mention of the nations hub airport. The previous transport secretary, Chris Grayling, approved a third runway at Heathrow and Parliament voted in favour of it. But the current Prime Minister is uncomfortable with it, judging by his recent comments about no immediate prospect of any bulldozers, and he is apparently eager to stop it if he can. Boris Johnson is right to be sceptical. A cynic will say his doubts are simply because Heathrow Airport Ltd is coincidentally due to submit its application for a Decision Consent Order to Grant Shapps around the time of the COP26 Climate Conference in Glasgow in November, or his promise to lie down in front of the bulldozers when he was Mayor for London. But the reality is that like so many things overseen by the Department for Transport in recent year, the third runway is a flawed scheme, beset with serious problems which may erupt whatever the outcome of an expected judgement by the Court of Appeal in coming weeks. First, there is the cost. Heathrow Airport Ltd claims it will cost 14 billion. But that is a six years old number for a previously pared back scheme. Not only has the proposal since changed with, among other things, extra land take, they still have no confirmed means of getting the new runway over the M25 so close to the M4 junction, without causing years of traffic delays and construction chaos. Critical elements, such as the business plan, Safety Case (necessary to show how the airport would be operated in practice) and the proposed new flight paths remain shrouded in secrecy. Put all this together and costs seem to be going through the roof. The Civil Aviation Authority recently refused to approve a 3 billion tranche of pre-application spending, triple the original estimate. Heathrow responded by announcing completion would be delayed three years until 2029. Our estimate is the real cost is likely to be at least 38 billion. Who pays if there is a big cost overrun? The answer is, in the first instance, the punters. Heathrow is financed by passenger fees, already the highest in the world. It has wriggled out of a commitment to keep them flat and IAG, the owner of British Airways, reckons they could double to more than 40 each. The taxpayer is also on the hook for at least 5 billion of road and rail upgrades. In order to make this complex project economic, Heathrow not only wants to increase passenger fees, it wants to add 50 per cent to its current capacity with an extra 260,000 flights annually, or another 700 departures and arrivals per day. Which leads us to the next point: how can this be compatible with the Governments strict new limits for carbon emissions and air quality? And what about the extra noise over West London? Supposing, for the sake of argument, it is either not compatible or the effect of flight-shaming is such that demand fails to arrive? What then? After years of paying out large dividends to its shareholders, Heathrow, already some 15 billion in debt, would currently struggle to absorb any cost overruns itself. Messrs Johnson and Shapps will not be able to avoid this issue much longer. Some time in the next few weeks a judgement is expected from the Court of Appeal in a Judicial Review case brought by environmental campaigners and local authorities. We are supporting a parallel competition-based case brought by Heathrow Hub, an independent consortium which has proposed an alternative, extended runway (which came second in the process run by the Airports Commission). Either the Government will win, in which case it will be game on with Heathrows planning application later in the year; or it will lose, in which case Ministers will, ironically, have to decide whether to take it to their favourite place: the Supreme Court. If they decide to cancel the project, there will be uproar from the business community and the considerable Heathrow lobby in the Commons. Presumably, Heathrow itself would demand hundreds of millions of pounds in compensation. If they go ahead with it, then environmental campaigners and prominent London-based Conservatives some of them in the Government, including trade minister Greg Hands (also chair of Shaun Baileys Mayoral campaign), environment minister Lord Goldsmith and Cabinet office minister Lord True would instead kick up a big fuss, and all in time for the London Mayoral election in May. There is actually a way out of this mess. The brains behind our cheaper, simpler and quieter extended runway concept including Jock Lowe, a former Concorde pilot and some of the worlds leading engineering firms anticipated the need to help politicians solve the Heathrow dilemma. The first phase of our proposal costs only 4.7 billion and would add only 70,000 additional flights. At that price, regulators need release no additional flights at all if they are not confident that carbon, air quality and noise limits could be met. In the meantime, the airport would operate more efficiently, with fewer delays, less taxiing and fewer track miles. Our proposal came second in the Airports Commission process, which deemed it viable. And unlike the third runway brings no new communities into the noise footprint and has an independent Safety Case which has been shared with the CAA. Under Section 6 of the National Planning Act, the secretary of state has a duty to consider a review if the circumstances change significantly after a major infrastructure project is approved by Parliament. In Heathrows case, the circumstances have obviously changed very materially. The best way forward for Johnson and Shapps would be to initiate such a review as soon as possible, before the Swedes invent another new word: Heathrowskam. | By Lou Cortina When Tamara Hicks, PhD, MSW, was hired by the University of Maryland School of Social Work last year, she did some research about employee benefits and came across the University of Maryland, Baltimores (UMB) Live Near Your Work Program (LNYW). Thanks to the homebuying assistance initiative, Hicks is now a proud resident of Hollins Market. Tamara Hicks stands outside her new home in the Hollins Market neighborhood. I looked into Hollins Market before I moved here and added several neighbors on Instagram so I could see if they loved it, says Hicks, a clinical assistant professor who moved to Baltimore from Charlotte, N.C. I always look for community engagement and how the residents buy in to the neighborhood. Im quite pleased because I get to live near my workplace just three bus stops and I'm at my office. I also really wanted to live in the city. The feeling is different than being in the suburbs. It's very hard to explain. But I love the city, and I love my neighbors. I had to navigate the program from many miles away in Charlotte, but I got it done! Hicks is one of 14 UMB employees who benefited from the LNYW Program in 2019, joining 20 others who bought houses with UMB assistance since January 2018, when the program was revamped with additional funds and homebuying resources. It now offers $18,500 grants of $16,000 from UMB and $2,500 from the city of Baltimore for closing costs and down payment. Hollins Market is one of seven targeted Southwest Baltimore LNYW neighborhoods; the others are Barre Circle, Franklin Square, Mount Clare, Pigtown/Washington Village, Poppleton, and Union Square. With a total of 34 new homeowners, the LNYW Program has used nearly $550,000 of the $1.5 million that UMB leaders committed to boost the grant. The funds have transformed the program, which used to offer a grant of $2,500 and was rarely used by employees between 2013 and 2017. The initiative also has been boosted by community partnerships with Live Baltimore, the Southwest Partnership, and GO Northwest Housing Resource Center to offer homebuying workshops, financial counseling, neighborhood tours, a housing fair, and more. In 2020, LNYW is entering a second phase, which includes a potential expansion of neighborhoods participating in the program and efforts to connect potential grant recipients with real estate developers who are renovating or building properties in the participating neighborhoods, says Karen S. Park, MA, MBA, UMBs director of strategic planning and chief of staff to the chief business and finance officer. UMB has solicited four neighborhoods to apply for inclusion in the program: Harlem Park, Heritage Crossing, Upton, and Druid Heights, Park says. These neighborhoods were identified for their current partnerships with UMB programs and proximity to our campus. We also conducted focus groups to better understand what types of properties and community amenities that future homeowners are seeking. In this process, we discovered that there was some confusion about the LNYW Programs requirements and parameters, so additional meetings were established with these focus group participants to answer their questions. In terms of demographics, program leaders say nearly 65 percent of the UMB homebuyers are African-American, 85 percent are women, and the average home purchase price is $177,258. Pigtown/Washington Village has been the most popular neighborhood, with 18 grant recipients buying houses in that community. Demetrius Shambley, MA, facilities planner for UMB, is among those employees who used the LNYW grant to buy a home in Pigtown. The close proximity to campus and the Orioles and Ravens stadiums and easy access to interstates are what initially attracted me to that community, says Shambley, who moved from a downtown apartment. Its a strong neighborhood where people care about their homes. My experience with the Live Near Your Work Program was very pleasing. The workshops and counseling sessions were helpful and informative. Sophie White, academic services coordinator in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, also bought a house in Pigtown after living in a downtown apartment. I was drawn to the small community feel, the emerging local businesses, the diversity within the neighborhood, and of course its proximity to UMB, White says. The grant significantly contributed toward the down payment for our first home. The process of applying was much easier than I anticipated and all went smoothly with receiving the benefits. My experience was very positive. Park says that high level of satisfaction was typical with the 2019 grantees, and shes optimistic of more to come. We remain on target to assist up to 90 families through this program by the end of its fifth year, Park says. The program has far exceeded our expectations and continues to generate a steady interest in homeownership in West Baltimore. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-21 00:46:33|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close TUNIS, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Tunisia's Islamist party Ennahdha announced on Thursday that it will grant confidence to the new government of Prime Minister-designate Elyes Fakhfakh. The proposed composition of the new government is reasonable because it respects the voters' will and representatives in parliament, said Rached Ghannouchi, president of the parliament and president of Ennahdha. At a press briefing, Ghannouchi said Ennahdha, which has a majority of 54 seats in parliament, approves the final lineup of the proposed government. "This government is composed of prominent figures in political parties," he added. After a meeting earlier in the day, the Tunisian parliament's office decided to hold a plenary session on Feb. 26 for the vote of confidence in the new government. Fakhfakh announced on Wednesday evening the final lineup of his proposed government. The new cabinet is composed of 30 ministers and two secretaries of state. Enditem Steklarna Hrastnik announces new space-inspired spirit bottle range Glass producer Steklarna Hrastnik is looking to strengthen its position in the packaging market with a new collection of premium spirits bottles. Its Hrastnik 1860 collection comprises Luna and Orion, which use natural design influences, and Jupiter Polaris, which uses modern geometric lines. The bottles were created in collaboration with packaging design agency Nude Brand Creation and were inspired by astronomy and Scandinavian minimalism. Named after the Greek god of hunting, Orion has a simple shape with equal sides and is designed to represent masculine robustness. Suggested uses include for Bourbon, cognac, whisky or navy strength gin. Jupitar Polaris is designed to create an "optical experience" for observers and is suggested as a suitable packaging for most spirits. Luna was based around simple Scandinavian design principles and its designers say it would suit most spirits or non-alcoholic drinks. All three bottles are available with personalisation opportunities for customers. The Hrastnik 1860 collection extends Steklarna Hrastnik's range of premium glass packaging, made using extra white flint glass. 20 February 2020 - Bethany Whymark IMO 2020 rules likely to be blessings for cement industry in Pakistan 20 February 2020 Pakistan's cement industry is likely benefit from competitive furnace oil instead of the more costly re-gasified liquefied natural gs (RLNG) for power generation, if it is allowed in the backdrop of IMO 2020 rules, which discourages use of high-sulphur fuel oil in shipping industry. According to a report of local research house, furnace oil (FO) prices is experiencing downward trend due to IMO 2020 that has come into effect recently and that requires tougher regulations on sulphur emission. Analysts believe, IMO 2020 will ultimately change the dynamics of oil and shipping industries for the decades to come. From January 2020 the United Nations has banned shipping agencies from using fuels with sulphur content above 0.5 per cent as compared to 3.5 per cent earlier. Resultantly, global demand for HSFO is expected to drop to about 1.55mbpd as against previous year, wherein it stood at 2.86mbpd. This is bound to lead to a further drop in RFO prices the environmentally challenging fuel. As a result, the 'disconnect' between FO prices and international oil prices stemming principally from implementation of IMO 2020 and hence foresee increased usage of 'cost competitive' FO as a primary fuel for cement manufacturers with their own power generation plants. It is worth mentioning that post adoption of IMO 2020, electricity generation from FO is more competitive than RLNG. Therefore, it is anticipated that Punjab-based cement manufacturers opting for increased power generation employing FO as a primary fuel as against current RLNG subject to regulator's approval. This is bound to augur favourably for gross margins of such cement manufacturers, including DG Khan Cement, Maple Leaf Cement, Fauji Cement Company and Cherat Cement. Published under Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan held talks with Libyan Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in Istanbul on Thursday, after Turkey said its commitments in Libya were connected with a ceasefire. Turkey supports the UN-recognised Government of National Accord led by Sarraj, and the two countries signed security, military and maritime deals in November last year. The closed-door meeting had not been on Erdogan's official agenda and took place at the Ottoman-era Dolmabahce Palace, the Turkish presidency said, without giving details. Earlier on Thursday, Libya's warring sides resumed talks in Geneva aimed at brokering a lasting ceasefire in the country. Libya has been mired in chaos since 2011 when a NATO-backed uprising led to the killing of longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi. Military strongman Khalifa Haftar, backed by the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, launched an offensive on Tripoli last April. A ceasefire brokered by Haftar-supporter Russia and GNA-backer Turkey was agreed last month by both sides to end fighting but there have been violations. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu earlier on Thursday told state broadcaster TRT Haber that Turkey's commitments in Libya were "connected to the ceasefire". At a Berlin summit last month, countries including Russia, Turkey, France and Egypt agreed to end foreign interference in Libya and respect for a UN arms embargo. "If the ceasefire does not continue, the transfer to a political process is very hard," Cavusoglu said. "The world condemns but what is being done to stop Haftar?" Libya's unity government halted its participation in UN talks this week after a barrage of rocket fire hit a port in the capital Tripoli, but returned to the table on Thursday. Search Keywords: Short link: PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 19:41:03 Paris, February 20, 2020, 7.30pm AB Science announces positive top-line Phase 2B/3 results for oral masitinib in progressive forms of multiple sclerosis Masitinib significantly delays disability progression on EDSS in patients with primary progressive (PPMS) and non-active secondary progressive (nSPMS) multiple sclerosis AB Science SA (Euronext - FR0010557264 - AB) today announced that the Phase 2B/3 study (AB07002) evaluating oral masitinib in primary progressive (PPMS) and non-active secondary progressive (nSPMS) multiple sclerosis met its primary endpoint (p=0.0256) with masitinib dose of 4.5 mg/kg/day. This treatment-effect was numerically maintained for subpopulations of PPMS and nSPMS. The study enrolled 301 patients in the 4.5 mg/kg/day treatment arm (200 treated with masitinib and 101 treated with placebo). The pre-specified primary endpoint was absolute change from baseline on Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) considering all measurements from week-12 to week-96. Results on the primary endpoint were supported by pre-specified statistically significant sensitivity analysis based on the ordinal EDSS model. Additionally, masitinib significantly delayed disease progression as measured by the time to reach an EDSS score of 7.0 (corresponding to disability severe enough that the patient is restricted to a wheelchair). Efficacy analysis was performed in the modified intent-to-treat (mITT) population, which included all randomized patients who took at least one dose of study treatment (masitinib/placebo). The proportion of patients experiencing at least one adverse event was 95.0% for masitinib (4.5 mg/kg/day) versus 87.1% for placebo. Safety was consistent with the known tolerability profile for masitinib. The study also enrolled 310 patients in a 6.0 mg/kg/day (titration starting at 4.5 mg/kg/day) treatment arm (203 treated with masitinib and 107 treated with placebo). There was no significant improvement with respect to placebo at this higher dose of masitinib. Primary progressive MS (PPMS) is characterized by steadily worsening function from the onset of symptoms, often without early relapses or remissions. PPMS affects about 15% of people diagnosed with MS. Non-active secondary progressive MS (nSPMS) is a stage of MS that follows relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and that is characterized with an EDSS score progression 1 point without any relapse in the last 2 years. nSPMS affects about 30-35% of people with MS. Patrick Vermersch, Professor of Neurology at Lille University in France and coordinating investigator of study AB07002 said, People with primary progressive (PPMS) and non-active secondary progressive (nSPMS) forms of multiple sclerosis account for half of all MS patients. While numerous treatments based on targeting of B-cells and T-cells of the adaptive immune system are available for patients with relapsing forms of MS, these strategies have failed or had inconclusive results in PPMS and nSPMS. Consequently, there remains a very high medical need for people with PPMS and nSPMS. Masitinib does not target the adaptive immune system and the results from this study represent a scientific breakthrough because this is the first time that the novel strategy of targeting the innate immune system via mast cells and microglia has been able to significantly slow progression of clinical disability in progressive forms of MS. These data are extremely encouraging and may provide new hope for progressive MS patients. Prof. Olivier Hermine (President of the Scientific Committee of AB Science and member of the Academie des Sciences in France) said, This positive result in progressive MS is an important new finding that further validates the mechanism of action of masitinib in neurodegenerative diseases [1]. Indeed, this is the second piece of supportive evidence delivered by the masitinib clinical program. The first one was the positive Phase 2B/3 study with masitinib in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) [2]. The second one is this new positive Phase 2B/3 study in progressive forms of MS, which share similar characteristics with other neurodegenerative diseases. The two studies taken together clearly demonstrate that targeting the innate immune system via macrophage/microglia and mast cells, as masitinib does, is one of the right strategies to treat neurodegenerative disorders. This is a true innovation that justifies the long-term efforts from AB Science to develop masitinib in ALS, progressive forms of MS and Alzheimers disease. A new patent was filed based on results from study AB07002. The company will consult with the Health Authorities to discuss the appropriate pathway forward for masitinib in the treatment of progressive forms of multiple sclerosis. AB Science plans to present detailed study results at an upcoming medical meeting. The top-line results will be further discussed in the coming weeks during a live webcast on masitinib in progressive forms of multiple sclerosis with Key Opinion Leaders. [1]: Stys PK and Tsutsui S. F1000Res. 2019 Dec 13;8. pii: F1000 Faculty Rev-2100. [2]: Mora JS et al. Amyotroph Lateral Scler Frontotemporal Degener. 2019 Jul 7:1-10. Phase 3 study in progressive PPMS and nSPMS The Phase 2B/3 trial (AB07002) was a prospective, multicenter, randomized (2:1), double-blind, placebo-controlled, 2-parallel groups study evaluating oral masitinib as a treatment for progressive multiple sclerosis (MS) tested at 4.5 mg/kg/day and 6 mg/kg/day (titration starting at 4.5 mg/kg/day). Eligible patients aged 18-75 years, with baseline Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) 2.06.0, regardless of time-from-onset, and diagnosed with primary progressive (PPMS) or non-active secondary progressive (nSPMS) MS, were treated for 96 weeks. The pre-specified primary endpoint was the overall EDSS (Expanded Disability Status Scale) change from baseline using repeated measures (GEE model, timeframe W12W96). The pre-specified sensitivity analysis was based on the ordinal EDSS model (GEE model, timeframe W12W96). The primary endpoint was overall EDSS change from baseline using repeated measures (GEE model, timeframe W12W96). About masitinib Masitinib is a new orally administered tyrosine kinase inhibitor that targets mast cells and macrophages, important cells for immunity, through inhibiting a limited number of kinases. Based on its unique mechanism of action, masitinib can be developed in a large number of conditions in oncology, in inflammatory diseases, and in certain diseases of the central nervous system. In oncology due to its immunotherapy effect, masitinib can have an effect on survival, alone or in combination with chemotherapy. Through its activity on mast cells and microglia and consequently the inhibition of the activation of the inflammatory process, masitinib can have an effect on the symptoms associated with some inflammatory and central nervous system diseases and the degeneration of these diseases. About AB Science Founded in 2001, AB Science is a pharmaceutical company specializing in the research, development and commercialization of protein kinase inhibitors (PKIs), a class of targeted proteins whose action are key in signaling pathways within cells. Our programs target only diseases with high unmet medical needs, often lethal with short term survival or rare or refractory to previous line of treatment. AB Science has developed a proprietary portfolio of molecules and the Companys lead compound, masitinib, has already been registered for veterinary medicine and is developed in human medicine in oncology, neurological diseases, and inflammatory diseases. The company is headquartered in Paris, France, and listed on Euronext Paris (ticker: AB). Further information is available on AB Sciences website: www.ab-science.com . Forward-looking Statements - AB Science This press release contains forward-looking statements. These statements are not historical facts. These statements include projections and estimates as well as the assumptions on which they are based, statements based on projects, objectives, intentions and expectations regarding financial results, events, operations, future services, product development and their potential or future performance. These forward-looking statements can often be identified by the words "expect", "anticipate", "believe", "intend", "estimate" or "plan" as well as other similar terms. While AB Science believes these forward-looking statements are reasonable, investors are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties that are difficult to predict and generally beyond the control of AB Science and which may imply that results and actual events significantly differ from those expressed, induced or anticipated in the forward-looking information and statements. These risks and uncertainties include the uncertainties related to product development of the Company which may not be successful or to the marketing authorizations granted by competent authorities or, more generally, any factors that may affect marketing capacity of the products developed by AB Science, as well as those developed or identified in the public documents filed by AB Science with the Autorite des Marches Financiers (AMF), including those listed in the Chapter 4 "Risk Factors" of AB Science reference document filed with the AMF on November 22, 2016, under the number R. 16-078. AB Science disclaims any obligation or undertaking to update the forward-looking information and statements, subject to the applicable regulations, in particular articles 223-1 et seq. of the AMF General Regulations. For additional information, please contact: AB Science Financial Communication & Media Relations investors@ab-science.com Attachment The director of Little Shop of Horrors said the classic tragedy will have people breaking out in laughter and it is a bucket-list show for him to direct. It is deceptively dark because of all the bright colors and fun songs, but at the end of the day, it's about a giant man-eating plant, and so people are like, what? But it's kind of got a sci-fi feel to it, Scott Windham said of the Permian Playhouse production. Little Shop of Horrors opened off-Broadway in 1982. Seymour, a poor orphan, and Audrey, a pretty blonde with a tacky sense of fashion work at Mr. Mushniks flower shop. The shop isnt doing well until Seymour brings in a plant that looks like a large Venus flytrap. The exotic plant brings fame and fortune to the shop, but Seymour is hiding a dark secret: The plant finally reveals a plan of world domination. I think every director wants to direct A Little Shop at least once just because it's such a classic show, Windham said. How often do you get to do such fun music and the puppeteering that happens in this show Most of the time, you have, like one or two puppeteers, with the show we actually end up having five different puppeteers. Our plant looks much different than the traditional kind of avocado-looking plant, he said. Ours is a little bit more like a cobra. I guess you could say a little more striking. This will be the first show that has had a pit band since Annie in July 2018. The orchestra adds so much, like just texture and energy and kind of makes the whole thing feel finished, he said. Windham said he enjoys seeing the actors getting into their characters. Little Shop of Horrors Permian Playhouse, 310 W. 42nd St. 362-2329; permianplayhouse.com Showtimes: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday and Feb. 28-29 and 2:30 p.m. Sunday and March 1. Tickets are $15. See More Collapse I love to see actors discover their character, and sometimes it can be a hard process, Windham said. Sometimes it takes them learning to trust me as a director, when I keep pushing and pushing and pushing, and sometimes theres moments of frustration. But when it finally clicks, and they break through. They find their purpose, they start discovering, and they really embrace these characters. There are also almost twice as many volunteers helping offstage than acting on stage. We have a lot of young stagehands involved in the show, he said. There have been a lot of people involved in the show. I think that the number of people offstage is double, if not more than double the number of actors on stage. The plant is an integral part of the story and even speaks during part of the show, Windham said. Its really the plants story, too, and just the journey as humans, that desire that we all have to be known, the desire for success, the desire to be something is all looked at in the show. Windham said that the show is written like a Greek tragedy. We've got the three muses that come on, or the chorus, and they tell the story. Weve got our, our three women that come on, and theyre the chorus and they tell the story. We've got our hero, we've got our ingenue, we've got the bad guy, you know. And so like, we've got these art-type characters in this show, and they're all flawed. He said that showcasing how humans are flawed makes the play an enduring piece of culture. It's in those flaws that we see beauty come from the brokenness, and I think that that's why this is such a timeless story, Windham said. People are going to enjoy the fact that this was put on by volunteers, Windham said. You'll fall in love with the characters, Windham said. It's a fun night. You're going to laugh a lot. I haven't said that very often. People are going to laugh a lot. There are some really humorous moments, hopefully, that stop-the-show-laughing-hard types of moments and, and my actors, no doubt will indulge the crowd when it comes to some of those funny moments. HICKORY, N.C., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Supreme Corporation and VOLT Wearable Tech ("VOLTech"), a division of VOLT Smart Yarns, unveiled the World premiere of VOLTech's IoT GPS System with Vital Sign Monitoring, its latest innovation in wearable technology at the 6th Wearable Device and Technology Expo in Tokyo, Japan. Through VOLT Smart Yarns that transmit location and vital signs wirelessly and instantaneously, the System tracks a person's GPS location while using patent-pending Impact Detection technology to detect impacts such as gunshots or car accidents, then accurately reads and assess changes in the person's vital signs with the use of a Skin Worn Body Patch. The System even allows for the ability to connect with Artificial Intelligence ("AI") to predict if the wearer will have a critical health event during an emergency, reducing response time from emergency personnel. Through its real-time vital sign monitoring, GPS tracking and AI integration, the VOLTech System provides unparalleled personnel accountability solutions for Military, Police, Firefighters and other personnel. "The unveiling of our IoT GPS System with Vital Sign Monitoring is the latest example of the incredible progress we are achieving in R&D and it continues to demonstrate how we are transforming the realm of possibilities in IoT enabled clothing," said Matt Kolmes, CEO of VOLT Wearable Tech and its parent company, Supreme Corporation. "By utilizing our unique VOLT Smart Yarn capabilities and pairing them with leading technology, we are able to create customizable, wearable textiles that are being recognized as the forefront of innovation in the wearable technology space." Recently, Supreme Corporation and VOLT were recognized by IPC for its contribution in creating an industry standard for Connections to E-Textiles. The IPC award reflects the hard work that VOLT has undertaken to provide greater compatibility with electronics and textile pairing, a frequent barrier in the wearable technology space. Additionally, at the Textile International Forum and Exhibition ("TIFE"), the Taiwan Textile Research Institute presented Supreme and VOLT with an award as a "Leader in Wearable Technology." "We're honored by the recent recognition we've received for our contributions in wearable technology," said Kolmes. "These awards reflect the continued dedication and passion we bring to our work every day, the world-class partnerships we are making, and the drive to deliver one-of-a-kind products that are changing the face of the wearable technology industry." Launched in 2018 as a division of VOLT Smart Yarns, VOLT Wearable Tech matches electronics and textiles in new configurations through the use of highly conductive VOLT Smart yarns, to deliver highly customized products for its customers that are transforming the world of IoT-enabled clothing. Currently, VOLTech offers a wide-range of customizable capabilities, including: GPS and Vital Sign Monitoring trackers, VOLT NASA sensors woven into fabrics to create the ability to monitor health and movement in living beings, and VOLT Smart IoT/LED technology for athletes and people on the go. Currently in development are yarns and fabrics with the capability to release medicine to its users. About Supreme Corporation A leader in Smart textiles, fiber and safety apparel technology, Supreme Corporation manufactures innovative specialty yarns and safety apparel. The privately-held, Hickory, NC-based company has held 185 patents in 60 countries and currently has 95 active patents in high-tech yarns and fabrics. VOLT Smart Yarns and VOLT Wearable Tech are divisions of Supreme Corporation. Using exclusive and patented processes, Supreme engineers are able to create revolutionary highly-conductive custom Volt Smart Yarns with specific levels of conductivity, resistance, and strength. These Volt Smart Yarns harness the power of highly conductive copper wires to deliver yarns and sewing threads that are poised to change the world and what is possible in Smart Textiles. VOLT Wearable Tech delivers custom B2B wearable tech solutions. For more information, please visit www.supremecorporation.com. Contact: Matt Kolmes CEO [email protected] TEL: (828) 322-6975 SOURCE Supreme Corporation Related Links http://supremecorporation.com/ [February 20, 2020] Liftr Insights Releases its Market Intelligence Platform at OCP Global Summit 2020 AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Liftr Insights, a global internet-attached infrastructure industry research and advisory company, will be a sponsor at the 2020 Open Compute Project Global Summit in San Jose, California. Liftr Insights will highlight its Market Intelligence as a Platform offering at its sponsor booth during the 2020 OCP Global Summit Expo. Market Intelligence as a Platform Investors need quantitative data about the cloud computing industry. But the industry is opaque to investors, because cloud vendors and the cloud supply chain exchange information using a direct business model. This model leaves investors out of the conversation and with a lack of transparency and insight for their investments. "Currently, investors are stuck with traditional data providers that are survey-based," said Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. "Surveys depend on timely and transparent vendor responses that often result in quarterly or yearly distributed reports. By the time investors receive their reports, they are usually outdated." Liftr Insights addresses these issues with its Market Intelligence as a Platform: the software code and methodology that drives its data collection and analysis. For exampe, Market Intelligence as a Platform is the foundation behind the Liftr Cloud Components Tracker subscription service. With Market Intelligence as a Platform, data collection is faster and more complete, and analysis is more thorough and reliable. As a result, Liftr Cloud Components Tracker reports are delivered on a monthly basis, giving subscribers finer data on a faster cadence for their investment models. Using APIs and DevOps Developed and operated using modern DevOps methodology, Liftr Insights' software-based Market Intelligence as a Platform uses Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to enumerate current cloud deployments and internet-attached infrastructure. With APIs, Liftr Insights can measure deployed infrastructure availability (what exists), capability (what's in it) and pricing (what it costs). Liftr Insights' data collection is compliant with investors and currently gathers publicly available data on the top four public clouds: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Alibaba Cloud and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). In addition, Liftr Insights' DevOps-based Market Intelligence as a Platform is modular and extensible to other internet-attached infrastructure besides the cloud, including 5G, edge computing and IoT. Technological investors, cloud stakeholders and attendees at the OCP Global Summit 2020 who are looking for competitive intelligence or to enhance their investment models should email [email protected]. About the Open Compute Project Foundation The Open Compute Project Foundation (OCP) was initiated by Facebook in 2011 with a mission to apply the benefits of open source and open collaboration to hardware and rapidly increase the pace of innovation in, near and around the data center's networking equipment, general purpose and GPU servers, storage devices and appliances, and scalable rack designs. OCP's collaboration model is being applied beyond the data center, helping to advance the telecom industry & edge infrastructure deployments. Liftr and the Liftr logo are registered service marks of Liftr Insights. The following are trademarks and/or service marks of Liftr Insights: Liftr Insights and Liftr Cloud Components Tracker. View original content to download multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/liftr-insights-releases-its-market-intelligence-platform-at-ocp-global-summit-2020-301007067.html SOURCE Liftr Insights [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] BRIDGEPORT The mother of a New Haven teenager shot to death by a state trooper last month following a pursuit broke into tears Thursday as she faced a large gathering of news media. I pray no other mother has to see this again and I pray for justice for Mubarak, Omo Klusum Mohammed said. Mubarak Soulemane, 19, was killed Jan. 13 in West Haven after he allegedly carjacked a driver in Norwalk following an alleged incident with a knife at an AT&T store there, then fled from police at high at speeds that reached 90 mph along Interstate 95 before getting off in West Haven. The family is planning a rally at 4:30 p.m. Friday at the I-95 Exit 43 ramp. According to Connecticut State Police, Trooper Brian North fired his weapon when he saw Soulemane with a knife after stopping the car off Exit 43 in West Haven. When the driver displayed a weapon (later determined to be a knife), a trooper on scene discharged his assigned duty pistol, striking the driver, state police said. Video of the incident released by state police shows North firing seven times into the car as Soulemane sat in the drivers seat, prompting numerous people on social media to question the shooting. It will be up to Middlesex States Attorney Michael Gailor to determine whether North violated any law. North is on desk duty pending the outcome of the investigation. In the meantime, the Soulemane family said Thursday they filed a claim, the first step toward a $10 million lawsuit against the state, the state police, the city of West Haven and the West Haven Police Department. State police have declined comment on a possible lawsuit. The West Haven police were active participants in stopping Mubraks vehicle, Mark Arons said during a press conference Thursday in the Bridgeport law office of Miller, Rosnick, DAmico, August and Butler. Arons, along with New York City civil rights lawyer Sanford Rubenstein, is representing the Soulemane family. Arons said they may later decide to include the Norwalk Police Department in the lawsuit. (Soulemane) wasnt a threat to anyone. They didnt have to rush to execute this young man, Arons said. The family wants state Trooper Brian North held criminally accountable in this wrongful death, Rubenstein said. The family has fully cooperated and will continue to fully cooperate in the states attorneys investigation. A half-dozen family, friends and supporters held signs during the press conference demanding justice for Soulemane, who grew up in Norwalk. We demand this officer be indicted, convicted and sent to jail, said Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter Greater New York, as others in the group chanted justice. This was basically a murder on tape. This officer should be in handcuffs immediately, added the Rev. Kevin McCall of New York City. Russian President Vladimir Putin has disclosed how he selected Mikhail Mishustin for the post of prime minister. "Three, or maybe even four candidates were submitted. But Mishustin was not on the list. No one mentioned Mishustin except me," Putin told TASS in an interview for the project entitled: "20 Questions with Vladimir Putin". Asked about the reasoning for his choice, Putin replied: "I took into account personal traits and professional skills of Mikhail Vladimirovich [Mishustin]." Furthermore, the Russian leader highlighted Mishustins performance as head of the Federal Tax Service (FTS). "I did. Not the fact that he carried [the digitization of the FTS] out, but the fact that he really became an expert in this area. A man of practice, who understands very well what needs to be done and who knows how to do it; and he is doing it and achieves concrete results," Putin explained. He believes it would be wrong to say that the tax services sole task is to levy taxes. "This is a very primitive understanding of the work of the tax service. Yes, naturally, it is one of the main bodies bringing funds to the state treasury; however, to think that a tax collector walks around with a club, squeezing money out of people is very primitive," he said. "His mission [in the capacity of FTS chief] was to ease the situation for taxpayers, to make the procedure more transparent and clear and less burdensome for citizens. An honest man who knows he properly pays all due taxes has the right to expect that the state will use the money wisely," Putin explained. In his opinion, "the first thing to do is not to simply extract money from people - it is to organize the system in such a way that both the state and tax payers could comfortably work with each other and it would be clear how things are arranged, and everybody could pay taxes without impediment, without unnecessary hassle and stress, and without running the risk of doing something that the state may interpret as illegal." The Russian head of state also has divulged that he had notified Dmitry Medvedev ahead of time about the governments resignation. "We have enjoyed very frank, collegial, friendly relations with Dmitry Anatolyevich for man years. We have no secrets from one another. So we discussed this issue with him. We had discussed it earlier and he knew what was going on," he noted. Putin rejected suppositions that the Cabinets resignation looked like a special operation. However, he stopped short of disclosing whether anyone else other than Medvedev and himself had prior knowledge of these plans, or when the corresponding decision was made. Replying to the journalists remark that the January government reshuffle created an impression of hastiness, Putin asked: "Why should we be waiting long to decide on such issues? What will that achieve?" "Would it be better to spend another six months after the resignation of the government in order to form a new one? Can you imagine what a mess the country will be in?" There should never be a gap in power. Never. Everything should be discussed and thought through in advance, in a calm and business-like manner, each step should be prepared, and then the decision should be taken and implemented," Putin stressed. "We cannot afford to muddle along here. Russia is not Belgium that can stay a whole year without any government," the president explained. Washington: Fossil-fuel production may be responsible for much more atmospheric methane than scientists previously thought, according to new research published today in the journal Nature. The results, if they hold, suggest that methane needs to be managed even more tightly than was accounted for in multilateral initiatives such as the 2015 Paris Agreement - not to mention many policies on the national and local level. Scientists aren't challenging the topline amount of methane that enters the atmosphere every year that number stays at about 194 million metric tonnes, says Benjamin Hmiel, a post-doctoral fellow in Earth science at the University of Rochester and the study's lead author. Rather, they're challenging how much of the total comes from natural versus industrial sources, an important distinction for policy-makers. Launched last month, Ather 450X will be launched in 10 cities by the end of 2020. Bookings in 4 new cities opened today. Ather Energy, the fast growing electric two wheeler maker, is in the process of expanding its presence beyond Bangalore and Chennai. The Hero MotoCorp-backed company already announced entry into Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Pune later this year. Responding to impressive number of pre-orders and dealership applications from tier II and III cities following the launch of 450X scooter, Ather Energy has now announced that it will add 4 more cities to its list by the end of this year. The EV maker will enter Coimbatore, Ahmadabad, Kochi and Kolkata. This move would take Athers presence to 10 cities by the end of 2020, and the company aims to expand its network to 30 cities across the country by 2023. Speaking about the expansion plans, Tarun Mehta, CEO, Ather Energy, revealed that the company has received over 2,000 requests for retail partnerships across the country and has been receiving huge chunk of pre-orders for the Ather 450X from several Tier II and III cities across the country. The Ather 450X can be pre-ordered online for a fully-refundable amount of INR 2,500. The latest iteration of the electric urban scooter is powered by a 6 kW permanent magnet synchronous motor which is supported by a 2.9 kWh lithium-ion battery. The company claims that the new battery can charge 50% faster (1.5 km per minute) than the one on 450. The scooter has a range of 116 km on projected Indian Driving Cycle while the company claims a realistic range of 85 km in urban conditions. The Ather 450X offers four riding modes Eco, Ride, Sport and Warp. In Warp mode, the scooter can accelerate from 0-40 km in just 3.3 seconds, making it the quickest EV in its segment. Ather Energys expansion plans would be supported by its upcoming Hosur facility. The company hasnt revealed the timeline for start of production at the new factory but, given that it is based on a built-up infrastructure, things should move fast. With Bajaj and TVS jumping into the electric scooter race, it is imperative for Ather Energy to accelerate its retail and production operations to keep pace. We expect the competition in this space to get fiercer in the short term. Yasmin Buari, a third-year student at the University of Ghana Medical School, has praised Vodafone for giving her financial and technical support throughout her senior high school (SHS) education. Yasmin is one of the beneficiaries of a three-year scholarship programme, which was introduced by the Vodafone Ghana Foundation to help increase the pool of females in the science, technology and engineering industry. The scheme sponsored the education of 300 brilliant female students in over 80 senior high schools across the country between 2014 and 2019. Sharing her experience, Yasmin said: Vodafones scholarship programme helped my parents and I a lot when I was in the senior high school. I attended various science camps and mentoring programmes where we were given hands-on training in coding and robotics, as part of the scholarship. We were told to uphold higher academic standards, which also helped in my admission into medical school. I would like to thank Vodafone and British Council for that wonderful initiative. Commenting on the initiative, Gayheart Mensah, Director of External Affairs at Vodafone said: We are excited that our scholarship programme provided the foundation that has empowered 300 females who are pursuing careers in the medical, engineering and other related disciplines. We believe that females can play a significant role in addressing the technology and engineering challenges in the country, and this is one of the initiatives we introduced to help decrease the high attrition rate of women in this area. Vodafones scholarship programme was introduced in 2014, in partnership with the British Council, to help bridge the gender gap in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) by increasing females involvement in these subjects in Ghana. The package, catered for the tuition fees, learning materials and educational expenses of the beneficiaries for their 3-year secondary education. 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 Hardeep Puri, the career diplomat before he made the switch to politics, will be the minister in waiting for US President Donald Trumps visit to India next week. The job means that the 68-year-old civil aviation minister will accompany the presidential delegation to all of their official engagements in India. The US president and First Lady Melania Trump will be on a two-day visit to India starting from February 24. Piyush Goel was the minister-in-waiting to the visiting US President in 2015 Barack Obama. The designated minister in waiting, a ceremonial facet of any head of state visit, accompanies the visiting dignitary to all important events. ALSO WATCH | Dont trust, US poll campaign, protest: Opposition on Trumps India trip It is mainly just to accompany and escort the state guest, said former diplomat BS Prakash, calling the protocol to designate a minister as a custom and courtesy extended to a visiting dignitary. He added that it was a prestigious gig because in many cases, it means that the Prime Minister has handpicked the person and offers him, or her, an opportunity to interact with the visiting dignitary. Another diplomat told Hindustan Times that it is a fairly straightforward assignment that required someone who wasnt going to make any `gaffes. Puri, having served as envoy to the UK, Japan and other countries and the United Nations, certainly can be counted on for his tact. It is unclear if there will be another minister who is assigned to the first lady, Melania Trump who is accompanying the President. Puri has not responded to HTs queries yet. External Affairs ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar told a news conference that it was not the governments practice to announce the name of the minister in waiting. [February 20, 2020] Kronos and Ultimate Software Enter Definitive Merger Agreement Creating Company Valued at $22 Billion Kronos Incorporated and Ultimate Software today announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement to form one of the world's largest cloud companies. By bringing together two industry leaders, the transaction will create the world's most innovative human capital management (HCM) and workforce management company to help organizations across all industries manage their people more effectively with an unparalleled combination of cloud solutions. The combined company will have enhanced scale and an even stronger position in the fast-growing HCM marketplace. This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005662/en/ This merger combines the power of two undeniable marketplace leaders who share a deep commitment to innovation, delighting our customers, and caring for our people. (Graphic: Business Wire) News Facts Kronos (News - Alert) and Ultimate each have a proven track record of delivering the industry's most innovative solutions to help organizations around the world drive better business outcomes, achieve a competitive advantage and create engaged workforces. The new company will bring together the best of each company's award-winning solutions - Ultimate's UltiPro HCM and Employee Experience products with Workforce Dimensions from Kronos, Kronos Workforce Ready, and other solutions from Kronos - with an unwavering commitment to delighting customers and exceeding their expectations. Combining two exceptional, highly compatible cultures will create a company that is People Inspired . Kronos and Ultimate have been consistently recognized around the world as great places to work - including both being multi-year winners of the prestigious Glassdoor Employees' Choice Best Places to Work and Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For honors. This reflects both companies' belief that people are at the core of an organization's success, and that prioritizing the employee experience is the most effective way to help customers succeed. . Kronos and Ultimate have been consistently recognized around the world as great places to work - including both being multi-year winners of the prestigious Glassdoor Employees' Choice Best Places to Work and 100 Best Companies to Work For honors. This reflects both companies' belief that people are at the core of an organization's success, and that prioritizing the employee experience is the most effective way to help customers succeed. Upon closing, the combined company will have revenues of approximately $3 billion, more than 12,000 employees worldwide, and an enterprise value of $22 billion, with further plans for growth including the addition of 3,000 employees over the next three years. Aron Ain, longtime Kronos chief executive officer, will be the chief executive officer and Chairman of the combined company - guiding an experienced executive team comprised of leaders from both Ultimate and Kronos. The new company will be jointly headquartered in Lowell, Mass. and Weston, Fla., with dozens of offices around the world. Hellman & Friedman LLC (H&F), the controlling shareholder of both Kronos and Ultimate, will be the controlling shareholder of the newly formed company. Following H&F, private equity funds managed by Blackstone will be the largest minority investor, followed by GIC, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), and JMI Equity. Supporting Quotes Aron Ain, chief executive officer, Kronos "I have never been more excited in my 40 years at Kronos! Combining our passionate and extremely talented Kronos and Ultimate teams will create a company that is truly People Inspired. Together, we will expand the value we deliver to customers and create the industry's most comprehensive human capital management and workforce management solution for organizations around the world. With a combined 70 years in business, we are poised for tremendous success. For our employees, customers, and partners there is an even better future ahead. Our top priority as we complete this merger is to ensure a smooth transition for our people and continue to exceed our customers' expectations." Adam Rogers, chief executive officer, Ultimate "The combination of Ultimate and Kronos paves the way to deliver the next generation of employee-facing solutions that will set the standard for the workforce of the future. This merger will enable our more than 12,00 inspired people around the world to deliver innovation in human capital management faster than ever before. Both companies remain fully committed to their core strengths as well as to the combined benefits that the new company will bring to employees and customers." David Tunnell, partner, Hellman & Friedman, lead director, Kronos, and chairman, Ultimate "The merger of Kronos and Ultimate brings together two exceptional, industry-leading companies that are dedicated to delivering great technology services and - just as importantly - creating outstanding employee cultures of their own. After many years of a growth-oriented partnership with Kronos, and a more recent, successful relationship with Ultimate, we have strong conviction in the deep compatibility of these two companies and the unlimited growth potential of this sector. We know that by creating an inspiring place to work and putting people first, this combined company will thrive for years to come." Martin Brand, senior managing director, Blackstone "We believe the combination of Kronos and Ultimate will create a cloud industry leader in human capital management and workforce management software, and one of the best companies to work for in technology globally." Transaction Details and Advisors The all-stock merger has been unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies and is expected to close at the end of March. Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC (for Kronos) and Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC (for Ultimate) acted as financial advisors and Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP acted as legal counsel on the transaction. About Kronos Incorporated Kronos is a leading provider of workforce management and human capital management cloud solutions. Kronos industry-centric workforce applications are purpose-built for businesses, healthcare providers, educational institutions, and government agencies of all sizes. Tens of thousands of organizations - including half of the Fortune 1000 - and more than 40 million people in over 100 countries use Kronos every day. Visit www.kronos.com. Kronos: Workforce Innovation That Works. About Ultimate Software Ultimate Software is a leading global provider of cloud human capital management and employee experience solutions, with more than 51 million people records in the cloud. Ultimate's award-winning UltiPro delivers HR, payroll, talent, and time and labor management, as well as HR service delivery solutions. Founded in 1990, Ultimate is headquartered in Weston, Florida, and employs approximately 6,000 professionals. More information on Ultimate's products and services can be found at www.ultimatesoftware.com. About Hellman & Friedman Hellman & Friedman (H&F) is a preeminent global private equity firm with a distinctive investment approach focused on large-scale equity investments in high-quality growth businesses. H&F seeks to partner with world-class management teams where its deep sector expertise, long-term orientation, and collaborative partnership approach enable companies to flourish. H&F targets outstanding businesses in select sectors including software & technology, financial services, healthcare, retail & consumer, and other business services. Since its founding in 1984, H&F has raised over $50 billion of committed capital, invested in over 90 companies, and is currently investing its ninth fund, with $16.5 billion of committed capital. Learn more about H&F's defining investment philosophy and approach to sustainable outcomes at www.hf.com. About Blackstone Blackstone is one of the world's leading investment firms. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our asset management businesses, with $571 billion in assets under management, include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow Blackstone on Twitter (News - Alert) @Blackstone. About GIC GIC is a leading global investment firm established in 1981 to manage Singapore's foreign reserves. As a disciplined long-term value investor, GIC is uniquely positioned for investments across a wide range of asset classes, including equities, fixed income, private equity, real estate and infrastructure. GIC has investments in over 40 countries. Headquartered in Singapore, GIC employs over 1,500 people across 10 offices in key financial cities worldwide. For more information on GIC, please visit www.gic.com.sg or LinkedIn. About CPP Investments Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) is a professional investment management organization that invests the funds not needed by the Canada Pension Plan (CPP) to pay current benefits in the best interests of 20 million contributors and beneficiaries. In order to build diversified portfolios of assets, investments in public equities, private equities, real estate, infrastructure and fixed income instruments are made by CPP Investments. Headquartered in Toronto, with offices in Hong Kong, London, Luxembourg, Mumbai, New York City, San Francisco, Sao Paulo and Sydney, CPP Investments is governed and managed independently of the Canada Pension Plan and at arm's length from governments. At December 31, 2019, the CPP Fund totalled $420.4 billion. For more information about CPP Investments, please visit www.cppinvestments.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. About JMI Equity JMI Equity is a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software companies. Founded in 1992, JMI has invested in over 145 businesses in its target markets, successfully completed over 95 exits and raised more than $4 billion of committed capital. JMI partners with exceptional management teams to help build their companies into industry leaders. For more information visit jmi.com. 2020 Kronos Incorporated and Ultimate Software. All rights reserved. Kronos and the Kronos logo are registered trademarks and Workforce Innovation That Works is a trademark of Kronos Incorporated or a related company. See a complete list of Kronos trademarks. UltiPro is a registered trademark of The Ultimate Software Group, Inc. All other trademarks, if any, are property of their respective owners. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005662/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office A 25-year-old man was booked on suspicion of murder on Wednesday in connection with a woman found dead Tuesday at a San Jose rental home, officials said. Ryoichi Fuseya accompanied by his attorney turned himself in around 11:45 a.m. at the Santa Clara County Sheriffs Office, according to a news release from the office. Detectives questioned him and booked him in the Main Jail in San Jose. With the Green Party being courted as potential coalition partners, could Catherine Martin and Francis Noel Duffy be the Dail's next power couple? "We're just a couple," Ms Martin says, with Mr Duffy chipping in: "She's the boss." The married pair were both elected in neighbouring constituencies earlier this month. Green Party deputy leader Ms Martin is a second-term TD in Dublin Rathdown and Mr Duffy a new entrant to the Dail for Dublin South-West. They first met as teenagers in their native Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan but, fittingly, reconnected at a count centre during the 1999 local elections, when Ms Martin's brother Vincent was elected as an Independent while Mr Duffy's father Eugene, another Independent, was unsuccessful. Ms Martin joked that due to the political rivalries they had to keep their relationship quiet. Ms Martin, a teacher, and Mr Duffy, a lecturer in architecture, married in 2003 and joined the Green Party after the birth of their first child Turlough (13). They have two other children, Tadhg (11) and Stella (9). Expand Close Power couple: Francis Noel Duffy and Catherine Martin at Leinster House yesterday. Picture: Mark Condren / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Power couple: Francis Noel Duffy and Catherine Martin at Leinster House yesterday. Picture: Mark Condren Ms Martin said of their decision to join the Greens that it was an environmental crusade. "When you hold your baby in your arms, you're thinking how to protect that child," she said. The pair were elected to county councils in Dublin in 2014 and Ms Martin has been in the Dail since 2016. Sacred Ms Martin said family life has been a "balancing act" with both parents working as elected representatives and Mr Duffy said the couple make sure there is time for the children - weekends are said to be "sacred". Ms Martin quickly made a mark in the Dail. Her maiden speech was an impassioned call for Fine Gael and Fianna Fail to end what she called a "political charade" 47 days into government formation talks in 2016. "I don't want to see that repeated," she said and urged the other parties to "get talking". But both say the Green Party is prepared to walk away from talks if the parties can't agree a green agenda. "We did before," she said. Mr Duffy said: "If you're given a mandate and you can't implement it then you're being disloyal to your electorate that voted for you." Ever since Donald Trump won, Democrats have surged in the suburbs. From Delaware and Chester Counties to the Lehigh Valley to bedroom communities outside Pittsburgh, and in suburbs of Detroit, Milwaukee, and Washington, Democrats have racked up wins in previously hostile territory, helped by affluent, college educated voters who have recoiled from the president. But now, as self-described democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders roars ahead in the presidential primary, winning Nevadas caucuses Saturday to establish himself as the clear Democratic front-runner, some party officials in Pennsylvania and New Jersey worry that if he becomes the nominee, he could cost them hard-won gains. Sanders argues his revolutionary zeal can energize previously disengaged voters among the young, people of color, and the white working class. But that approach runs counter to the get-things-done messages that helped moderate Democrats such as Chester Countys Chrissy Houlahan and South Jerseys Andy Kim flip 40 Republican congressional seats in 2018 to take control of the U.S. House. Moderate approaches have also driven wins in state legislative, county commissioner, and even prothonotary races. Right now Chester County tends to be more in the moderate position, said Dick Bingham, chairman of the countys Democratic Party. "We just barely turned blue, so were still very much in that kind of middle of the political spectrum range. Republicans still outnumber Democrats there, so independents and GOP crossover voters have made the difference in Democratic victories, Bingham said. Bingham, like other Democratic leaders interviewed, didnt directly criticize Sanders, and predicted Democrats will unite around their partys eventual nominee, no matter who it is. But party leaders did openly worry the Vermont senator could repel swing voters who can tilt tight races for Congress and the state legislature. Montgomery County is home to many moderate Republicans, and I hear from them with some regularity that they are interested in having a different president," said Val Arkoosh, a Democratic county commissioner there. "But they do have concerns over some of the more deeply progressive policies that are being espoused by Senator Sanders, so I think it could affect turnout from people who wouldnt necessarily always vote Democratic. Endorsements from swing-district lawmakers in the region tell the story: They have all sided with centrists in the primary. Houlahan and Rep. Conor Lamb, from outside Pittsburgh, support Joe Biden. Kim, of Burlington County, backs Pete Buttigieg. Farther north in New Jersey, Rep. Tom Malinowski endorsed Biden, and Rep. Mikie Sherrill sided with Mike Bloomberg. All of them won GOP-held battlegrounds in 2018, and several could face difficult fights to hang on to those seats. Lamb forcefully criticized Sanders plan to ban fracking in a recent tweet aimed at the candidate and one of his top supporters, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.). In the most important election of our lives, Sen. @BernieSanders & Rep. @AOC are celebrating a bill that would eliminate thousands of good union jobs in #PA17 & across PA a state we need to win, Lamb wrote Feb. 14. What are we doing? We are Democrats. Jobs come first. Other Democrats in swing seats elsewhere in the country have been even more explicit in criticizing Sanders and worrying he could cost Democrats the House. On Thursday, another New Jerseyan in a competitive district, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, endorsed Bloomberg and specifically cited the down-ballot impact of the partys presidential nominee. "Democrats need a candidate at the top of the ticket who can win, Gottheimer said in a statement that denounced an all-or-nothing extremist approach to governing. With so much at stake for Democrats up and down the ballot, we must unite behind a candidate who can appeal to voters across the spectrum, he added. No House member who flipped a Republican district has endorsed Sanders. But one of his national cochairs, Rep. Ro Khanna, of California, grew up in Bucks County and argued that Sanders message can win in Pennsylvania. Sanders message of health care for all, a living wage, and child care will resonate with many in Bucks County who want a better life for the working class and middle class, Khanna said. Sanders will be able to get record turnout. And members of Congress can tailor their message to fit their district. No one needs to run as a Sanders clone. Democrats, after all, saw that suburban gains werent enough to beat Trump in 2016, not as other parts of the state swung away from the party. So far, Sanders message is working in the primary. He raced to a virtual tie for first place in Iowa and an outright win in New Hampshire, the first two states to vote, before dominating in Nevada on Saturday. He has surged to the top of national polls. Numerous surveys show him running ahead of or close to Trump and increasing his support among nonwhite voters, critical in the Democratic primary. Young voters overwhelmingly favor him. And after Trumps win in 2016, supporters say voters are hungering for an alternative president who colors outside the normal political lines. READ MORE: Mike Bloomberg is getting a serious look from suburban Democrats who just want to beat Trump But many vulnerable Democrats are still wary of being tied to Sanders. Kathy Harrington, first vice chair of the Lehigh County Democratic Party, said one local official in a tough 2020 race has said that hed avoid carrying Sanders literature when knocking on doors in conservative areas. Harringtons son, who is 29, is in love with Bernie Sanders" and believes hes the only person whos going to be able to win. But, she added, Im in the car with someone right now who said she wouldnt vote for Bernie Sanders even though shes a Democrat. Shes making a gag noise right now. A national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Tuesday captured the divide. More registered voters were enthusiastic about Sanders, 16%, than about any other Democrat. But 44% were very uncomfortable with him, also the highest for any Democrat. And while Sanders had a double-digit national lead over his Democratic rivals, the same survey found that 67% of voters had reservations or felt very uncomfortable with a socialist candidate, the worst result of any attribute tested. Sanders, an independent, identifies as a democratic socialist. In Pennsylvania, Sanders is viewed unfavorably by 52% of registered voters, the worst of any Democratic candidate, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday (though Biden was close, at 51%). The anxiety among center-left Democrats in many ways mirrors the tension swing-district Republicans felt in 2016, when Trump defied party insiders and became the GOP nominee. Republicans in closely divided districts walked a tightrope. Some said they would support their partys nominee. Others vowed to write in alternatives. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey waited until hours before the polls closed to announce he would, indeed, vote for Trump. Despite predictions of doom, however, Trump won, and so did the swing-district Republicans around Philadelphia though two years later most of them would retire or be wiped out. Sanders supporters say the best path to victory is to generate a growing base of voters who can match the enthusiasm Trump draws. While swing-district Democrats emphasize cooperation and practicality, Sanders promises sweeping changes to health care and major parts of the American economy. In order to beat Donald Trump, Democrats will need to inspire a mass movement of working-class voters from all backgrounds and all corners of this nation," said Rosemary Boeglin, a Sanders campaign spokesperson. "His ability to expand the electorate by bringing in people who have been left out of the political process will drive the high voter turnout we need in the general election ... [and] will reverberate to the benefit of progressive candidates up and down the ballot. But as Trump has also demonstrated, rousing supporters passions can also fire up opponents and turn off swing voters. Moderates who dislike Trump wont suddenly return to the GOP, said Josh Novotney, a Republican lobbyist in Philadelphia. But Novotney said they might stay home if Sanders is atop the Democratic ticket: Its not too difficult to brand someone a socialist when they put it next to their name. For the past few weeks, Pakistani doctoral student Muhammad Sultan Irshad has been writing his research articles in the international dormitory of Hubei University, Wuhan. He came to China to pursue his doctoral study in September last year. After the COVID-19 broke out, he stayed in Wuhan, the epicenter of the epidemic, along with hundreds of his Pakistani compatriots. "I was doing an experiment in my lab and then a very kind staff member of my school told me about the virus. I was surprised by the sense of responsibility of the Chinese people who could behave like one unit in a very short period of time," Sultan told China.org.cn. "It is an unfortunate and disturbing event. The outbreak of this virus has cost precious human lives," Sultan said. "Every crisis is a check on the resilience of a nation. I chose to stay in Wuhan with an open heart and China has since proved its worth and mettle." Wuhan city is still in lockdown in an attempt to curb coronavirus transmissions. Though it has caused inconvenience, Sultan felt safe and well cared for in his university. "Hubei University is equipped with all the required necessities. Our university management provides us food and a service to buy things. I cook myself," Sultan said. "We are highly optimistic and stand firm with the Chinese nation and we strongly believe in our university management." Since the founding of relations China and Pakistan have enjoyed a close relationship and the virus has been a chance to exemplify that. So far, the Pakistani government has reportedly sent 300,000 medical masks, 800 hazmat suits and 6,800 pairs of gloves to China. "Pakistan stands with the people & govt of China in their difficult & trying time and it will always stand by them," Pakistan's Prime Minister Imran Khan tweeted on Feb. 12. "We will be extending every material & moral support to China just as China has always stood by us during all our times of trial and tribulation." Though he misses his family, Sultan told his parents that he would still stay put. He recalled how he comforted his mother and reassured her by telling that he was taken good care of. She responded by telling him she was proud that he was standing firm with his "iron brother." According to the Chinese embassy in Pakistan on Feb. 12, three Pakistani citizens affected by novel coronavirus in China have been cured and discharged from hospitals in Guangzhou and Shenzhen of Guangdong province. Sultan has been following the news and commented that, "the response to the virus sends a very clear message to the world: believe in the Chinese government. I also strongly believe in the Chinese people due to their tremendous positivity, self-esteem, dignity, responsibility, and honesty." "The world witnessed the efforts of the great Chinese nation. The way it has managed and controlled the outbreak is unprecedented." He said that two people had left a deep impression on him: Dr. Li Wenliang and nurse Wu Yaling who stayed on the job after hearing devastating news of her mother's death. "We should be thankful to these unbreakable people, especially doctors, nurses, engineers, military and educational institutions." While in quarantine, Sultan has spent his time conducting his research. He said that the quarantine was a "chance to do something for yourself without any disturbance or distraction." When asked about what Sultan wanted to do after the epidemic subsides, he said, "I will go first to my lab and do the experiment I have designed. And one more thing, I will sing for the Wuhan people." He wrote a poem to extend his good wishes to Wuhan. O My Glorious Wuhan Sure, you will get well soon! May your Hanjie and Jianghan streets get rush again! May your people be busy again! O My glorious Wuhan! Sure, you will get well soon! May the cherry blossom parks' birds chirp soon! May the plum and metasequoia blossom at noon! O My glorious Wuhan! Sure, you will get well soon! May East Lake water flow with happy noise! May lonely ducks sing songs in beautiful voices! O My glorious Wuhan! Sultan, my Wuhan will get well soon! Mexico City mayor says two suspects, who are reported to be a couple, were detained in a town in the state of Mexico. Authorities in Mexico have arrested suspects in the killing of a seven-year-old girl whose murder rocked the capital with protests, Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said. The body of Fatima Cecilia Aldrighetti was discovered over the weekend in a plastic rubbish bag, sparking outrage over growing violence against women in Mexico. The alleged perpetrators of the femicide of the minor Fatima Cecilia were arrested in a town in the state of Mexico, Sheinbaum said Wednesday on Twitter. Sheinbaum had earlier said that the two suspects are apparently a couple and that witnesses told investigators the pair had abandoned their rented home in a southern neighbourhood of the capital on Saturday, the day before the girls body was discovered. Authorities searched the house on Tuesday night and found clothing and other items belonging to the girl. Sheinbaum also said the woman was known to the girls family. The previous day, Aldrighettis grandfather told The Associated Press news agency that he did not recognise a police sketch of the female suspect, but authorities on Wednesday released photographs of both suspects. Aldrighetti, who was buried on Tuesday by grieving family members, friends and neighbours, was seen on surveillance video leaving her school on February 11 with a woman who was not her mother. That day her mother was about 15 to 20 minutes late in picking her up, according to family members. The killing sparked outrage over growing violence against women in Mexico [Edgard Garrido/Reuters] In Mexico City, grade-school students often walk out of school after classes to meet parents waiting on the sidewalks, but there have been few controls to ensure someone is there to meet them. The girls grandfather and others have criticised the school for turning Aldrighetti out onto the street when classes were done for the day and for not calling police to come get her when there was no parent present to pick her out. Children who are not picked up are supposed to be taken to a prosecutors facility in the central neighbourhood of Doctores. It can take an hour or more to get there from outlying neighbourhoods, especially when the sprawling capitals notorious traffic is at its peak. Outrage over recent killings With the death of Aldrighetti, officials have said they plan to have prosecutors offices around the city care for children who are not picked up until their parents are able to claim them. Sheinbam said officials also plan to bolster protocols for identifying people who pick kids up from school, accelerate deployment of security cameras and have uniformed workers on hand for security at drop-off and pick-up hours. City prosecutors said the arrest warrants would be on charges of kidnapping with intent to cause harm. More charges such as for murder could be added later. Authorities lost a full day in searching for Aldrighetti because they waited for a formal missing persons case file to be opened. Sheinbaum said officials were reviewing the timeline of response from when the girl was first reported missing. The abduction and killing of the seven-year-old came just two days after Ingrid Escamilla, a young Mexico City resident, was allegedly murdered by a boyfriend. The man, who has been arrested and purportedly confessed to killing Escamilla with a knife, mutilated her body and flushed part of her corpse into the sewer. Outrage grew after local media published horrific photos of the skinned corpse, apparently leaked by city police officers. The killings have proved a politically difficult issue for President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who said protests over the killings were an attempt to distract attention from his social programmes. Last week, Lopez Obrador showed little patience for those who questioned him about the governments commitment to fighting violence against women. This issue has been manipulated a lot in the media, the president said on Monday, adding, I dont want the issue just to be womens killings. In the wake of the protests, Mexicos lower house of congress has proposed toughening prison sentences for the murder of women and sexual abuse of minors. In heavily equipped, large and often complex manufacturing facilities, instrumenting assets to track an optimize them is non-trivial. In fact, implementing connected systems designed to improve the efficiency and flow inside factories or outdoors in harsh conditions, including on large farms or construction sites, has been so difficult in the early days of Industrial IoT (IIoT) that many projects have been abandoned as simply too hard to make work. WISER Systems, a real-time asset tracking company, headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina, is out to change that and have been succeeding, according to their team, using their Redundant Radio Localization and Tracking (RRLT) technology for indoor-outdoor positioning at industrial scale. The company serves customers with autonomous locating needs in complex environments across industries, including Aerospace, Retail, Oil and Gas, Automotive, Manufacturing, Warehousing / Logistics, Government, and the U.S. Military. Last week at IoT Evolution Expo, Logan Maxwell, Solutions Engineer at WISER, demonstrated the companys Locator system, which Maxwell explained is different in that it operates without a direct line-of-sight between antennas and tracker tags. This helps make our installations more flexible and affordable. This is especially important for manufacturing environments where line-of-sight requirements could add huge numbers of devicesand huge costs as a consequence. Weve taken this even a step further in the latest version of our software by implementing a GPS-staking feature that allows continuous global visibility even in settings like factories where GPS doesnt work accurately. Maxwell explained that every manufacturer understands the costs and the headache of losing critical assets, and some have been burned when trying to implement cumbersome manual processes to prevent asset loss. We help these manufacturers lower downtime and eliminate inefficiencies through automation of manual processes like scanning, data entry, and asset location, Maxwell said. We also provide quantification of movement of tagged assets so that manufacturers can optimize their processes with real data from their own floor. Since nearly every factory involves hundreds or thousands of moving parts, its easy to find examples where they can save time, improve operations, bolster worker safety, and cut down on unneeded costs, Maxwell said. Hollywood makes it look like this kind of real-time location system (RTLS) is easy, he continued. The fact is, this is actually a very young industry, and its challenging to deliver real-time location data. On the flip side, RTLS end-users who have worked with these technologies early onsay 20 years agohave often seen more system failures than successes, so theyre sometimes dubious that location systems will ever work. However, even with only a few years of actual real-time location and asset tracking, manufacturers are finding huge benefits from technologies like WISERs. Maxwell shared an example where one of their customers was losing nearly 100 technician work hours each month, just checking tools in or out or looking for tools that had been misplaced. This customer also had to pause quite a few operations if a tool went missing because there was a high risk of tools being left in areas that could cause damage and even life-threatening accidents, Maxwell said. With a little work, though, we were able to eliminate check-in and check-out paperwork and show a point-by-point of where any such tool was at any time. The company has also emphasized simplicity for customers, with an interface that allows customers to adjust the system without bringing an electrician or engineer on-site, or flying a technical expert in. Weve refined the solution so much that our customers can fine-tune the system themselves, often getting tracking performance even beyond what we expected. We have also had great success with brownfield implementations meaning we can help our customers leverage their existing infrastructure, which is a huge advantage when validating the system. To date, the company has received both Phase I and II Small Business Innovation and Research grants from the United States Department of Agriculture, as well as North Carolina State Universitys prestigious Daugherty Endowment for Entrepreneurship. WISER won 1st place in the Industrial Internet of Things category at IoT World 2017, Phase I, II, and III awards in the U.S. Armys inaugural Expeditionary Technology Search (2018) and was a top 10 finalist in NASAs global iTech competition (2019). The company also participates in the Chevron Technology Ventures Catalyst Program. Edited by Ken Briodagh She quickly worked her way up the ladder in the drinks world to become, at age 33, the lead distiller for one of Americas oldest and most renowned whiskey brands. A little more than a year later, Central New York native Nicole Austin has earned national attention with a new version of the classic George Dickel Tennessee Whisky. Austin put her own stamp on a Dickel Bottled in Bond whiskey released last year. It was recently named Whisky Advocate magazines Whisky of the Year -- beating out new spirits from such distillers as Kentuckys Four Roses and Scotlands Dewars. (Note: Whiskey is the preferred spelling in the U.S., while Dickel -- and Whisky Advocate -- follow the Scottish spelling of whisky without the e.) At the start of 2019, a Tennessee whiskey would have been considered a long shot to be named Whisky Advocates Whisky of the Year, the magazines Jeffery Lindenmuth wrote in the article about the ranking. But this Dickel came barreling from behind with the poise and power to impress our blind tasting panel. Its value is umatched. Lindenmuth and Whisky Advocate gave a lot of the credit to Austin, who grew up in Camillus before moving to Manlius and graduating from Fayetteville-Manlius High School. Whisky Advocate magazine named this George Dickel Bottled in Bond Tenseseee Whisky as its Whisky of the Year. CNY native Nicole Austin in Dickel's general manager and distiller.Courtesy of Anne Austin As recently as 2016, Dickel seemed to be reeling, following the departure of two longtime distillers, Lindenmuth wrote. In 2018, 33 year old Nicole Austin, a chemical engineering graduate who got her start with New York craft distiller Kings County Distillery, took over as general manager and distiller. Austin set about cherry picking the warehouses for exceptional barrels. She found the winning whiskey in a barrel distilled in 2005. Her sense of good whiskey, in other words, led her to select the batch that became last years Dickel Bottled in Bond. (Bottled in Bond is a designation that means the whiskey was distilled at one distillery during one distilling season -- not blended with others. It also must be aged four years in a bonded warehouse and bottled at 100 proof -- 50% alcohol). The mouthwatering peanut aromas evoke memories of cracking open a school lunchbox while the palate delivers abundant fruit: orange marmalade and caramel apple. Best of all, Lindenmuth wrote, the 100-proof whiskey is just $36 a bottle. After graduating from F-M, Nicole Austin got a degree in chemical engineering from Manhattan College and went to work in the not-so-glamorous wastewater treatment industry in the New York City area. There she discovered whiskey distilling, in which she could use her chemical engineering skills. After her start at Kings County Distillery in Brooklyn, she went to Ireland for a while to work for the famous Tullamore Dew brand. In 2018, she landed at Dickel. Technically, she is the general manager and distiller for Dickels immediate parent company, Cascade Hollow Distilling near Tullahoma, Tenn. Cascade Hollow, in turn, is owned by the international drinks company Diageo. Remarkably, Austin is just one of two major Central New York connections to the George Dickel brand. The other is the Auburn bar A.T. Walley. It is the top on-premises (bar) account for Dickel sales in the United States. It buys Dickel whiskey by the barrel, selling bottles to regular customers to keep behind the bar. Read more: How a CNY woman came to run a legendary U.S. distillery Auburn, N.Y. bar is nations No. 1 outlet for Dickel whiskey Don Cazentre writes about craft beer, wine, spirits and beverages for NYup.com, syracuse.com and The Post-Standard. Reach him at dcazentre@nyup.com, or follow him at NYup.com, on Twitter or Facebook. Thanks for visiting Syracuse.com. Quality local journalism has never been more important, and your subscription matters. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work. Theres no shortage of serious stuff on the California ballot on March 3: a presidential primary, $15 billion worth of school bonds, and a flood of local candidate and tax measures dealing with trains, parks and child care. But for millions of voters, its not enough to get them to the polls. San Rafael Assemblyman Marc Levine wants to answer this apathy by making voting mandatory. Citizens who sign up to vote would be obliged to hand in a ballot, marked up or not. Hes holding off on a penalizing those who ignore the plan. The idea comes loaded with assumptions worth challenging. Voting should not be a requirement that needs to be checked off. Free speech and personal liberty protect citizens from a forced march to the voting booth. Required participation cheapens the idea of civic duty built on thought and commitment. Theres a practical concern, too. If would-be voters know theyll be made to cast a ballot, they may not sign up, the very opposite of the measures intention. Also, once more voters are roped in, Californias near 2-to-1 Democratic registration would likely lock in the majority party. Adios, GOP. Let Levine make his arguments when the bill, AB2070, comes up for hearings this spring. For now, he notes that jury duty is mandatory and voting should be as well. Democracy is not a spectator sport it requires the active participation of all its citizens he says. Compulsory voting would spur wider knowledge of political issues and lessen the impact of single-issue voting blocs, other supporters claim. Such beliefs have support in 22 countries that have forms of mandatory voting, among them Australia, Belgium and Brazil. Enforcement varies from a fine to loss of voting rights in future years. Levines idea touches on the changing nature of voting in this state. Some 20 million people here are registered to vote, with 4 million more eligible but not signed up. That level of registration is the highest in years. The November 2018 election drew a 64.5% turnout, another record. Its never been easier to sign up in California via drivers license renewal and widespread registration efforts. Nearly two thirds of state ballots are cast by mail, making a trek to a precinct garage or school gym a thing of the past. If Levines effort emphasizes anything, its the importance of voting. Republicans elsewhere in the country are working hard to limit turnout by disqualifying infrequent voters, gerrymandering electoral districts and imposing voter ID measures. In 2018, Florida gave voting rights to felons who served their time, but GOP officeholders are stalling that change. Levines bringing up an important topic. But voting should be an honor and prize, not a legal mandate. This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters. Todays event vividly illustrates how consistent, equitable state funding helps create programs and jobs that can change student lives and contribute to Arizonas economy, said President Dr. Corr of Arizona Western College. Arizona Community Colleges rallied at the State Capitol yesterday, showcasing their programs, students and the staggering economic benefits they deliver to Arizona. They converged to thank legislators and Governor Ducey for the one-time funding from last year and to urge them to continue to invest in Arizona Community Colleges. We represent 10 college districts and nearly 300,000 students, almost double the number of public universities, said President Haynie of Eastern Arizona College Our financial impact is staggering with graduates earning $11B in increased wages over their working lives, equating to 5.6% of the total gross state product. The College Presidents and Chancellors from around the state kicked off the event by highlighting how the 2019/20 funds are being put to good use. For example, Pima Community College shared how it is expanding its Aviation Technology Center for more classrooms, labs, and a second commercial jet hangar, helping create 450+ jobs with a total economic impact of $225.5M over the next five years. Cochise College, a rural educational hub in southern Arizona, is constructing a new automotive technology building on its Sierra Vista Campus and a new agricultural greenhouse on the Douglas Campus. With the nursing shortage crisis, The Maricopa Community Colleges is creating a state-of-the-art nursing program with funding to cover program development, equipment, and facility expansion at Gateway and Paradise Valley Community Colleges. Illustrating the vital work of the colleges, Dr. Jackie Elliot, President of Central Arizona College said, We provide the most important and accessible educational entry point for traditionally underserved students and are the number one gateway to higher education. At the event, students, faculty and staff from every corner of the state proudly presented their programs on the Capitol lawn from Robotics at Yavapai Community College to Virtual Welding at Mohave Community College. Northland Pioneer College put on a law enforcement stun gun presentation, and their fire science department showed how backdrafts can be deadly if not correctly assessed. Coconino Community College brought in their program dog to illustrate the need for more veterinarian techs, and Eastern Arizona College kept the mood lively with their marching band. Estrella Community College exhibited Cyber Security, and Mesa Community College demonstrated Automated Technology. The scene was dynamic and colorful with even more exhibits from colleges across the state. And of course, ten community college mascots from a fighting Gila Monster to Andale the Bull were also there entertaining the crowd. Nearly 600 people toured the exhibits, including legislators, who were reminded that the programs they help fund make students career-ready in high-demand jobs with skills needed by todays employers. Several students toured the chamber with legislators and told them what Arizona Community Colleges means to them and how important the funding is. The tagline from the event was #FundWhatWorks. Throughout the day, the displays served as a reminder that the jobs of the future demand a highly educated and skilled workforce a workforce produced by Arizona Community Colleges. Todays event vividly illustrates how consistent, equitable state funding helps create programs and jobs that can change student lives and contribute to Arizonas economy, said President Dr. Corr of Arizona Western College. We want to continue to collaborate with the legislators and Governor Ducey to Fund What Works. About Arizona Community Colleges: With 10 college districts and nearly 300,000 students, the Arizona Community Colleges are the backbone of Arizona's higher educational system, driving the economic engine and delivering an educated citizenry to meet the most in-demand jobs of today and the complexities of tomorrow. Connected through shared goals of access and completion, Arizona Community Colleges deliver a high-quality, low-cost education, prepare students of all ages across the state to be career-ready and enable students for pathways to universities. Learn more at http://www.arizonacommunitycolleges.org. North Dakota regulators on Wednesday green-lighted the proposed expansion of the Dakota Access Pipeline, which involves building a pump station in Emmons County to help push up to twice as much oil through the line every day. Energy Transfer plans to begin construction on the facility this spring following the PSCs unanimous decision to grant the company an amended permit for the project. The company said its pleased with the vote, and added in a statement that the decision brings us another step closer to being able to optimize the existing pipeline to safely transport up to 1.1 million barrels of crude oil per day, to more efficiently accommodate the increasing market demand for Bakken crude oil. The PSCs approval could be challenged in court by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, which still seeks to shut the pipeline down through a federal lawsuit it filed over the project when it was under construction in 2016. The tribe also intervened in the expansion case before the PSC. Standing Rock Chairman Mike Faith said he wasnt surprised by the vote but was very disappointed to hear todays outcome. The tribe is examining its options for legal recourse, he said. Energy Transfer still seeks approvals from regulators in Iowa and Illinois to complete its expansion plans, which include putting in a total of three pump stations along the 1,200-mile line and making upgrades to boost the horsepower of other pumping facilities. With its planned capacity increase, the pipeline would have the ability to take three-quarters of all oil produced in North Dakota to market, transporting it closer to refineries in other states or toward ships that would carry it overseas. PSC weighs tribes concerns Standing Rock has raised concerns about the risk of a pipeline spill throughout the course of the PSC proceedings on the expansion case, including at a 15-hour hearing in Linton last November. Commissioners maintain that many of the issues raised by the tribe fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government, specifically the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. Your concerns were heard, and they are reflected in this permit and addressed by the many ongoing regulatory processes that are in place, Commissioner Julie Fedorchak said Wednesday. She addressed several of the main issues brought up by the tribe, such as the worst-case spill scenario under the expansion. Energy Transfer said the potential worst-case spill would occur from a storage tank at the pump station. Federal regulations require that the pipeline company have resources available to respond to their largest tank spilling any place along the line, not just at the location where that could happen, Fedorchak said. She also touched on surge, which is a sudden shift in a pipelines pressure triggered by a significant change in flow, such as a valve inadvertently closing. As discussed in the hearing, surges are very, very rare, Fedorchak said. That said, they are serious and so there are significant regulations guiding them. She cited a federal rule that prohibits the pressure during surges from exceeding 110% of the pipelines maximum operating pressure. Dakota Access has committed to managing surge so as not to exceed 105% of the operating pressure limit on the pipeline system, she said. Theyre operating it and protecting it 5% tighter than the federal requirements. She also pointed to other measures the company has taken, including agreeing to follow the recommendations of an expert consultant that Energy Transfer hired to address surge potential. A document with the consultant's analysis is among a handful of spill-related documents that Standing Rock pushed the PSC to require Energy Transfer to disclose publicly. At a meeting last month, commissioners were hesitant to grant that request, not wanting to overstep on safety matters they say fall to federal regulators. Standing Rock then made one more attempt to get Energy Transfer to disclose the documents, which include information the tribe wanted to review about the pipeline's pressure and the company's own analysis of the severity of potential spills. The tribe sought permission to issue a subpoena if the commission did not act itself, arguing that the information is squarely relevant to the PSCs permitting decision. Commissioners are tasked with determining whether a project will produce minimal adverse effects to the environment and residents. The PSC on Wednesday effectively rejected the tribes request in another unanimous vote. Tim Purdon, an attorney for the tribe, said Standing Rock brought nationally recognized pipeline experts to the commission during the November hearing to identify specific red flags and press for information that would help address those red flags, and the PSC chose not to act on that. "Imagine what this process looks like if the tribe doesnt intervene, doesn't come forward with these experts?" he said. "Who raises that? Who is in a position to independently verify what the company is saying? The tribes contribution to this process cant be overstated." Fedorchak said the proper time to subpoena documents would have been on the front end, before the hearing, so that their contents could be discussed there. Energy Transfer maintains that the pipeline expansion would be safe and would not increase the risk of a spill. Rising oil production in the Bakken and increased demand for transportation prompted the company to propose boosting the lines capacity. North Dakota produces just under 1.5 million barrels per day of oil, which is more than a 400,000 barrel-per-day increase over when the Dakota Access Pipeline first started operating in June 2017. The PSCs two other commissioners also weighed in on the expansion. After one of the most extensive public hearings in commission history, to me its clear that this pipeline optimization project meets all of North Dakotas siting criteria and is in the best interest of our citizens, Commissioner Randy Christmann said. Having pipelines in place to transport oil helps to reduce the number of large trucks traveling roads, Commission Chairman Brian Kroshus said. It is the safest means of transporting crude oil, and crude oil is something that fuels our economy, it fuels our nation, he said. Whats next for pipeline, tribe The new Dakota Access pump station is slated to be built on 21 acres west of Linton. Energy Transfer estimates that construction of the $40 million facility will take eight to 10 months, which means that work at the site would wrap up around the end of 2020 or the beginning of 2021 if it starts this spring, as the company said it would Wednesday. Energy Transfer is free to build the Emmons County pump station now and does not need to wait to secure approvals for the expansion from other states, Fedorchak said. Its at their own risk, she said. If they dont get the other approvals, then their investment might be lost. The Illinois Commerce Commission has scheduled a hearing for early March. A decision from Iowa regulators is pending, as well. Energy Transfer has secured a permit from a South Dakota county where it plans to build another pump station, and state regulators there say the project does not require their approval. Standing Rock, meanwhile, is putting together an emergency response team in case the pipeline were to leak at its Missouri River crossing just north of the reservation. The tribe draws its water from the river. A major spill could affect the reservation for many, many years, said Faith, the tribal chairman. The tribe recently met with state emergency officials to hash out details for a collaboration on spill response training. The tribe and state plan to partner on a tabletop exercise, in which they would talk through spill scenarios, and they are eyeing July as a potential time to hold a mock spill response event to actually get on the river, Faith said. The tribe also has been in touch with several companies that specialize in oilfield spill response about coordinating efforts. Cleaning up a spill along the northern border of the reservation could be complicated, Faith said. The water level there fluctuates, and responders might have to deal with erosion and strong winds. You have to be prepared for the worst, Faith said. You have to have a good team together to try to contain that. Energy Transfer says it has systems in place to detect leaks quickly and shut down the pipeline should a spill occur. Reach Amy R. Sisk at 701-250-8252 or amy.sisk@bismarcktribune.com. Love 10 Funny 1 Wow 0 Sad 2 Angry 20 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee on Thursday wrote to Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the reduction of central funds to the state. "I write to you with deep concern regarding the steady reduction of central funds to our state and also the inordinate delay in the release of funds due to us, from the central government," Banerjee said. The Chief Minister also complained of irregular release of GST compensation to the state. Banerjee accused the Centre of denying West Bengal Rs 11,212 crore for the financial year 2019-20. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) JERUSALEM - Israel on Thursday called on Belgium to scrap this weekends annual Carnival parade after last years featured a float with anti-Semitic caricatures. The carnival in the industrial city of Aalst has its roots in the Middle Ages and often features satirical floats that take shots at local politicians and the wealthy. Belgium as a Western Democracy should be ashamed to allow such a vitriolic antisemitic display. I call upon the authorities there to condemn and ban this hateful parade in Aalst, Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz tweeted. Last years festivities featured one float depicting Jews with exaggerated features and side locks standing over bags of money. The caricatures recalled anti-Semitic tropes of the Middle Ages and Nazi Germany. The carnival had been listed as a UNESCO heritage event until last year, but Aalst renounced the distinction days before the U.N. cultural agency scrapped it over the anti-Semitic incident. Aalst Mayor Christoph DHaese said the Israeli foreign ministers call to cancel the festival was truly disproportional. I absolutely call on people to avoid these sensitive subjects he said in an interview with the VRT network. But that is something completely different than the ban which is called for here. Aalst is one of Europes most famous Carnivals and it is a celebration of unbridled, no-holds-barred humour and satire. Politicians, religious leaders and the rich and famous are relentlessly ridiculed during the three-day festival ahead of Roman Catholic Lent. UNESCO, Jewish groups and the European Union condemned last years float as anti-Semitic, with the EU saying it conjured up visions of the 1930s. Agriculture officials say no political representations were made in relation to an abandoned prosecution for alleged animal cruelty. Business Minister Heather Humphreys has also denied interfering after it emerged she passed on a letter about the case of a Co Monaghan farmer to the Department of Agriculture. The department last night insisted the decision to drop the prosecution of Brian Wright was made on the basis of the "full and individual circumstances of this case". It had been pursuing the case against Mr Wright, who faced charges relating to alleged breaches of animal welfare laws. Mr Wright (68), of Kilgorman, Newbliss, Co Monaghan, was previously fined for instances of animal cruelty. At the weekend, the Sunday Times reported Ms Humphreys delivered a letter relating to the case to the Department of Agriculture. A spokesperson for Ms Humphreys said that a constituent provided the minister with correspondence outlining "concerns" in relation to the case and asked her to pass it on. "She did not give any view on, or make any representations in support of, the correspondence. The minister did not interfere in the case," the spokesperson added. A statement from the department last night said no political representations were made with regard to the case. "The decision taken to withdraw the prosecution in this case was taken by relevant department officials having regard to the full and individual circumstances," it said. "Prosecutors are not legally compelled to pursue all prosecution cases to a final conclusion in the courts. "Occasionally, there may be instances where the facts of a case are such that proceeding with a prosecution may not be considered desirable, appropriate or justifiable." The statement added: "It is not possible to state matters further or to comment specifically on the case of Mr Wright as [the department] does not comment in detail on individual cases." He spends his spare time at prayer and ablutions, at the imams modest madrasa, and on his laptop, where he watches videos about jihadist martyrs, including one of his cousins. When the imam, Youssouf (Othmane Moumen), accuses Ines of apostasy for proposing an Arabic study group that would use secular texts, rather than the Quran Ahmed takes the condemnation literally, with horrifying results. The roots of Ahmeds zeal are not explained. The viewer, as usual with the Dardennes, is plunged into his reality and trusted to gather essential information on the fly. Ben Addi is a quiet, inexpressive performer, and his blankness places Ahmeds inner life firmly off limits. We can speculate that the soft-spoken, uncompromising Youssouf might have stepped into a void left by Ahmeds absent father, or about how the boy might have found relief from the torments of adolescence in strict religious observance. But to interpret Young Ahmed in those ways would be to mistake it for (or fault it for failing to be) a psychological case study. The plot may hinge on Ahmeds actions and motivations, but the films real drama revolves around a central moral and political conflict, between religious extremism and a humanist ethos that is more behavioral than doctrinal. Ahmeds narrow, austere, immature way of looking at the world is contrasted not with a rival set of beliefs, but with the patience of the people around him and the benevolence of the Belgian state. Ines treats him kindly, and so do the guards and social workers at the juvenile detention center where he is sent after he attacks her with a knife. His social worker (Olivier Bonnaud) and the owners of the farm where he goes on work assignments are friendly and respectful of his religion. The infidel world seems as dedicated to his well-being as he is to its destruction. You can probably stop wishing in that hand, now. The state's lawmakers have already filled the other one with a steaming pile of dung. Now it's time to make a decision: Do you accept what they've done and move on or set your inner ape free and lob that turd right back at them? Sens. Joseph Cervantes and Richard Martinez will find out soon enough when election time comes around. These days, Millennials and Gen-Xers are apparently ruthless when it comes to voting. According to the Pew Research Center, voters ages 18 to 53 outvoted their elders in 2018an increasing trend that researchers say will likely continue this year. Someone must have forgotten to tell Cervantes and Martinez that Millennials and Gen-Xers love their weed, because last week the two Democratic senators voted to table the recreational cannabis bill that's been making its way through the Legislature, helping their Republican colleagues virtually kill our chance of seeing cannabis legalized this session. Last week, SB 115, the Cannabis Regulation Act, was sent to die alone in the cornfield by the Senate Judiciary Committee after we saw it narrowly pass through the Public Affairs Committee earlier this month. Committee Chairman Cervantes immediately argued that there wasn't enough time to go over the bill, and said that it seemed to favor special interests. He also cited issues with the involvement of unions and individuals with criminal records. He apparently convinced Martinez to join him in his mad rush to piss off voters and suggested they squash the whole thing. The Judiciary Committee voted 6-4 to table the bill, with most members voting along party lines. Except for those wily Democrats Cervantes and Martinez, of course. Back in January, I pointed out that while three-quarters of New Mexicansof both parties, mind youreportedly support the legalization of recreational cannabis, state Republicans were taking a hard stand against SB 115 and could prove troublesome. The New Mexico GOP tweeted before the vote that a recreational cannabis market wouldn't be the economic windfall that Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishama supporter of the billwas promising. The governor has touted this bill as a means to raise revenue and jolt the New Mexico economy. Not true. It's unclear what the economic impact ... The account failed to produce any evidence supporting the statement, however. I expected the Republicans to buck the bill, but I definitely didn't expect any Dems to help them out. Maybe I should have. Following the vote, Gov. Lujan Grisham made a statement. Legalized recreational cannabis in New Mexico is inevitable, she wrote. The people of New Mexico have said they want it. A diversified state economy demands it. Poll after poll has demonstrated that New Mexicans want a 21st century economy and want cannabis to be part of it I am disappointed but not deterred by tonights committee motion We will keep working to get it done. And ultimately we will deliver thousands of careers for New Mexicans We will deliver justice to the victims of an overzealous war on low-level drugs. I asked Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis what he thought of the news. Davis was the head of the governor's Cannabis Working Group, which provided the recommendations that the bill was ultimately based on. Davis seemed hopeful. In just the first three weeks of the session, we've moved legalization farther than its ever been, he wrote in an email. As for me, I'll be doing my part by remembering exactly who shot this one down. Cervantes and Martinez: We're watching you. New Laws Cause Confusion A patient enrolled in the Colorado medical cannabis program was arrested for marijuana possession near Farmington, N.M. But he argued that the state's new reciprocity law allows him to possess cannabis. The deputy who arrested him is now being investigated by internal affairs. According to KRQE, Vinny Amato says he shouldn't have been arrested in the first place. I dont get why I was brought to jail over a petty misdemeanor that according to everything Im reading was legal to begin with, he said. Earlier this month, Amato was pulled over for speeding in San Juan County. He was returning from a jaunt to Colorado and was carrying 112 grams of flower that he'd purchased there because it's cheaper. Amato claims he told the officer that he wasn't breaking any laws. New Mexico reciprocates, he allegedly told the officer. And the cop was like 'I dont know what youre talking about,' Amato said. According to a new law that passed last year, patients enrolled in another state's medical cannabis program can possess, use and even purchase medical cannabis while in New Mexico. Nevertheless, Amato was arrested and spent the night in jail. He was released the next day but only under the condition that he not use cannabis. The San Juan County Sheriffs Office says Amatos complaint is now with internal affairs, and the confusion could stem from the lack of clarity in the law. The New Mexico Department of Health told reporters that while out-of-state patients can possess cannabis, they aren't allowed to transport it across state lines. This is not explicitly stated in the law, however. It seems like nobodys aware of the law. If theres that much gray area for them being misinformed, why am I taking the brunt end of it? Amato asked. It's unclear how this case will turn out, but investigators told Amato they'd stay in touch. There may be a solution on the horizon to combating superbug infections resistant to antibiotics. The tenacious bacteria and fungi sicken more than 2.8 million people and lead to more than 35,000 deaths in the United States each year. An international team of researchers has found that a combination of ingredients (acidified nitrite and ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) known as AB569 and developed by a University of Cincinnati scientist kills a bacteria (Pseudomonas aeruginosa), one of the most serious pathogens that exhibits multidrug resistance and virulence. Their findings are available online in the scholarly journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. "AB569 kills these pathogenic bacteria by targeting their DNA, RNA and protein biosynthesis as well as energy and iron metabolism at concentrations that do not harm human cells," explains Daniel Hassett, a professor in the UC Department of Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology. "These were tested in laboratory mice with humanized cells. Our data implicate that AB569 is a safe and effective means that could be applied to eradicate these superbugs." Pseudomonas aeruginosa was applied to the lungs of laboratory mice for five days. This pathogen in humans causes pulmonary infections in patients with cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and many other opportunistic infections. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is considered one of six ESKAPE pathogens, known by their acronym and considered among the most resistant and deadly to humans. The ESKAPE pathogens include Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter spp. These ESKAPE pathogens typically result in hospital-acquired infections leading to illness such as pneumonia and MRSA infections. Urinary tract infections that are resistant to antibiotics are also among illnesses caused by these organisms. "These superbugs have an ingenious mechanism of being able to resist traditional antibiotic therapies by a vast number of acquired strategies," explains Hassett, also the paper's senior author. "Antibiotics affect specific processes in the bacteria, but not all of them. AB569 affects multiple processes at once leaving the exposed bacteria simply overwhelmed." AB569 was patented in March 2018 in the United States by Hassett and initially was seen as a potential treatment for many antibiotic-resistant organisms that cause pulmonary infections in patients with cystic fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and many other opportunistic infections. In addition to tackling chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and cystic fibrosis, AB569 may also be effective in addressing infections related to severe burns, urinary tract disorders, endocarditis and diabetes, said Hassett. "Multidrug resistance, a trait of superbug bacteria, is one of the greatest threats to global public health," says Hassett. "It is usually caused by excessive drug usage or prescription, inappropriate and often compliance-related use of antimicrobials, overuse in the chicken, beef and pork industries and/or substandard pharmaceuticals." Hassett says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers antibiotic resistance to be among the most serious threats to human health because pathogens rapidly evolve new means to combat drug therapy leaving those who are susceptible at risk. "Superbugs typically are found in areas of the world where there is a high population density, thereby facilitating rapid spread of such organisms. People who have traveled to areas of the world with high rates of antibiotic resistant bacteria such as South Asia and the Middle East are more likely to carry superbugs," said Hassett. "This is why patients are often quarantined if they test positive for such organisms while epidemiologists are on their toes tracking a pathogen's spread." He said these superbugs may be naturally occurring but there are some things individuals can do daily to lessen exposure such as avoiding travel to destinations that report a high incidence of infection, washing hands religiously and if you feel ill and have been to place with an outbreak, notify a physician or appropriate health authority right away. ### Cameron McDaniel, a 2018 graduate of the doctoral program in the UC Department of Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology, is the paper's first author. McDaniel is also a former postdoctoral candidate in the UC College of Pharmacy. Hassett said a core group of researchers at UC also worked with colleagues at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and scientists from Canada and other universities across the United States. Other study co-authors in the UC Department of Molecular Genetics, Biochemistry and Microbiology are Warunya Panmanee, Andrew Paul, Seung-Hyun Ko, Amy Bogue and William Miller. Co-authors and researchers from Cincinnati Children's Hospital are Nupur Dasgupta, Joel Mortensen, Phillip Dexheimer, David Haslam and Bruce Aronow. Co-authors from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, are Geoffrey Winsor, Claire Bertelli and Fiona Brinksman. Other co-authors include Erin Gill and Robert Hancock, both of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada; Daniel Muruve, University of Calgary; Michael Schurr of the University of Colorado, Denver; Prateek Donagare and Thomas Meyer, both of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Gee Lau of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Marek Danilczuk and Malcolm D.E. Forbes, both of Bowling Green State University. Disclosures: Hassett is a stockholder and principal scientist at Arch Biopartners. AB569 is currently in a Phase 1 human trial at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center in healthy volunteers testing its safety and pharmacokinetic profile. Muruve is a co-founder and chief security officer for Arch Biopartners. AB569 has been licensed by the University of Cincinnati exclusively to Arch Biopartners, a Toronto-based publicly traded biotechnology company. February 2015 In an audio clip from his speech at the Aspen Institute, which circulated widely this month, Mr. Bloomberg said: Its controversial, but the first thing 95 percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25. Thats true in New York, its true in virtually every city in America, and thats where the real crime is. Youve got to get the guns out of the hands of the people that are getting killed. Kids think theyre going to get killed anyway because all their friends are getting killed, so they just dont have any long-term focus or anything. Its a joke to have a gun, its a joke to pull the trigger. He said other cities had higher murder rates than New York because they havent gone after scaring the kids to get guns out of them. A lot of people dont like the fact that thats what you do, but thats what stops this. Put those cops where the crime is, which means in minority neighborhoods. An unintended consequence is people say, Oh my God, you are arresting kids for marijuana, theyre all minorities. Yes, thats true. Why? Because we put all the cops in the minority neighborhoods. Yes, thats true. Why do we do it? Because thats where all the crime is. The first thing you can do for people is to stop them getting killed. We did a calculation on how many people who would have been dead if we hadnt brought down the murder rate and got the guns off the streets, and the way you get the guns out of the kids hands is to throw them against the wall and frisk them. Because then they say, I dont want to get caught, so they dont bring the gun. They still have a gun, but they leave it at home. September 2018 After a long stretch in which he didnt prominently comment on stop-and-frisk, Mr. Bloomberg confirmed in an interview with The New York Times (parts of which were published at the time) that he still believed it had been the right policy during his tenure. He did allow, though, that circumstances might be different now. We used it at a point in time where there were an awful lot of people killing each other, and it was a technique that we used which was supported by a lot of people who said, Look, we just got to stop this carnage no matter what. And based on that, weve evolved into using other techniques. But the murder rate came down dramatically, and what I look at is the number of people whose lives were saved by getting kids to not carry guns because they were afraid to be stopped. The New York City Police Department is very well managed and has stayed within the law. And I cant tell you every cop did everything perfectly, but I think it was a technique that was appropriate at the time. My job was to do everything I could to stop murder. When pressed on the fact that the crime rate kept falling after Bill de Blasio became mayor and abandoned stop-and-frisk, Mr. Bloomberg acknowledged the trend but said: Keep in mind, all of this stuff is built on what was done before. So you cant just say the techniques you would have after kids are afraid to carry guns are different than the techniques you would use if they were not afraid to carry guns. January 2019 During a question-and-answer session at the United States Naval Academy, a midshipman asked Mr. Bloomberg what he would say to the black and Latino communities affected by stop-and-frisk. Mr. Bloomberg said the police certainly did not pick somebody by race and added: We focused on keeping kids from going through the correctional system kids who walked around looking like they might have a gun, remove the gun from their pockets and stop it. The result of that was, over the years, the murder rate in New York City went from 650 a year to 300 a year when I left. It was a program which we had, and then when the number of guns we were confiscating started to fall and people left their guns at home, we tailed that off. October 2019 Just a month before he renounced stop-and-frisk, Mr. Bloomberg defended it in a Washington Post interview and argued that it had actually helped minority communities. First 5G-enabled smartphone in India, Realme X50 Pro is to launch simultaneously in India and Spain on February 24. The Global Launch event can also be watched live at 10:00 am on the official Realme Europe YouTube channel. Realme X50 Pro's launch event will take place in Delhi. Realme X50 Pro is said to be priced at Rs 50,000 approximately. The phone is set to be one of the first brands to unveil 5G enabled smartphone in India even though the "network is not available in the country", according to an official. The phone will feature a 90 Hz SUPER AMOLED Fullscreen display. The latest Realme smartphone will be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor. Realme X50 Pro will reportedly run on Android 10 and will be packed with 12GB RAM. The best processor is arriving from the future, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 5G which will be in the new #realmeX50Pro#realme5G Follow us live the 24/02/2020 at 9:30hrs (CET) - realme Europe (@realmeeurope) February 11, 2020 Realme 5G smartphone features a 65W SuperDart charge and a USB type-C charging port. According to the official Realme Twitter handle, this smartphone will feature a quad camera setup at the front. The camera setup will offer 20x zoom. Realme X50 Pro quad camera setup also features one 64MP camera. This smartphone by Realme also features a dual ultra-wide selfie camera. The new #realmeX50Pro has 6 reasons for you to look at every detail from a different angle. What's more? 20x Zoom on the #real5G smartphone. Launching India's first 5G smartphone at 2:30 PM, 24th Feb on our official channels. #real5G Head here: https://t.co/xQsEu3XJS3pic.twitter.com/kFW5rhooKB - realme (@realmemobiles) February 18, 2020 This smartphone will be available in two colours-Rust Red and Moss Green. Although the smartphone is being launched in February, it could be up for sale sometime later as the country doesn't have a 5G network infrastructure currently. TRAI is still working towards floating a paper among telcos to start a 5G spectrum auction process. According to media reports, 5G is unlikely to be commercially available till the next year. Also read: Poco X2 launch in India today; check out specifications, features, price Also read: Honor 9X Lite price, specifications appear on Pakistan retail site NEW YORK and LONDON and HONG KONG, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hazeltree, the leading provider of integrated treasury management and portfolio finance solutions, today announced the expansion of Hazeltree Collateral Manager to include Standard Initial Margin Model (SIMM) calculations in partnership with AcadiaSoft. This new partnership helps clients to meet their obligations under Phases 5 and 6 of the Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR). Under the new rules, derivatives trading relationships become increasingly complex, requiring both sides of each transaction to calculate daily Initial Margin (IM). Calculating bilateral margin under SIMM requires sophisticated risk, sensitivities and market data inputs across all covered trading with each respective counterparty. This initiative will provide the Hazeltree buy-side community with seamless margin calculations for their entire margin workflow, all in a single cloud solution. Hazeltree Collateral Manager helps optimize collateral usage, minimize operational risks, strengthen controls and enhance treasury ROI through a streamlined, automated OTC collateral management process. By partnering with Hazeltree, were able to offer the buy-side community a state-of-the-art integrated solution that both helps our clients meet their UMR obligations and takes another step toward standardization across the industry. The more consistency we can bring to these services, the more efficient well make the entire margin process for our clients, said Fred Dassori, Head of Strategic Development at AcadiaSoft. Hazeltree supports all aspects of the collateral management processes, ensuring our clients are fully equipped to meet the upcoming phases of UMR, said Paul Calderone, Chief Operating Officer of Hazeltree. "We partner with industry leaders to better service buy-side firms. We are delighted to add AcadiaSoft to our list of partners as we continue enhancing our collateral management capabilities. About AcadiaSoft, Inc. AcadiaSoft, Inc. is the leading industry provider of risk and collateral management services for the non-cleared derivatives community. AcadiaPlus is an open platform that provides the sell-side, the buy-side and fund administrators with specialist applications and a third-party partner ecosystem for the straight-through processing of the entire risk mitigation lifecycle. Backed by 16 major industry participants and market infrastructures, AcadiaSoft is used by a community of more than 1100 firms exchanging approximately $700B of collateral on a daily basis via its margin automation services. AcadiaSoft is headquartered in Norwell, MA and has offices in London, New York and Tokyo. For more information, visit acadiasoft.com. Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AcadiaSoft_ and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/acadiasoft-inc/. About Hazeltree Hazeltree is the leading treasury management and portfolio finance solutions provider, serving hedge funds, private markets, asset managers, fund administrators, insurance companies and pension funds with powerful, proactive performance enhancement and risk mitigation capabilities that generates alpha from streamlined operations and reduces a range of liquidity and funding risks. Hazeltrees integrated solution includes comprehensive cash management, securities financing, collateral management, counterparty management and margin management capabilities. Hazeltree is headquartered in New York with offices in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit www.hazeltree.com. A group of volunteers in Chongqing municipality, southwest China, have made great efforts to protect the ancient buildings and revitalize traditional villages in the city, Peoples Daily reported. Volunteers do research in Chongqing. (File photo) The volunteers, who belong to a non-governmental organization established in 2011, have organized over 30,000 activities and toured along 39 cultural routes in Chongqing in the past nine years to record the citys history. During their tours along the cultural routes, they found that the ancient buildings suffered various types of damage, and decided that each one of them would follow up on several cultural relics in a detailed manner. Each volunteer would check the buildings under their charge at regular intervals, write up reports on the conditions of the historical buildings and submit them to the relevant government departments for them to formulate plans to repair and improve the damaged structures. By December 2019, the volunteers had written a total of 2,482 reports on 132 cultural relics in Chongqing. Starting from the end of 2017, the team members have conducted investigations in 74 ancient villages in Chongqing in an attempt to spread knowledge of traditional customs. They have helped build museums in the villages or kept journals on the villages, which are then printed and distributed to more people. At the same time, the volunteers have worked together with schools to give lessons on cultural protection to encourage students to participate in the protection of cultural relics. Three hospitality experts with a combined F&B experience of almost 50 years have joined The St. Regis Saadiyat Island Resort, Abu Dhabi with the aim of strengthening its position as a leading dining destination for residents and tourists in the capital. Sat at the helm of the kitchen operations for the resort, Michael Gremer brings with him more than two decades of culinary expertise and will be responsible for boosting the gastronomic experiences currently available at its restaurants. Hailing from Germany, the 51-year-old executive chef has a solid background in top management roles in luxury and international hotels across Asia, including countries such as China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan, in addition to wide experience with large-scale launches and renovations in the US and Australia. Hamza Ghazi Al Durdang is the second to join the team as their newest pastry chef. With almost 15 years experience in creating culinary masterpieces in Jordan, UAE and most recently India, he is an extremely talented and innovative pastry chef who specialises in chocolate creations and sugar arts. Themis Kouris has been welcomed as the venue manager of Mazi Abu Dhabi. Equipped with more than 15 years of international experience in the F&B industry, Kouris has co-owned a bakery and catering business and managed restaurants worldwide, including London, Beijing, Saudi Arabia and Hong Kong. With a passion for wine, Kouris has attended several courses over the past decade to help customers choose the best option to compliment their culinary experience. This knowledge and his likeable personality will be a welcome addition to Mazi Abu Dhabi that has won multiple awards in just four months since its launch. Gremer said: I am honoured to be working with a kitchen team that have such an impressive skill set and experience working with some of the biggest names in the industry. We are thrilled to continue the legacy of the St. Regis brand while creating new and innovative menus and culinary experiences. Spread across the expansive resort are seven dining venues, including the world-renowned Buddha-Bar Beach Abu Dhabi, Mazi Abu Dhabi serving modern Greek cuisine, Mediterranean-inspired Olea, an award-winning Southeast-Asian restaurant Sontaya, The Manhattan Lounge, an onsite pastry shop The Drawing Room, and the casual pool and beach setting. - TradeArabia News Service Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - February 20, 2020) - Eric Sprott announces that on February 13, 2020, his 5,000,000 common share purchaser warrants of Goldstrike Resources Ltd., (the "Corporation") with an exercise price of $0.06 per common share (all on a pre-consolidated basis) expired unexercised, and with the Corporation's previous treasury issuances, resulted in Mr. Sprott's control of the common shares of the Corporation decrease to 6.6% of the current outstanding shares, requiring a change to his previous early warning report. Also, on December 29, 2019, Mr. Sprott donated 7,589,500 pre-consolidation common shares to The Sprott Foundation (which he controls). The Corporation has disclosed that its common shares were consolidated on a 20 to 1 basis effective January 17, 2020. Prior to the expiry of warrants, Mr. Sprott controlled 629,475 common shares and warrants exercisable for 250,000 common shares representing approximately 6.6% of the issued and outstanding shares on a non-diluted basis, and approximately 9.0% on a partially diluted basis. Mr. Sprott now beneficially owns and controls 250,000 common shares representing approximately 2.6% of the outstanding common shares of the Corporation, but still controls 629,475 common shares, representing approximately 6.6% of the outstanding shares of the Corporation. Mr. Sprott has a long-term view of the investment and may acquire additional securities of Goldstrike Resources either on the open market or through private acquisitions or sell securities either on the open market or through private dispositions in the future depending on market conditions, reformulation of plans and/or other relevant factors. The Corporation is located at 1130 West Pender Street, Suite 1010, Vancouver, British Columbia, V6E 4A4. A copy of 2176423 Ontario Ltd.'s early warning report will appear on the Corporation's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and may also be obtained by calling Mr. Sprott's office at (416) 945-3294 (200 Bay Street, Suite 2600, Royal Bank Plaza, South Tower, Toronto, Ontario M5J 2J1). To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/52645 Vissel Kobe fans are tested for signs of the coronavirus in Suwon, South Korea, on Feb. 19, 2020. (Han Myung-Gu/Getty Images) South Korea Coronavirus Cases Double in 24 Hours, Linked to Church Super-Spreader Church expresses its 'deepest regret' in a statement The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in South Korea has more than doubled in 24 hours, according to the latest figures from Koreas health agency, with officials saying that a number of new infections are linked to one female super spreader. The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 22 more cases have been identified, bringing the total to 104. Just a day earlier, there were 51 confirmed cases. Many of the new cases of coronavirus are linked to a Christian church, the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony, in Daegua city located in the southern part of the country, the Korean CDC said. According to the BBC, health officials said 30 of 53 new cases have been connected to one woman who visited the church. According to the health agency, a woman born in 1959 went to the church after she had gone to Wuhan, China, the epicenter of the outbreak, NPR reported. The unnamed woman is believed to have had nearly 1,200 contacts. In a statement posted online, the church expressed its deepest regret over the COVID-19 incident, which is caused by a new form of coronavirus that was first reported in December. But the organization added that it is deeply concerned about the spread of false slander against the Shinchonji Church, based on the prejudices that have come from other churches. A woman is walking with a bicycle in Wuhan, China on Feb. 17, 2020. (STR/AFP via Getty Images) Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin told residents to stay indoors after 90 people who worshipped at the Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony showed symptoms of infection, Reuters reported. We are in an unprecedented crisis, Kwon told reporters, adding that all members of the church would be tested. Weve asked them to stay at home isolated from their families. Read More South Korea Reports Sudden Jump in Virus Cases, 90 More Show Symptoms At the same time, South Korea also reported its first death, according to health officials. The Chinese Communist Party has imposed severe measures in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and in a number of other cities in an attempt to curb the spread of the virus. The regime also took drastic measures to keep the economy and stock market from crashing. In nearby Japan, the country reported the deaths of two elderly passengers who were on the quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship on Thursday. They were the first deaths from aboard the ship, where more than 600 people were diagnosed with the virus. Reuters contributed to this report. (Photo : Rowan Baxter's Facebook Account ) Accident or Suicide?: Wife of Rowan Baxter Said Husband 'Poured Petrol on Her' Before Brisbane Car Accident Happened (Photo : Rowan Baxter's Facebook Account ) Accident or Suicide?: Wife of Rowan Baxter Said Husband 'Poured Petrol on Her' Before Brisbane Car Accident Happened Former Rugby League Player Rowan Baxter, his wife Hannah Baxter, and his three young children were reportedly died after being killed in a car fire in Brisbane, Australia, early this morning. According to multiple Australian news websites, the ex-rugby player was the alleged suspect of killing his family. Ex-rugby player Rowan Baxter murdered three young children and wife by flaming their vehicle READ ALSO: Kobe Bryant's Death Not Caused by Sikorsky S-76B's Engine Failure Says Report According to the investigation, on Wednesday, Feb. 19 at around 8:30 AM local time, police authorities were called at the crime of the scene at Brisbane wherein they found the dead bodies of Rowan Baxter, 42, and his three children Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey-- ages between six and three. The children were found dead inside the vehicle while authorities tried to revive the father. However, emergency personnel failed, and Rowan was also declared dead around the time. Some reports said that Rowan had self-inflicted wounds on his body when they found his it inside the vehicle. Meanwhile, Rowan's wife, Hannah Baxter, 31, was then delivered to the hospital but died later due to severe burns. Before Hannah was declared dead, she accused her husband of 'pouring petrol on her' while she tried to get away from the burning vehicle. Authorities said that Hannah was the one driving the car while Rowan was sitting on the passenger's seat when the alleged 'accident' happened. Brother of Hannah said that Rowan is a 'monster' The Australian news site reported that Rowan has been abusing his family. Before the said accident, the brother of Hannah Baxter, Nat Clarke, posted on his Facebook account that his brother-in-law was a 'heartless monster' towards his family. "Yesterday ... I had my sister, nephew, and two nieces taken from me in the worst way possible by a heartless monster they called (their) dad, former NRL player Rowan Baxter," Mr. Clarke wrote on Facebook. This sparked the idea that Rowan was a suspect of 'domestic violence' against his wife and children-- which now resulted in his action of suicide with his entire family. Investigations are still ongoing Brisbane authorities said that it's too early to speculate that Rowan did purposely alighted their family vehicle. "How the fire actually occurred has not been ascertained at the moment, so for us to call it a murder-suicide or a tragic accident, it's inappropriate at this stage," Detective Inspector Mark Thompson said. Watch: A video from NZ Herald shows Rowan Baxter's daughter filming herself on her mother's phone just over a year ago. The girl says in the video that she misses her father. READ ALSO: Kobe Bryant's Death Made Staple Center Stadium Shed Tears; How Important is Kobe Bryant to the NBA Industry? 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- LF Networking (LFN), which facilitates collaboration and operational excellence across open networking projects, today announced the addition of nine new members.The project welcomes new Silver members A10 Networks, AMD, Codilime, Mirantis, Robin.io, Solutions by STC, ULAK, and Xilinx, and Associate members University of California San Diego, and University of Surrey. "It's great to kick off 2020 by welcoming a new swath of global members to the LFN community," said Arpit Joshipura, general manager, Networking, Edge & IoT, the Linux Foundation. "We're expanding our member ecosystem in tandem with growth across initiatives that harmonize open source an open standards, enable automated testing and deployment, and further Cloud Native Network Functions as open source becomes more mainstream." The newest LFN members will work alongside the 100+ existing member organizations to drive development, testing and implementation of LFN's networking projects, including FD.io , ONAP , OpenDaylight , OpenSwitch , OPNFV , PNDA , SNAS , and Tungsten Fabric . LFN begins 2020 by evolving joint collaboration across the industry to enable cloud native network functions (CNFs) to shift workloads into Kubernetes clusters using ONAP to orchestrate a variety of functions and services. Other activity includes harmonization with open standards, via the Common NFVI Telco Taskforce (CNTT), jointly hosted by the GSMA. The group recently published an initial common Reference Model and Reference Architecture as well as hosting a joint hackathon with developers across the LFN community. CNTT enhances the OPNFV Verification Program (OVP) which combines open source-based automated compliance and verification testing for NFV stack specifications established by ONAP, multiple SDOs such as ETSI and GSMA, and the LF Networking End User Advisory Group (EUAG). Current efforts include the next iteration of OVP, with more automation integrated via ONAP. Join the Community at Open Networking & Edge Summit (ONES) Open Networking & Edge Summit (formerly Open Networking Summit), the industry's premier open networking event now expanded to comprehensively cover Edge Computing, Edge Cloud & IoT, takes place in North America April 20-21 in Los Angeles, Calif and in Europe September 29-30 in Antwerp, Belgium. ONES enables collaborative development and innovation across enterprises, service providers/telcos and cloud providers to shape the future of networking and edge computing. Join the LFN community in Los Angeles and register by March 10 for Early Bird pricing: https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-networking-edge-summit-north-america/register/ Member Supporting Quotes: "The Linux Foundation and its members continue to advance open source initiatives across a range of technologies. As network functions become more virtualized and cloud-native, the work the foundation is doing will help enable these network functions as open source. We are honored to join the Linux Foundation to help drive joint initiatives like the end-to-end 5G cloud-native network proof of concept (POC)," said Yasir Liaqatullah, vice president of product management, A10 Networks. Bartosz Gorski, CodiLime's Chief Relationship Officer & Board Member is excited about this new opening. "The Linux Foundation, LF Networking and CodiLime have a mutual interest in pursuing the development of open-source networking stack. This has led us to join forces to foster the development of a networking project for the benefit of the entire open-source community. For the last 9 years, CodiLime has gained considerable experience in network engineering providing solutions for industry leaders. Last year we had the opportunity to present our solution based on Tungsten Fabric at the LFN booth at the Open Networking Summit and we got very positive feedback from the community. I believe that 2020 will see even more fruitful collaboration." "The LF Networking community is the guiding force of innovation in 5G, Edge, and the next generation of software-defined networking technology," said Shaun O'Meara, Field CTO at Mirantis. "Mirantis has a history of becoming a significant collaborator in the projects we are part of. As we continue to promote open standards and innovation in our work with Kubernetes, Edge/IoT, and CNFs, we welcome the opportunity to collaborate with other members to benefit our customers, partners, and the industry at large." "Cloud-native networking is a big challenge with many technologies and technology providers, that's why open standards and working together as a community are key to solving problems that we all face. There are exciting possibilities in this area for speeding industry adoption of open CNFs and vRAN technology for cost-effective and performant 5G rollout and scaling," said Mehran Hadipour, vice president, business development, robin.io. "LF Networking's community represents a vibrate, collaborative effort to further the networking industry, and its focus on activities such as VNF compliance and validation, interoperability testing, and ecosystem acceleration is industry-leading. We are pleased to become members of LFN, participate in the OVP program, and accelerate areas such as 5G, cloud native networking, and edge/IoT," said Metin Balc, PhD, CEO, ULAK. "Joining the Linux Foundation Networking Consortium reinforces Xilinx's commitment to sustainable, open-source ecosystems. Software, 5G, telco, data center and multi-access edge computing developers can now easily take advantage of our adaptable platforms. We're delighted to join the LF Networking consortium to enable software developers to use our leadership technology," said Dan Mansur, vice president, Wired and Wireless Communication Group, Xilinx. About the Newest LFN Members: A10 Networks enables service providers, cloud providers and enterprises to ensure their 5G networks and multi-cloud applications are secure. With advanced analytics, machine learning and intelligent automation, business-critical applications are protected, reliable and always available. Founded in 2004, A10 Networks is based in San Jose, Calif. and serves customers in 117 countries worldwide. For more information, visit: www.a10networks.com and @A10Networks . For 50 years AMD has driven innovation in high-performance computing, graphics and visualization technologies the building blocks for gaming, immersive platforms and the data center. Hundreds of millions of consumers, leading Fortune 500 businesses and cutting-edge scientific research facilities around the world rely on AMD technology daily to improve how they live, work and play. AMD employees around the world are focused on building great products that push the boundaries of what is possible. For more information about how AMD is enabling today and inspiring tomorrow, visit the AMD website, blog, Facebook and Twitter pages. CodiLime specializes in building, developing and integrating SDN & NFV solutions in a single-multi- or hybrid-cloud environment. It offers a wide range of services related to network engineering, including front-end and back-end development, DevOps, quality assurance and UX/UI services designed specifically for network applications. The company is also a contributor to Tungsten Fabric, an open-source SDN Controller and has done multiple projects of OpenStack and Kubernetes implementation. Thanks to its expertise, the company has won the confidence of such global industry leaders as Juniper Networks, Nutanix, Nvidia, AT&T, Gigaspaces, Stratoscale, Cloudify, Huawei, IBM and Hitachi. Learn more about CodiLime at https://codilime.com/ . Mirantis helps enterprises move to the cloud on their terms, delivering a true cloud experience on any infrastructure, powered by Kubernetes. The company uses a unique as-a-service model empowering developers to build, share and run their applications anywhere from public to hybrid cloud and to the edge. Mirantis serves many of the world's leading enterprises, including Adobe, Citizens Bank, DocuSign, PayPal, Reliance Jio, Splunk, and Volkswagen. Learn more at www.mirantis.com Robin.io provides an application automation platform that enables enterprises to deliver complex application pipelines as a service. Built on industry-standard Kubernetes, the Robin platform allows developers and platform engineers to rapidly deploy and easily manage data- and network-centric applicationsincluding big data, NoSQL and 5Gindependent of underlying infrastructure resources. The Robin platform is used globally by companies including BNP Paribas, Palo Alto Networks, Rakuten Mobile, SAP, Sabre and USAA. Robin.io is headquartered in Silicon Valley, California. More at www.robin.io and Twitter: @robin4K8S. Solutions by STC is part of Saudi Telecom Company's ongoing commitment to transform itself into a leading regional ICT player. Solutions is accelerating STC's enterprise segment growth strategy through providing a wide range of Information and Communications Technology services beyond the traditional Telco offerings of STC. Today, Solutions is the #1 ICT service provider in Saudi Arabia and operates under the umbrella of the Enterprise Business Unit of STC. Solutions provides advanced services and solutions that include IoT/M2M and Digital services, VSAT Services, Cloud Services, Network & Business Continuity Solutions, Data Center Services, Managed Services and ICT Systems Integration; serving STC customers across a wide array of the Saudi market's vertical segments including the Public Sector, Enterprise, Defense, Utilities, Healthcare, Retail and other private sectors. More about Solutions at https://www.stcs.com.sa/ ULAK provides end to end broadband communications infrastructure for telecom operators with LTE-A Base Stations fully operational in more than 1000 sites; SD-WAN and SD-DC solutions, and concentrates her efforts heavily on 5G technologies, 5GNR, NFV, VNF, MANO, and network virtualization. For more info visit t https://www.ulakhaberlesme.com.tr/index.php/en/ At the University of California San Diego, we embrace a culture of exploration and experimentation. Established in 1960, UC San Diego has been shaped by exceptional scholars who aren't afraid to look deeper, challenge expectations and redefine conventional wisdom. As one of the top 15 research universities in the world, we are driving innovation and change to advance society, propel economic growth and make our world a better place. Learn more at www.ucsd.edu . The University of Surrey is a global community of ideas and people, dedicated to life-changing education and research. With a beautiful and vibrant campus, we provide exceptional teaching and practical learning to inspire and empower our students for personal and professional success. Xilinx develops highly flexible and adaptive processing platforms that enable rapid innovation across a variety of technologies from the endpoint to the edge to the cloud. Xilinx is the inventor of the FPGA, hardware programmable SoCs and the ACAP, designed to deliver the most dynamic processor technology in the industry and enable the adaptable, intelligent and connected world of the future. For more information, visit www.xilinx.com. About The Linux Foundation The Linux Foundation is the organization of choice for the world's top developers and companies to build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption. Together with the worldwide open source community, it is solving the hardest technology problems by creating the largest shared technology investment in history. Founded in 2000, The Linux Foundation today provides tools, training and events to scale any open source project, which together deliver an economic impact not achievable by any one company. More information can be found at www.linuxfoundation.org . 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 Jill Lovato The Linux Foundation [email protected] SOURCE LF Networking (Natural News) The infamous Diamond Princess cruise ship that we previously reported had at least 61 confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) aboard has finally evacuated some of its high-risk passengers, but to a place you might not expect: Nebraska. According to reports, 13 of the ships most high-risk patients, along with their spouses, have been sent to the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha for evaluation. And one of them, disturbingly, was specifically sent to a special containment unit due to symptoms of an undisclosed chronic condition, according to Shelly Schwedhelm, head of Nebraska Medicines emergency department. All 13 of these individuals have been tested, officials say, and like all the rest of the evacuees they will now have to remain in a federal quarantine for 14 days. Meanwhile, Schwedhelm says officials are trying to determine whether or not these 13 will be allowed out of their rooms or be forced to stay there at all times. While some 300 people have now been evacuated from this particular cruise ship, many hundreds more are still on board as it sits out in the water near Japan under mandatory quarantine. The United Kingdom (UK), which has 74 of its nationals still on board, is considering an evacuation of its own to bring these people under appropriate care. We sympathize with all those caught up in this extremely difficult situation, a UK spokesman told the media. We are urgently considering all options to guarantee the health and safety of the British people on board the Diamond Princess, in line with the latest advice from the Chief Medical Officer and the World Health Organization, and are working closely with the Japanese authorities and our international partners. Listen below as Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, explains how to defeat a coronavirus infection: More than 1,000 people outside of mainland China are now infected with the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) The latest data shows that there are now more than 1,000 cases of the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) outside of China, with new cases appearing to grow exponentially in some areas. Iran, for instance, has reported two confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19), both of which resulted in death. This means that, at least in Iran at the current number, theres a 100 percent death rate from the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19). Once confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO), this will raise the official death toll from the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19) outside of China to seven. It remains unclear if these two Iranian deaths occurred in Chinese nationals or Iranian nationals. The official death count in China is still around 2,000, though as weve been reporting that figure is likely a gross underestimate. With China now bringing in mobile incinerator units to handle all of the dead bodies, theres simply no way that only 2,000 people there have died from the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19). Meanwhile, Japan has allowed some 500 passengers to disembark from the aforementioned Diamond Princess cruise ship, leaving behind about 2,000 passengers who have yet to be allowed back into their homelands. We need to find the best way to have a safe Olympics, stated Japanese virologist Dr. Hitoshi Oshitani at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. Japan, as you may know, is scheduled to host the Tokyo Games this upcoming July. Right now, we dont have an effective strategy, he added. But by the end of July, we may be in a different situation. Reports indicate that an upcoming public birthday celebration for Japanese royal leader Naruhito, which was scheduled to take place on February 23, has been canceled due to the Wuhan coronavirus (CoVid-19). Hear more podcasts each day from the H.R. Report channel at Brighteon.com: You can also keep up with the latest coronavirus news at Outbreak.news. Sources for this article include: NaturalNews.com TheEpochTimes.com ArcGIS.com ABCnews.Go.com Brighteon.com Witnesses and surveillance videos of the suspect's getaway car led authorities quickly to his home, near the scene of the second attack, where he was found dead near the body of his 72-year-old mother, said Peter Beuth, the Interior Minister for the state of Hesse. Neighbour Dieter Hog said he looked out his window and saw 25 or 30 police officers with dogs combing the area. "They were running around looking for the fugitive who was involved," Hog said, adding that even though he lived close by, he did not know the suspect. Both the suspect and his mother had gunshot wounds, and the weapon was found on the suspect, Beuth said. At the townhouse on Thursday, forensic experts came and went from the building, and police kept people away. A website believed to be the suspect's is being evaluated, Beuth said. "Initial analysis of the web page of the suspect indicate a xenophobic motivation," he said. It does not appear, however, that the suspect was known either to police or Germany's domestic intelligence agency, he added. He said federal prosecutors have taken over the investigation of the crime and are treating it as an act of domestic terrorism. "This is an attack on our free and peaceful society," he said. Following a conference call with Germany's state interior ministers, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann said on the basis of the investigation so far, "it was a right-radical xenophobic" attack, German news agency dpa reported. The attack was quickly and broadly condemned by many organisations, including the Central Council of Muslims, the Confederation of Kurdish Associations in Germany, and the Central Council of Jews. Merkel pledged that "everything will be done to investigate the circumstances of these terrible murders." In unusually plain words, the German leader said: "Racism is a poison. Hatred is a poison." "This hatred exists in our society and its is responsible for far too many crimes," she added, citing the killings committed by a far-right gang known as the NSU, the shooting of a regional politician from her party last year and the attack on a synagogue in Halle in October. She added that authorities would do everything possible to stand up to those who try to divide the country with racism. French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted it was a day of "immense sadness" and pledged his "full support for Germany." "I'm at the side of Chancellor Merkel in her fight for our values and the protection of our democracies," he said. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said the consulate in Frankfurt and the embassy in Berlin were trying to obtain obtain information about the attack, including the possibility that some of the victims were Turkish. German news outlets were reporting that police are examining a video the suspect may have posted online several days earlier in which he details a conspiracy theory about child abuse in the United States. The authenticity of the video couldn't immediately be verified. Loading In the video, the dark-haired speaker wearing a white button-down shirt under a suit jacket, said he was delivering a "personal message to all Americans" that "your country is under control of invisible secret societies." In a slow and deliberate voice, in accented English, he says there are "deep underground military bases" in which "they abuse, torture and kill little children." He makes no reference to the far-right fringe QAnon movement in the US, but the missive is similar to the movement's central, but baseless belief that US President Donald Trump is waging a secret campaign against enemies in the "deep state" and a child sex trafficking ring run by satanic paedophiles and cannibals. The attack comes amid growing concerns about far-right violence in Germany. Two Australian Survivor contestants have taken to social media to comment on a Survivor auction last night, suggesting editing has changed what actually took place. Last night viewers saw Phoebe bid $500 for an undisclosed item, which was 1/4 of her tribes $2000 fund. When a scroll was revealed it explained she could feast upon every other item offered to contestants. As the auction progressed an elated Phoebe, joined by AK as her dinner guest, were devouring pizza, burritos, avo & toast, parma, margaritas and beer others went starving. The scene put her firmly in the crosshairs of her own tribe. But on Twitter she commented on the editing, suggesting it was actually Moana who bid $500 first and she simply matched the bid. Another contestant, Shonnee backed her up her claim. The claims suggest the broadcast version was structured to depict her as the villain of the scene, without the context of Moanas earlier bid. Welcome to Reality TV. Endemol Shine Australia said in a statement, Australian Survivor is filmed 24 hours a day, seven days a week with 24 contestants talking and strategizing. Due to the nature of the show, not everything makes it to air but it is a true representation of what happens on the island. A north Dublin housing estate was evacuated last night after a suspected pipe bomb was discovered. The army bomb disposal team was called in to the Knowth Court area of Ballymun. The area was sealed off for a time while the team investigated the incident. A number of houses were evacuated and the incident eventually came to an end at around 3am. Gardai say the device was not viable. See Something, Say Something February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month and raising the consciousness is Burque Revolt as they dedicate their Saturday, Feb. 22 event ABQ Unidos Poetry Slam to spreading awareness of teen dating violence, while creating a safe space for teens to use their words to express themselves. Warehouse 508 (508 First Street NW) is the place be for this free, all-ages event, and 4pm to 7pm is the time to be there. To find out more about this event and why should absolutely not wear scented products or spew your hate speech there, see burquerevoltpoetryslam. wordpress. com. View in Alibi calendar New Works at Keshet Keshet's 2020 Choreographers' Showcase premieres the work of local, regional and national choreographers on Saturday, Feb. 22 at 7:30pm and Sunday, Feb. 23 at 2pm at the Keshet Center for the Arts (4121 Cutler Ave. NE). Tickets range from $10 to $15 for this all-ages dance event and are available at keshetarts.org. View in Alibi calendar The Crime Branch of Delhi Police on Thursday has issued notices to 10 students of Jamia Millia Islamia University asking them to appear before it for questioning in the December 15 violence that ensued at the varsity, sources in the department said. According to sources, these students have been identified through the footage from CCTV installed in the varsity. On December 15 last year, Delhi Police burst into the campus, threw teargas shells and allegedly assaulted students. The action followed a day of protests where some protesters -- which the University has maintained were outsiders and not students -- set buses and vehicles ablaze in some parts of South Delhi. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Angelina Jolie has said it's time the world steps in to help with the Syrian conflict as she reflects on the lack of action since her first visit to the border in 2011. The UN Special Envoy calls out politicians for failing to step in like other conflicts in the Middle East and questions when America stopped rooting for the 'underdog' as reflects on the hearbreaking things she's witnessed over the past 10 years. In a Time essay titled 'The Cost of Inaction in Syria is Too High', the actress says America helping other countries in the past has been 'for our own interests' and that stepping in after a purported 500,000 Syrians have perished, would be no different. 'Afghanistan and Politicians often imply that we face a choice between open-ended military and diplomatic interventions of the kind we've seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, and leaving other countries to fend for themselves, sending whatever amount of humanitarian aid we're willing to supply, and sealing ourselves off,' Jolie writes, adding: 'Syria is proof that a lack of leadership and diplomacy has consequences.' Angela asks in an essay 'The Cost of Inaction in Syria is Too High' published Thursday: 'When did we stop wanting to stand up for the underdog?'. Pictured Jolie speaks at a United Nations Security Council Meeting on the situation in the Middle East And Syria at United Nations on April 24, 2015 in New York City Reflecting on how innocent children have unfairly become victims of inaction she suggested politicians have been putting focus in the wrong places. 'Countries have focused on the fight against terrorism or on the humanitarian relief effort, while the war itself has bled ever more fiercely' She adds: 'History shows that when we fought for the liberation of Europe in World War II, or contributed to building the postwar global order, we did so for our own interestsand we reaped the benefits. When America was attacked on 9/11, many countries made common cause with us because we had earned their friendship.' Jolie who has six children with ex-husband Brad Pitt opened up about the devastating effects of the war in Syria after the Trump admins slashed the total number of refugees allowed into the country each year to a historic low of 30,000. As part of his Muslim ban refugees from 11 countries considered to be threats to US security, including Syria, admissions fell by 90 percent from 2017 to 2018, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project. Jolie recalled a 2011 trip to the Jordanian border where she heard about an eight-year-old boy who begged his family to bring his leg with him after they fled following an airstrike. 'I hoped that stories like his might force the world's rich and mighty countries to intervene to stop the violence,' Jolie who is thought to be worth $100million - opened up. But despite her 10 visits to draw attention to the crisis, 'years of pleas have gone unanswered'. Jolie writes in the March 2 issue of Time: 'History shows that when we fought for the liberation of Europe in World War II, or contributed to building the postwar global order, we did so for our own interestsand we reaped the benefits. When America was attacked on 9/11, many countries made common cause with us because we had earned their friendship' The US has refused to comment on it's approach to Syria but Mike Pompeo has previously said $95billion in donations makes the US the world's largest contributor to humanitarian assistance. Pompeo and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands at a Peace summit on Libya at the Chancellery in Berlin, on January 19, 2020. World leaders gathered to make a fresh push for peace in Libya, in a desperate bid to stop the conflict-wracked nation from turning into a 'second Syria' The US has refused to comment on it's approach to Syria but Mike Pompeo has previously said $95billion in donations makes the US the world's largest contributor to humanitarian assistance. Jolie admits that initially people in the country were hopeful her famous face would result in action and they begged her: 'Please, tell people what is happening to us'. But she says 'hope curdled into anger and the struggle for survival' due to the indifference the world has shown despite seeing images of 'children asphyxiated by gas, maimed by shrapnel, drowned on the shores of Europe oras I writefreezing to death in the cold of Syria's Idlib province'. Jolie uses the example of one man who held his baby up to her and asked: 'Is this a terrorist? Is my son a terrorist?' US actress and UNHCR special envoy Angelina Jolie shakes hands with a Syrian refugee during her visit to the Zaatari refugee camp near the Jordanian border with Syria, on September 11, 2012. At that point the number of refugees who had fled Syria had reached more than 250,000 Jolie (C-L) visits the refugee camp of Mardin, Turkey, that hosts victims of the crisis in Syria, on June 20, 2015 Jolie, accompanied on the trip by daughters Shiloh, 11, and Zahara, 13, speaks with a young Syrian refugee boy outside his home January 28, 2018 in Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan. Nearly seven years after the start of armed conflict in Syria, more than 6 million people remain displaced inside the country while 5.48 million have fled to other countries in the region The philanthropist has also met parents who have to make the choice between which child gets access to food or medicine while it is scarce. Reflecting on how innocent children have unfairly become victims of inaction she suggested politicians have been putting focus in the wrong places. 'Far from healing Syria's wounds, the response of some external powers has been to inflict further injuries, bloodying their hands in the process,' she writes. 'Other countries have focused on the fight against terrorism or on the humanitarian relief effort, while the war itself has bled ever more fiercely.' As Special Envoy Jolie focuses on major crises that result in mass population displacements. She has helped contribute to finding solutions for people forced to flee their homes. In the March 2 issue of the magazine she adds: 'We're watching the brutal endgame of the war in Syria as if it has little to do with us. But it does. 'We should be using our diplomatic power to insist on a cease-fire and a negotiated peace based on at least some measure of political participation, accountability and the conditions for the safe return of refugees.' A Boeing 777X airliner lifts off for its first flight at Paine Field on January 25, 2020 in Everett, Washington. Washington state lawmakers moved on Wednesday to remove a key tax break for Boeing and other aerospace firms in a bid to head off possible European tariffs on U.S. goods and ease a transatlantic trade dispute over aircraft subsidies. The United States last week toughened its own tariffs on aircraft built by Boeing's arch-rival, Europe's Airbus, after winning approval last year from the World Trade Organization to penalize European goods over Airbus subsidies. The European Union is widely expected to win approval to impose similar tariffs on U.S. goods when a parallel case over U.S. support for Boeing comes to a head during the spring. The WTO has found that the world's two largest planemakers received billions of dollars of unfair subsidies in cases dating back to 2004. The global trade body has faulted both sides for failing to comply with its previous rulings, opening the door to a tariff war. After years of debate, the main focus of the European case against the United States involves a system of preferential state tax rates for aerospace introduced 16 years ago and renewed in 2013 to help attract production work for Boeing's 777X. Washington state lawmakers in Olympia said they had introduced companion bills in the Senate and House that would remove the aerospace tax break, which saved Boeing more than $200 million in 2018. "There is broad agreement in Olympia that we need to act this session to address the WTO issue in order to avoid retaliatory tariffs that would damage not just our commercial aircraft industry, but other important Washington exports," Governor Jay Inslee said in a statement. He said Boeing which was widely reported to have lobbied for the tax breaks to be extended to include the new 777X program in 2013 had now asked for them to be removed. "Boeing has said it would like that tax incentive at least suspended, until the issue is fully settled with the European Union," Inslee said in a statement. The 777X, the largest twin-engined jetliner, staged a maiden flight last month. Boeing said in a statement that it fully supports legislation to reverse the tax breaks. "This legislation demonstrates the commitment of Washington and of the United States to fair and rules-based trade, and to compliance with the WTO's rulings," Boeing said. But, it said, Airbus and the European Union must "finally come into compliance by ending illegal launch aid subsidies once and for all and addressing the harm they have caused the United States aerospace industry and its workers." The United States says the European Union has failed to address subsidies for Airbus' A380 and A350 airliners. The European Union says it has fallen into line with the WTO's rulings and accused the Trump administration of dragging its feet on removing aid for Boeing. Both sides have called for negotiations while accusing the other of failing to cooperate. Meanwhile, makers of products ranging from luxury goods to whisky have raised concerns over the impact of a tit-for-tat tariff war spreading beyond the aerospace industry. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 12:49:51|Editor: Liu Video Player Close SYDNEY, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- An eight-year-old COVID-19 patient was released from an Australian hospital on Wednesday evening having been completely cleared of the disease, authorities announced. The boy was part of a Chinese tour group who were travelling in the Australian State of Queensland earlier in the month when one of the nine members became sick. All members of the group were placed into isolation, while the boy, who tested positive for COVID-19, was placed into a separate isolation -- as were four others who also tested positive and remained in hospital on Thursday. "I can announce the first family who have been quarantined at the Gold Coast University Hospital were discharged (on Wednesday night)," Queensland State Health Minister Steven Miles said. "Their 8-year-old son has recovered from the coronavirus and is no doubt very excited to get out of hospital." During his time in the hospital the boy was looked after by his father who did not contract the virus but will now nonetheless be required to spend 14 days in isolation to ensure he is not at risk of spreading it. "There is no evidence this person has been unwell and they are showing no signs of having contracted the virus. They remain in isolation out of hospital as a precaution," Queensland's chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young explained. There are still four people in the Gold Coast hospital with COVID-19, all from the same tour group -- two men aged 44 and 37, and two women, aged 42 and 37. Young said that all those patients were doing well and would continue to undergo assessments over coming days to be released from hospital when safe to do so. "The remaining Gold Coast University Hospital patients are well. It is possible further family groups may be released over the next week when medically cleared and some may require similar further quarantine," Young said. Taapsee Pannu, who is gearing up for the release of Thappad, has shared a heart-warming post about the importance of parents support in a persons life, especially that of a woman. The post also elaborates on her character in the film directed by Anubhav Sinha. Posting a picture from Thappad where Taapsee hugs her onscreen dad Kumud Mishra, she wrote, Being daddys girl is what made things easy/difficult fr Amrita.The fact she thought her partner will be someone like her father got her expectations soar high but when they crashed,he was there to hold her from falling.Witness this beautiful father daughter relationship #Thappad. Also read: Ananya Panday teams up with Vijay Deverakonda for his Bollywood debut, welcomes him in style. See pics Being daddys girl is what made things easy/difficult fr Amrita.The fact she thought her partner will be someone like her father got her expectations soar high but when they crashed,he was there to hold her from falling.Witness this beautiful father daughter relationship #Thappad pic.twitter.com/54vyJMiZk6 taapsee pannu (@taapsee) February 20, 2020 Recently, a special screening of Thappad was held in Delhi and the all-celeb audience has been showering praises on the movie. The Delhi screening was organised by Vishal Bhardwaj. Filmmakers Anurag Kashyap, Sudhir Mishra and Hanal Mehta have announced they will hold screenings in Bhopal, Jaipur and Mumbai. In an interview to PTI, Taapsee had spoken about the intention behind the film. Shed said, It is important that we talk about it (domestic violence), thats why we made this film. When we were discussing about this film, we had this thing in mind, to show that the girl is from an upper middle-class educated and well-to-do family. She also told IANS, How I stand for gender equality and womens right has nothing to do with success, but everything to do with upbringing. I was never told that I am any less because I am a girl. I have a sister and, whether it is education, jobs or any other choice we made, in our house my parents never questioned it because we are girls. So the choice of films that I make is a reflection of my mindset. My audience sees my belief in my choices. Also featuring actors Ratna Pathak Shah, Manav Kaul, Dia Mirza, Tanvi Azmi and Ram Kapoor, Thappad is slated for release on February 28. Follow @htshowbiz for more OTTAWA - The Senate's ethics officer says Conservative Sen. Victor Oh breached the upper house's ethics code four times when he accepted an all-expenses paid trip to China in 2017. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 19/2/2020 (692 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. The Senate of Canada building and Senate Chamber are pictured in Ottawa on Monday, Feb. 18, 2019. The Senate's ethics officer says Conservative Sen. Victor Oh breached the upper house's ethics code four times when he accepted an all-expenses paid trip to China in 2017. CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA - The Senate's ethics officer says Conservative Sen. Victor Oh breached the upper house's ethics code four times when he accepted an all-expenses paid trip to China in 2017. Moreover, Pierre Legault says Oh withheld information and deliberately misled the investigation into the trip, raising questions about his integrity. At issue is a delegation Oh led on a visit to Beijing and Fujian province in April 2017; the delegation included Chinese-Canadian community leaders, as well as two fellow Conservative senators, Leo Housakos and Don Plett. Oh told Legault the trip was "a personal sightseeing journey" to his ancestral home, paid for by his sister. But in a report tabled in the Senate, Legault says evidence shows Oh touted the trip to others as a trade delegation and that he blurred the line between his private and public affairs throughout the visit. He concludes that Oh violated the ethics code which prohibits accepting any gift or benefit related to a senator's position by allowing his sister to pay for a trip that included a substantial official component. Oh similarly violated the code again during the trip by attending a banquet hosted by Xiamen Airlines, which was considering the possibility of offering a direct flight to Toronto, Legault found. And he did it again by attending two dinners hosted by Pantheon Asset Ltd., which included discussion about Pantheon opening an office in Vancouver. As well, Legault says Oh failed to uphold the principle spelled out in the code that senators must maintain a clear separation between their public roles as senators and their personal, private affairs. Legault slams Oh's conduct throughout the investigation into the trip, accusing him of deliberately misleading the ethics officer on a number of matters, including giving him a version of the list of members of the delegation that didn't mention their business connections. "His conduct also raises questions about his integrity," Legault says in the report. "In my view, Sen. Oh's conduct in deliberately withholding information in this inquiry is the type of conduct that did not uphold the highest standards of dignity inherent to the position of senator and that would undermine public confidence in the office of senator and in the Senate as a whole." Legault largely exonerates two other senators involved in the trip, Conservatives Leo Housakos and Don Plett. Oh told them he was taking care of the cost of the trip, which the two senators assumed meant it was a "routine form of sponsored travel" paid for by a Chinese-Canadian community organization. Legault says "their misunderstanding was not unreasonable." However, he reminds all senators that they have an obligation under the code to exercise due diligence, including knowing who is paying for their travel. The Senate's ethics committee must now consider Legault's report and decide whether to impose any sanctions or penalties. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 19, 2020. CHICAGO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Relativity, an industry leader in legaltech, today announced that it is now accepting submissions for its 2020 Relativity Fest Student Scholarship. Now in its fifth year, the academic scholarship awards forward-thinking students with the opportunity to make an impact in the legal technology space and network with industry professionals, better positioning them for a hiring market that values legal technology competency. "The legal industry is changing, and now more than ever lawyers are required to excel in both law and technology," said Janice Hollman, Academic Program Manager at Relativity. "This scholarship comes at a time where the role of technology in today's litigation and investigation proceedings is exigent. I am looking forward to meeting with this year's scholarship winners on the ground at Relativity Fest." Since the American Bar Association introduced an amendment in 2012 requiring technology competency, 36 states have made similar amendments making it the duty of all state-barred attorneys to be knowledgeable in legal technology. For new lawyers and paralegals, being well-versed in e-discovery platforms like RelativityOne and gaining exposure to cutting-edge conferences like Relativity Fest provides a leg-up against the competition. "Relativity Fest was an amazing opportunity to meet successful people in this industry. I have met new friends and gained insights into this industry," said Taylor Hogshead, a graduate of the UCLA Paralegal Extension program. The Relativity Fest Student Scholarship is offered as part of the Relativity Academic Partners Program, an educational initiative that provides over 100 law schools and paralegal programs with free access to hands-on training in Relativity Server while giving students the tools and experience and tech competency they need to excel in today's increasingly complex legal industry. As part of the program, universities and program instructors have access to Relativity and additional educational and information resources, including in-person training and the Relativity Community site. To be considered for the scholarship, potential applicants can use this link to apply. Selected students will attend Relativity Fest where they will have access to a variety of networking and learning opportunities designed to educate attendees on the growing impact of technology on today's legal industry. The 11th annual Relativity Fest will take place in Chicago from September 20 23, 2020. Both undergraduate and graduate students are eligible to apply for the scholarship by May 14, 2020. The award covers transportation, lodging, meals and event registration. The scholarship is open to anyone who is at least 21 years old by September 20, 2020. About Relativity At Relativity, we make software to help users organize data, discover the truth, and act on it. Our e-discovery platform is used by thousands of organizations around the world to manage large volumes of data and quickly identify key issues during litigation, internal investigations, and compliance projects. Relativity has over 180,000 users in 40+ countries from organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice, more than 70 Fortune 100 companies, and 198 of the Am Law 200. RelativityOne offers all the functionality of Relativity in a secure and comprehensive SaaS product. Relativity has been named one of Chicago's Top Workplaces by the Chicago Tribune for 10 consecutive years. Please contact Relativity at [email protected] or visit http://www.relativity.com for more information. SOURCE Relativity Related Links https://www.relativity.com Global members of the Belt and Road News Network (BRNN) and media outlets that participated in the short-term media workshops under the BRNN have paid close attention to and spoken positively of China's effective measures to fight the novel coronavirus epidemic, calling for the international community to oppose false allegations and support China in its battle. Chinese people have made highly efficient efforts to combat the epidemic, while the country has shown the world its sense of responsibility as a major power, pointed out Dr. Iqbal Surve, executive chairman of Independent Media, one of South Africa's leading multi-platform content companies, in his letter to Li Baoshan, president of People's Daily. It's believed that Chinese people will overcome the challenges in the end just like it did with all the hardships in its history, said Surve, stressing that Independent Media's outlets stand firmly against fake news that smear China and belittle the efforts of the Chinese government and Chinese people in combating the crisis, and insist on providing true and comprehensive information for readers in South Africa. On Feb.12, Pretoria News, a newspaper under Independent Media, published an article by David Monyae, director of the Center for Africa-China Studies (CACS) at the University of Johannesburg, calling for enhanced solidarity and joint efforts to fight the epidemic. Cape Times, another newspaper owned by Independent Media, has also published an article bringing information about scientific prevention and control measures and the efforts made by public medical institutions in South Africa to combat the virus. Russian news agency TASS (ITAR-TASS) and newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta have provided timely and accurate information on progress in epidemic control and prevention as well as China's measures to fight the novel coronavirus, publishing more than 10 updates daily. TASS Russian News Agency cited remarks from Russian diplomats warning people about fake news on the epidemic published by some Western media. Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an editorial titled Russia and China share weal and woe: Russian people fully support China in fighting epidemic. In addition, Rossiyskaya Gazeta released a full-page poster expressing strong support for Wuhan, the epicenter of the health crisis, and China, with the poster saying Go, China! We stand together with you! Rossiyskaya Gazeta has also published an article that pointed out that the novel coronavirus epidemic will not change the trend of the continuous growth in economic and trade cooperation between China and Russia. It's believed that the two countries will turn the crisis into opportunity and explore more areas for future cooperation, the article said. Emirates News Agency, the official news agency of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has constantly paid close attention to the development of the epidemic and reposted relevant commentaries in mainstream newspapers in the UAE. Pakistan's Jang Media Group has published and broadcast a series of news reports on the current novel coronavirus epidemic in its newspaper Daily Jang, the most widely read Urdu newspaper in Pakistan, as well as its television stations and websites. In addition to information about local epidemic control and prevention and treatment of local patients infected with the virus, the media group also pays close attention to the general situation of the epidemic in China, Pakistan's assistance to China, and responses and opinions of Chinese media and citizens. The editor-in-chief of the Ethiopian News Agency has also expressed his support for Chinese people's efforts to combat the epidemic via e-mail to the secretariat of BRNN, saying that he believes joint efforts to build the Belt and Road will bring the world a better future, and that his colleagues will continue to report on the actual situation in China. Olusegun Adeniyi, chair of the editorial board of THISDAY, a major newspaper in Nigeria, praised the Chinese government for its appropriate measures in coping with the epidemic and expressed concern about and indignation at discriminatory comments online in his recent articles. The BRNN is an important platform for cooperation among media outlets of countries and regions participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). So far, 205 media outlets from 98 countries around the world have become full members of the BRNN. People's Daily is the chair of the BRNN. The repatriation of the art object became possible due to successful cooperation between diplomats and special agencies of the two states. "An Amorous Couple" painting by Pierre Louis Goudreaux stolen during World War 2 is set to be finally returned to Ukraine, Ukraine's Permanent Mission to the United Nations reported. On February 19, 2020, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine Vadym Prystaiko participated in the official handover ceremony of "An Amorous Couple" painting, which was held in New York, the Mission wrote on Facebook. The painting had been stolen by Nazis during World War 2 from the Khanenko Family National Museum in Kyiv and then discovered in the U.S. The repatriation of the art object became possible due to successful cooperation between diplomats and special agencies of the two states. Read alsoU.S. plans to hand over to Ukraine Navy another three Island-class patrol boats in 2021 U.S. officials earlier said the painting had been missing for years, held by a London private collector and then in Massachusetts. It resurfaced in 2013 when it was listed on a website for an unnamed New York auction house. The FBI determined it was bought from a Missouri auction house in 1993 by a New York dealer who had consigned it to the auction house. In recent years, U.S. officials have stepped up efforts to locate art seized from Ukraine by Nazi forces and return it to Ukraine. In December 2018, U.S. authorities moved to claim a 107-year-old painting of Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible that was stolen from a Ukrainian art museum during World War 2. A Vietnamese man wanted for drug dealing has turned himself in to authorities in his hometown after spending three years hiding in China due to his fear of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) epidemic sweeping the country. Officers in Tuong Duong District in the north-central province of Nghe An confirmed on Thursday morning that Luong Van Tu, 27, had recently turned himself in. Tu had been wanted by Vietnamese authorities for drug dealing for the past three years while he was on the lam in China. Police records show that in 2016 Tu and his accessory, 27-year-old Dang Dan Oanh, established a drug distribution ring in Tuong Duong. Police officers eventually broke up the drug ring but Tu and Oanh managed to escape. Oanh was captured in November 2016, while Tu had been on the run until recently. At the police station, Tu claimed he had fled to China but decided to return to Vietnam and turn himself in, for fear that he might catch the novel coronavirus in China. COVID-19 has killed 2,126 people and infected over 75,700 globally since it first surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei Province in December 2019, according to the South China Morning Post. Vietnam has so far confirmed 16 cases of the viral infection, including 13 Vietnamese, one Vietnamese American, and two Chinese. Fourteen have fully recovered, with no death recorded in the country. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! Pakistan's govt taking solid steps to promote fish farming February 20,2020 | Source: Urdu Point Provincial Minister for Fisheries and Livestock Malik Asad Ali Khokhar on Thursday said the Punjab government was taking solid steps for the development and promotion of fish farming across the province under the vision of Prime Minister Imran Khan and Chief Minister Punjab Usman Buzdar. He said this while performing ground breaking ceremony of Tilapia fish hatchery set up at a cost of Rs 28.6 million in fish farm on Satiana road, here. He said the Punjab Government was providing 80 percent subsidy on establishing fish farms to small farmers for increasing fish production. The minister said that Faisalabad was the first city out of total five where Tilapia fish hatcheries were being established. He said the government was focusing on strengthening fish farming in the province, adding, "We can meet the nutrition needs in the country by increasing fish production." He asked the farmers to contact with hatcheries of the Fisheries department for getting healthy fish seeds. The minister also threw fish seeds of different kinds of fishes in Government Himatpura Lyallpur Park spreading over 9 acres. He said that Himatpura farm would be developed on most modern lines. He said that fish meet was rich in Omega-3 which was very useful for heart related diseases. Director Fisheries said that the project of Satiana road Tilapia fish hatchery would be completed within two years. Later, the minister visited Gatwala forest park and wildlife farm. Champaign, IL (61820) Today Cloudy. High 41F. Winds SW at 10 to 15 mph.. Tonight Partly cloudy skies during the evening will give way to cloudy skies overnight. Low 26F. Winds WSW at 5 to 10 mph. Advertisement A fitness trainer who was burned to death with her three children by her 'monster' husband suffered 10 years of emotional, financial and sexual abuse, a friend has revealed. Hannah Clarke and her three children were torched in their car on Wednesday morning by Rowan Baxter who stabbed himself to death at the scene in Camp Hill, Brisbane. On Friday morning her friend Manja Whaley, who met Ms Clarke at a gym last year, revealed the mother-of-three had been abused throughout her relationship. Speaking on the Today show, Ms Whaley also told how Baxter once admitted threatening to kill his oldest child from a previous relationship in comments which spooked Ms Clarke. He also threatened to harm their children if she refused to have sex with him and wouldn't let her wear shorts to the gym in case she attracted other men. On Friday morning her friend Manja Whaley (right) revealed that Ms Clarke had been abused throughout her relationship Manja Whaley shared this photo of Ms Clarke (centre in black next to her mother Suzanne) with her children and dog at the gym where she worked and ran a 'Mums and bubs' class. Bottom right is Manja Whaley with her children Ms Whaley also shared this image of Ms Clarke at the beach with her two daughters before they were brutally killed Hannah Clarke and her three children were torched in their car on Wednesday morning by former Rowan Baxter (all pictured together) who stabbed himself to death at the scene in Camp Hill, Brisbane The friend said Ms Clarke did not believe she was in a domestic violence relationship because she had never been hit. 'I work in domestic violence... so when she first confided in me we spoke about the violence and for such a long time she didn't believe she was in a domestic violence relationship,' Ms Whaley said. 'It hadn't crossed her mind, because as she said to me, her words, 'he didn't hit me'.' 'I then started unpacking with her the emotional abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, and she had experienced all of those. 'And some of the things that she would explain was this excessive control of Rowan, the sexual abuse daily, and if she didn't have sex with him, he would punish not only her but also the children. 'She wouldn't be allowed to go to the gym which was not only her passion but her outlet. 'There was the checking of her accounts on Facebook, the accusations of her cheating, if she was having messages with males, even males he knew through the gym, he would accuse her of being flirtatious. Left: Hannah Clarke pictured with her 'main man', son Trey in a beach snap. Right: Ms Clarke on her wedding day with her husband Grim aftermath: A burnt-out Kia Sportage is seen on Raven Street where Rowan Baxter murdered his three children and estranged wife by dousing them in petrol and setting them alight Ms Whaley also revealed that Baxter would make comments about Ms Clarke's physical appearance. 'She would get dressed and she would be picking up her clothes, and he would say things to her like 'look at your stomach, that's just disgusting'. You know, the list goes on. 'She would always come to the gym in tights, and I once asked her about it and, yeah, he didn't like her wearing shorts because she would be promiscuous. 'So, it was all of that. Just that control and manipulation, threats, and, yeah, just threats to punish, not only her but also her children.' Ms Whaley, who was a domestic violence worker for 10 years, also revealed a terrifying comment that Baxter made to Ms Clarke about a previous relationship with the mother of his first child. She said: 'Still something Hannah said stuck to her mind is that he said to his previous partner that if she was to leave him, and with his child, he would take the child and kill himself and kill the child. 'He never followed through, but there are these threats, you know, things that they say. It is just dangerous.' On Thursday morning dozens of family and friends visited the scene of the tragedy to pay tribute to Ms Clarke According to Ms Whaley, Ms Clarke left Baxter on December 5. 'My hope is that people are more aware of domestic violence... just because you haven't been beaten doesn't mean that there is no domestic violence,' she said. The death of Ms Clarke and her children has sparked an outpouring of grief and anger on social media which has been noted by Queensland Police. 'Our investigations have shown us quite clearly that there is a palpable sense of grief and mourning amongst the community,' Detective Inspector Mark Thompson said. Queensland Police have revealed Ms Clarke and Mr Baxter had been previously referred to support services, and police had received reports of domestic violence within the family over several months. A Brisbane court granted at least one domestic violence order against Baxter, 42. On Wednesday morning Ms Clarke, 31, was setting out on the school run from her parents' home when her estranged husband approached their SUV and sat in the passenger seat. Aaliyah (left), six, Laianah (right), four, and Trey (centre), three, were killed in a quadruple murder-suicide on Wednesday morning when their father set their car alight on their way to school The car travelled around the corner into Raven Street, in Camp Hill, where he doused everyone in flames and set the car alight. Hannah was able to escape, but was so badly burned her skin was literally falling off through holes in her scorched active wear. The children burned to death inside the car as neighbours tried in vain to rescue them from the inferno and Baxter did his best to hinder their efforts with a knife. Then Baxter, horribly burned by the flames himself, plunged the knife into his chest and dropped dead next to the car. Two days after the tragedy, Queensland Police Commissioner Katarina Carroll confirmed police are treating their deaths as murder. 'This is a shocking tragedy which has affected the whole community,' Ms Carroll said. 'Our thoughts are particularly with the family and loved ones.' How killer dad was jealous of his wife for being FITTER and better at Crossfit than him - as the master manipulator's 11-year campaign of abuse is laid bare By Nic White for Daily Mail Australia A wannabe rugby league professional who burned his entire family to death after his wife left him was a master manipulator who tried to control every aspect of her life. Rowan Charles Baxter, 42, 'ambushed' his estranged wife Hannah Clarke, 31, as she drove their kids Aaliyah, 6, Laianah, 4, and Trey, 3, to school in Brisbane on Wednesday morning. He dived into the car, doused them in petrol and set it ablaze, burning all four to death while stabbing himself in the chest until he died next to the car. Hannah's parents Lloyd and Suzanne Clarke told Daily Mail Australia on Thursday that although Baxter entered a downward spiral after she left him with the kids, he was always a menace. They said Baxter was controlling and emotionally abusive from the start of their relationship 11 years ago - when Hannah was just 20 - and tried to isolate her from friends and family. 'We always had misgivings about him,' Mrs Clarke said as the couple stood next to a table with two framed photos of Hannah and her children either side of a bouquet of flowers. 'He was always controlling, he ruined her relationship with everyone, even tried to get her away from us.' Baxter couldn't stand how her daughter, a champion athlete who won gold medals in trampoline, would outshine him Baxter often expressed his adoration - both for his wife and his children - all over social media (Pictured with his two daughters) 'We'd go down to the coast and if they turned up and saw us there, they would go to another beach.' Baxter breached a domestic violence order weeks before he committed the quadruple murder-suicide. He was due to face court again on April 8 after a magistrate ruled he was free to return home during his initial hearing on January 29. Less than a month later, he would commit his unimaginable act of evil. Mr Clarke said few people knew what a monster Baxter really was because he was able to convince everyone he was 'hard done by' and that he was the good guy. 'Rowan was very good at manipulating people into doing what he wanted, he could put the tears on in a pinch and make you feel sorry for him,' she said. Left: Hannah Clarke pictured with her 'main man', son Trey in a beach snap. Right: Mrs Baxter on her wedding with her husband Hannah Clarke survived the initial inferno, which killed her three children, Aaliyah, six, Laianah, four, and Trey, three on Wednesday morning, but died in hospital 'He makes people think he's a nice guy, then he sponges off them and burns them when he's done with them, and moves on. 'He sponged thousands off us and Hannah.' Mr Clarke said Baxter couldn't stand how her daughter, a champion athlete who won gold medals in trampoline, would outshine him. 'He was jealous of her sporting success and when she beat him in crossfit. He had a chip on his shoulder because he didn't make it as an NRL player,' she said. Mr Clarke said Baxter was the main trainer but his wife was far more qualified because he 'couldn't pass the tests'. 'Rowan didn't like that he couldn't control Hannah with us and her brother because we saw right through him,' he said. 'He had to win at all costs, being a sportsman and a personal trainer and all that. 'Over the 11 years of marriage he wore her down. He split her apart from her brother. Since we got her out they've reconnected and have a great relationship.' Hannah finally had enough in November and, with the help of her parents, secretly left her husband and took the three children with her. 'She had to get the kids and just go without saying anything, because he was such a control freak and would get into her head space and she would give in,' Mr Clarke said. Baxter's New Years' Day post: The killer brought in the new year with this post of his children in the shallows. 'Goodnight ratbags always in my heart,' it was captioned Bodies were seen being loaded into the back of a funeral van on Wednesday afternoon, the family's burnt-out Kia Sportage can be seen in the background being examined by police On Thursday morning dozens of family and friends visited the scene of the tragedy to pay tribute to Ms Clarke Without Baxter being able to control the situation anymore, all hell broke loose and he entered a spiral of increasingly erratic actions before Wednesday's horrific murder-suicide. 'Everything got worse after she left as he couldn't control the situation anymore,' Mrs Clarke said. Her husband added: 'He thought he was hard done by and wanted 50 per cent of custody and we knew that couldn't work, the guy didn't work, he couldn't support his own family. It started getting ugly.' Baxter, a New Zealand Warriors castoff, was occasionally allowed to see the children on weekends, but there was always tension, and even one assault, on drop offs and pickups. 'He kidnapped (one of the kids) on Boxing Day and took her interstate to Pottsville (in NSW) for four days until the police got her back,' Mrs Clarke said. 'He stayed with a mate who was an absolute animal and sent Hannah a disgusting email blaming her for everything.' Hannah explained in a series of messages to a friend how Baxter managed to grab her child and run away for days on end. 'He took her off me in the street because I said the kids couldn't stay with him until we had a court order,' she said. 'He got the s**ts and picked her up and threw her in his car.' In another conversation, Hannah said: 'I'm so glad I got out when I did. I'm safe, I'm with my parents who are very, very normal. I'm just so glad I got out when I did.' Text messages sent by Hannah Clarke to a relative in the weeks after she fled her violent marriage and moved in with her parents The shocking murder-suicide that has left Australia reeling unfolded just metres from the home of Ms Clarke's parents on Raven Street, Camp Hill, as she drove her children to school Three weeks ago - the last time the children stayed with Baxter at the former family home 3km away - the two got into an argument as he dropped them off. Baxter assaulted her in the Clarke's front yard by grabbing her by the wrist and twisting her arm behind her back, hurting her shoulder. The couple said he was charged with assault. 'He was supposed to drop the kids off at 9 o'clock but everything has to be on his terms so he arrived at 9.15. He was incredibly petty,' Mr Baxter said. There was more drama when he picked them up days earlier, which Mr Clarke said was a window into his mind. 'He wouldn't even look Hannah in the eyes. Hannah took the kids out and said that one of them had an ear infection and needed to take medication and he wouldn't even listen,' he said. The Baxter children Laianah, four, and Aaliyah, six holding Trey, three One of Hannah Clarke's friends doubled over in pain as she visited the scene of the murder in Brisbane. She cried at the memorial which has been building up since Wednesday 'He was trying to rush the kids into the car and Hannah said 'hey how about a kiss goodbye from Mum?' and Trey jumped out and gave her a hug.' Mr Clarke said Baxter didn't check if Trey was buckled back in, drove a little down the road , stopped, got out and buckled him up, then 'sped off like a lunatic'. Baxter's Facebook page was filled with sweet snaps of his children, videos of them at play, and declarations of love - but it was all an act. 'Everyone thought they had a great family because he projected this image on social media with all these sweet pictures and saying he couldn't live without her,' Mr Clarke said. 'It was all a facade. He said he was a good father and he loved his kids, but how can you love them and do something like this?' Mrs Clarke added: 'He was on social media every night [making himself look like a loving father] so Hannah got a lot of trolls sending her nasty thing, but they didn't know the story.' Facebook takes down killer dad's profile after his page was inundated with people branding him 'scum' After the horrific murder-suicide, Baxter's Facebook page was flooded with thousands of hate messages. 'Enjoy hell, you dirty, evil, possessive b*****d,' one person wrote. 'Eternal suffering is still not enough for you.' 'I am atheist, but with my heart I hope I am wrong and that there is a hell for monsters like this,' another woman wrote. 'He deserves to burn for eternity. Rest in peace the mother and the three beautiful innocent children. So sickeningly sad.' Prior to the deactivation Baxter's Facebook page had been turned into a memorial page Another added: 'Such horror. There's a dark place in hell for someone who sets their children on fire. Bless their and their mother's souls. They deserved so much more.' By Thursday night the Facebook page was removed from the site. Daily Mail Australia understands the account was removed as it breached Facebook's Violence and Criminal Behaviour policy. Prior to the deactivation Baxter's account had been turned into a memorial page. Ms Clarke's has not yet been given the same treatment. Advertisement Police attend the scene of a car fire which claimed the lives of an entire family of five Hannah Clarke died just hours after her babies were doused in petrol and burned alive by her estranged husband Rowan Hannah Clarke was desperate to save her babies even when covered in flames with her skin melting off Hannah continued to be the best mum she could to her 'two princess and a prince', and took them to Sea World with her parents on the weekend - their last family outing. Hannah's parents are still searching for answers about how Baxter managed to get inside the car and set it on fire. They said he wasn't allowed with in 20m of her after an earlier assault, and they didn't see him that morning and have no idea why he was there. 'We still don't know how he got so close. He's obviously ambushed her somehow, I'm sure she would not have stopped for him, she would be more likely to try to run over him,' Mr Clarke said. 'He had to hurt us because we'd beaten him. He was sprialling and had run out of people to sponge off. Looks like all of a sudden he decided there was only one way out.' The couple believed Baxter was obsessively tracking his estranged wife's phone and location by hacking her device - forcing her to frequently change her passwords. For 24/7 confidential support, contact Lifeline on 13 11 14 BRISBANE MURDER-SUICIDE: HOW COWARDLY RAMPAGE UNFOLDED JANUARY, 2020 Queensland Police officers are called to a family violence incident that allegedly involved the couple. WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 19 - EARLY MORNING: Rowan Charles Baxter, 42, is spotted filling a jerry can with fuel at a local service station. 8.20AM: Baxter dives into his estranged wife Hannah Clarke's white Kia Sportage as she was preparing to do the school drop off on Raven Street, Camp Hill, a wealthy suburb of Brisbane. He douses Ms Clarke, 31, and their three children - Aaliyah, six, Laianah, four, and Trey, three - in petrol and sets the car alight. Neighbours hear an explosion which sounded like a 'gas bottle' blast. At least four explosions followed. Baxter grabs a knife from the SUV and stabs himself in the chest. He tries to stop neighbours from saving his wife and children before dying in the street. Ms Clarke escapes the burning car and screams: 'He's poured petrol on me.' Horrified witnesses see her skin peeling off her body. One heroic neighbour hoses her down in an attempt to save her life and suffers burns himself. She is rushed to Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital in a critical condition. WEDNESDAY NIGHT: Ms Clarke dies in hospital from the horrendous burns she suffered in the quadruple murder suicide. Advertisement Mourners pay their respects at a makeshift shrine near the scene. Mothers were seen kneeling by the flowers with children They said he sent Hannah suspicious attachments and 'knew things he shouldn't have known'. 'He was going through her phone and tracking her whereabouts. It was really scary,' Mrs Clarke said. Mr Clarke gave a heartfelt thanks to everyone who responded to the horrific car fire and pledged to express his gratitude in person in coming weeks. 'I'm so thankful to the neighbours and the tradies who tried to help my girl, for trying to save her,' he said. He wished a speedy recovery to heroic neighbour Michael Zemek, who got Ms Baxter to lie down and roll to smother the flames, then sprayed her with water from his garden hose. Mr Zemek is recovering in hospital from burns to his hands and face he suffered while trying to save Ms Baxter. Re-advertise of Area Manager, Aleppo, Syria Organization: UNDP - United Nations Development Programme Country: Syria Field location: Aleppo, Syria Office: UNDP Aleppo, Syria Grade: NO-C Closing date: Wednesday, 26 February 2020 Job ID: 28828 Practice Area - Job Family: Crisis Prevention and RecoveryManagement Vacancy End Date: (Midnight New York, USA) 26/02/2020 Duty Station: Aleppo, Syrian Arab Republic Education & Work Experience: G-Bachelors Level Degree - 7 year(s) experience, I-Masters Level Degree - 5 year(s) experience Languages: Arabic, English Grade: NOC Vacancy Type: FTA Local Posting Type: External Bureau: Crisis Prevention & Recovery Contract Duration: 1 Year with possibility for extension Open for Syrian Nationality only Background More than eight years into the crisis, the scale, severity, and complexity of needs across Syria remain deep and far-reaching. Over half of the countrys population have fled their homes: 5 million people have sought refuge in the region and beyond, and 1 million people are internally displaced. 13.1 million people remain in need of humanitarian assistance. Of these, 6 million people face acute humanitarian needs. Millions of people have fallen into poverty, forced to resort to harmful coping strategies and faced with increasing protection risks. If hostilities continue in some parts of the country, humanitarian needs are expected to deepen in these areas during 2019. In 2019 with no end to the conflict in sight, humanitarian needs are expected to continue to grow in scale, severity, and complexity. Humanitarian Response Plan (HRP) and the successor arrangement to the UNSF are expected to play a role in strengthening the Humanitarian-Development-Peacebuilding Nexus by strengthening Resilience of the affected population in Syria. The role of Resilience is expected to grow in importance and significance due to the need to accelerate the transition from immediate Humanitarian assistance to IDPs and affected population to more sustainable and recovery-oriented support, including support to potential returns of IDPs as well as refugees. The priorities of UNDP Syria are, as stipulated in the Country Programme Document 2016-2017 (extended till the end of 2019), to enhance the resilience and socio-economic stabilization of individuals and communities through restoring the disrupted livelihoods of the affected communities; and restoring, rehabilitating and maintaining sustainable basic services and infrastructure in damaged areas and host communities. Embedded in each priority is an institutional crisis response capacity development component for key national and local partners. Mindful of the scale of the crisis, the scaled-up, targeted, and rapidly responsive interventions of UNDP Syria would strive to mitigate displacement and movement of refugees, including forced, illegal, and unsafe migration and the trafficking of refugees, and to support potential returns of the IDPs. Under the overall guidance of the Resident Representative and Deputy Resident Representative and direct supervision of the Field Management Specialist and close collaboration with programme and operations teams, the Area Manager is responsible for the coordination and management of UNDPs area-based strategies and interventions in Aleppo. The Area Manager analyzes social and economic trends and advises UNDP office accordingly on policy and programme interventions; builds strategic partnerships in the field with local authorities and development partners; and coordinates the formulation, management and monitoring of area-based strategies, plans and interventions. S/He ensures achievements of results within the timeline, allocated budget and according to UNDP quality and accountability standards and rules and regulations. The Area Manager is responsible for day to day management of the office and works together with programme portfolio and project managers and early recovery team for programmatic planning and implementation and relevant CO operations units for operational issues. S/He liaises with relevant partners and stakeholders and supervises and guides field staff, ensuring quality reporting on implementation. Duties and Responsibilities Ensures strategic programme planning, coordination and implementation in Aleppo, focusing on achievement of the following results: Leads the preparation of social and economic analyses and context analyses in the area and feeds results regularly to update the area profile and situation analysis; Regularly conducts analyses of the most critical resilience needs, response capacities, access situation, operational environment and applicable security issues; Provides guidance and manages the overall Aleppo area office programme development and implementation including planning, budgeting, implementation and monitoring. Ensures overall efficient coordination of programmes/projects including planning processes and timely delivery of results taking into consideration agreed upon work plans with the UNDP country office and consistency with CPD priorities. Support localization and implementation of Sustainable Development Goals in the region and promote joint initiatives and delivering as one-UN in the area; Ensures identification and promotion of joint programming and planning opportunities; Identifies and develops new programme and project opportunities; Supports capacity building of national counterparts; Oversees project implementation through close monitoring of results. Ensures effective application of RBM tools, management of scorecard targets and other benchmarks; Coordinates and follows through on decentralized local evaluations; Ensures full compliance with audit requirements and timely follow-up to audit recommendations; Promotes identification and synthesis of best practices and lessons learned for organizational sharing and learning; Leads the preparation of local implementation strategies as per locally identified priorities; strategic goals of UNDP and available resources; Based on the above, identifies concrete thematic interventions, prepares the area-based implementation plan in coordination with technical teams in Damascus, and manages the process of formulating proposals in conjunction with local partners; Identifies different implementation modalities for the planned activities according to the operational environment in the target area. Responsible for Representation and Coordination and effective Management of the Area Office focusing on achievement of the following: Represents UNDP with UNCT and partners at the local level as requested and authorized by the Resident Representative; Provides strong coordination support to UN Agencies, local authorities and other organizations through the establishment of a wider consultation process.; Ensures proper coordination and inputs to Interagency initiatives; Maintains collaboration and coordination with the other Area Managers to ensure programmatic integration and sharing of best practices; Maintains regular contact with strategic partners, project managers and implementation partners in the area office; Advocates for adherence to UNDP resilience principles with a view to enhance socio-economic recovery and local governance; Ensures smooth running of the Area Office, builds an effective Area Office team, promotes team work and an environment that is conducive to delivering results; Ensures full responsibility for the appropriate use and management of resources attributed to the Area Office by tracking use of financial resources, ensuring the integrity of financial systems and consistent application of the Internal Control Framework and/or rules and regulations. Continually find ways to systematically identify and integrate efficiency gains and cost reductions in all operations of the Area Office; Approves contracts and ATLAS transactions under written delegated authority from the Resident Representative. Has Atlas manager rights as delegated. Responsible for the management of the Area Office staff, monitors their performance, completing performance assessments where necessary; Ensures timely and regular reporting; In collaboration with the CO, ensures that the security needs of office and projects are met. Under the supervision of the Resident Representative and in collaboration with the Local Security Associate/Officer ensures enforcement of security procedures and MOSS/MORSS requirements in the Area Office; Tags capacity development development projects displacement early recovery economic trends financial resources humanitarian assistance humanitarian response information management internally displaced local communities local development local governance monitoring and evaluation procurement programme planning project implementation project manager refugees resource mobilization security associate social sciences sustainable development sustainable development goals trafficking Mitigates possible risks and impacts associated with the Area Office operations (e.g. logistical, security etc.) by proactively designing reduction measures in collaboration with the Security Advisor; Builds capacity of the office staff by identifying capacity needs and establishing training/learning programmes. Leads development, implementation and monitoring of area-based work plans ensuring achievement of results according to UNDP quality and accountability standards, rules and procedures: Implements activities as per approved proposals and monitors implementation regularly to ensure timely delivery of results according to UNDP quality and accountability standards, rules and procedures; Supervises and monitors implementations of programme activities and updates progress against key indicators including inputs into the UNDPs information management system and alert any potential risks for implementations and take risk mitigation; Participates in the preparation of procurement and recruitment plans and follows up with the Field Management Specialist and relevant CO units as needed; Ensures effective application of RBM tools, closely monitors work plans of the area office and each of the on-going projects; Guides capacity-building of the area office staff in both programme and operations works; Provides regular briefings to the Field Management Specialist and UNDP Management, as needed; Supervises and mentors staff, ensuring regular feedback on their performance; Facilitates the work of national and international consultants and participates in missions to the area; Coordinates the preparation and review of all documentation pertaining to the area, such as project sheets, monitoring reports, briefs, stories, etc.; Manages the work of UNDP operationally ensuring relevant documentation is provided to the country office as per HR, financial, procurement and other operational rules and regulations and guidelines; Building and maintaining strategic and effective partnerships with all stakeholders and coordinates UNDP area-based activities internally with various thematic portfolios and externally with other UN agencies, civil society, local authorities and any other local stakeholder: Establishes and fosters effective relationships with key stakeholders in the field including government authorities, local communities and municipalities; Maps stakeholders and builds partnerships with private sector, NGOs/ CBOs and other local partners; Provides strategic advice to the Syria CO in overall resource mobilization efforts for Aleppo in close collaboration with relevant portfolio managers at the CO.; Coordinates the local level Early Recovery and Livelihoods Sector Working Group and NGO forum; Participates in inter-agency missions as approved by UNDP Syria Management and provide relevant suggestions for follow up; Identifies potential partners (NGOs, private sector etc.), and manages communications with implementation partners for timely and quality implementation of activities on the ground; Encourages ways of increasing Area Office funding base such as engaging in resource mobilization efforts in consultation with local counterparts and following-up with donors on local opportunities. Promotes communication flow in the office focusing on achievement of the following results: Maximizes communication between the various portfolios and ensures that stakeholders (development partners, bilateral and multilateral donors, private sector, civil society, UN agencies and Government agencies) have one consistent UNDP counterpart; Ensures internal communication and coordination at area office level as well as effective and proactive communication between relevant CO units (management, programme and operations units) and the area office; Monitors the perception of UNDP at the local level and suggest media activities that positions UNDP more strategically and effectively as an impartial broker for local resilience and development. Enhances local visibility for UNDP in development effectiveness; Ensures that local resilience results are effectively communicated in collaboration with Communication Office in the country office; Provides inputs to UNDP CO Communications on development results. Competencies Required Skills and Experience Education: Masters Degree in Business Administration, Management, Social Sciences, Development Studies. First level university degree with 7 years of experience may be considered in lieu of advanced university degree; Experience: A minimum of 5 years of progressively professional experience in the field of development; Hands-on experience in design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of development projects; Field experience in the area of local development is a strong asset; Experience in the usage of computers and MS Office. Knowledge of the area, experience of working in Aleppo and excellent partnerships is highly desired; Language Requirements: Fluency in both Arabic and English. Disclaimer Important applicant information All posts in the GS categories are subject to local recruitment. Applicant information about UNDP rosters Note: UNDP reserves the right to select one or more candidates from this vacancy announcement. We may also retain applications and consider candidates applying to this post for other similar positions with UNDP at the same grade level and with similar job description, experience and educational requirements. Workforce diversity UNDP is committed to achieving diversity within its workforce, and encourages all qualified applicants, irrespective of gender, nationality, disabilities, sexual orientation, culture, religious and ethnic backgrounds to apply. All applications will be treated in the strictest confidence. Scam warning The United Nations does not charge any application, processing, training, interviewing, testing or other fee in connection with the application or recruitment process. Should you receive a solicitation for the payment of a fee, please disregard it. Furthermore, please note that emblems, logos, names and addresses are easily copied and reproduced. Therefore, you are advised to apply particular care when submitting personal information on the web. India will ink an agreement with Sri Lanka to develop the Jaffna's Palaly airport in the Tamil-dominated Northern province, an official statement said on Thursday. The decision comes a day after the Sri Lankan Cabinet approved a proposal for the MoU with India for the project, which would include terminal modification and electricity supplies among others. "India has already agreed to provide Sri Lanka with a grant of 300 million Sri Lankan rupees (Rs 11.83 cr) for the development of the airport which started its international flights last year," the statement said. Under the proposed work on the MoU, the facilities at the airport such as terminal modification, electricity supplies, utility services and transit facilities are to be improved. India's Alliance Air became the first airline last November to operate flights to and from Palaly when they commenced a service to Chennai. It was only this month that a civilian flight service was started to Palaly from capital Colombo which is meant as a feeder to Chennai-Jaffna flights. The airport would add to the socio-economic welfare of the Tamil dominated Northern province, whose capital Jaffna was the base from where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ran their military campaign for a separate Tamil homeland for nearly 30 years. The campaign ended in 2009 after the Sri Lankan Army killed its supreme leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Commercial tenants have been announced for the Denham Building in Birminghams Parkside District. Atlanta-based Third & Urban and Colliers International say the mixed-use redevelopment will be the home, beginning next month, of TechStars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator and Rintro. The 132,000-square-foot complex on First Avenue South will also see the opening of Monday Night Brewing in April. Work began in 2018 on the project. The Denham Building is named after its original architects, Denham, Van Keuren & Denham. It originally opened in 1927 as the Merchants and Manufacturers Terminal Building. With such a large and dynamic building, our goal is to attract an array of tenants that will contribute to and benefit from the unique and vibrant fabric of Parkside, John Hennessy said. Hennessy is a partner at Colliers International, the firm leading commercial leasing for the building. As the technology and innovation sector grows in Birmingham, we want the Denham Building to support this growth as a central location for our citys innovative entrepreneurs. Last October, Colorado-based Techstars and Alabama Power launched Techstars Alabama EnergyTech Accelerator to nurture businesses focused on the future of energy. The Economic Development Partnership of Alabama (EDPA) and the Alabama Department of Commerce are also taking part in the venture. TechStars is a 13-week mentorship-driven accelerator focused on helping startups address innovative electrical and utility solutions. Nate Schmidt, managing director of TechStars, said the Denham Buildings location and collaborative atmosphere are what the program was looking for. The Denham Building is the perfect spot for our citys next great companies to emerge, Schmidt said. I envision mentors visiting the space to collaborate with founders before dropping by Monday Night Brewing to enjoy a locally brewed beer. Plus, most of our out of town teams will likely live nearby or at Denham. I dont think Alabama Power could have picked a better place for this program. Rintro is a Birmingham-based tech startup with a mobile app enabling short-term rentals for outdoor recreational equipment. Its designed to eliminate the cost barrier associated with outdoor activities such as canoeing, camping, rock climbing and mountain biking. Founder Richie Gudzan said the building is the right fit. For us, it has everything throwback roots and an industrial past with a modern feel right in the epicenter of Parkside," Gudzan said. Monday Night Brewing, the Atlanta-based brewery, plans to offer a selection of beers brewed exclusively in Birmingham. The product of three friends love of beer and conversation, Monday Night Brewing began after founders Jonathan Baker, Jeff Heck, and Joel Iverson met in a Bible study group through Atlanta Westside Presbyterian Church. On Monday nights, they would brew beer in Hecks backyard. By 2011 they were introducing their own brand. We have some pretty exciting things planned for Monday Night Social Club from the unique decor to the expansive food menu and beer list, co-founder and Chief Marking Officer Jonathan Baker said. Expect bold, geometric designs, mixed textures and comfortable seating combined with a delicious food menu and the most extensive tap list we offer on draft at any of our breweries. In addition, Third & Urban and Colliers International are currently building out more studio suites, ranging from 2,500 to 6,000 square feet, that will be ready for tenants to occupy within 120 days. Residential apartments are currently 90 percent leased. Commercial spaces also feature larger offices from 10,000 to 20,000 square feet, street-level retail or restaurant spaces and a rooftop restaurant and patio with a view of the Birmingham skyline. This post was modified at 5:32 p.m. Feb. 20 to correct information provided by the developer. NEW YORK and LONDON and HONG KONG, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hazeltree, the leading provider of integrated treasury management and portfolio finance solutions, today announced the expansion of Hazeltree Collateral Manager to include Standard Initial Margin Model (SIMM) calculations in partnership with AcadiaSoft. This new partnership helps clients to meet their obligations under Phases 5 and 6 of the Uncleared Margin Rules (UMR). Under the new rules, derivatives trading relationships become increasingly complex, requiring both sides of each transaction to calculate daily Initial Margin (IM). Calculating bilateral margin under SIMM requires sophisticated risk, sensitivities and market data inputs across all covered trading with each respective counterparty. This initiative will provide the Hazeltree buy-side community with seamless margin calculations for their entire margin workflow, all in a single cloud solution. Hazeltree Collateral Manager helps optimize collateral usage, minimize operational risks, strengthen controls and enhance treasury ROI through a streamlined, automated OTC collateral management process. "By partnering with Hazeltree, we're able to offer the buy-side community a state-of-the-art integrated solution that both helps our clients meet their UMR obligations and takes another step toward standardization across the industry. The more consistency we can bring to these services, the more efficient we'll make the entire margin process for our clients," said Fred Dassori, Head of Strategic Development at AcadiaSoft. "Hazeltree supports all aspects of the collateral management processes, ensuring our clients are fully equipped to meet the upcoming phases of UMR," said Paul Calderone, Chief Operating Officer of Hazeltree. "We partner with industry leaders to better service buy-side firms. We are delighted to add AcadiaSoft to our list of partners as we continue enhancing our collateral management capabilities." About AcadiaSoft, Inc. AcadiaSoft, Inc. is the leading industry provider of risk and collateral management services for the non-cleared derivatives community. AcadiaPlus is an open platform that provides the sell-side, the buy-side and fund administrators with specialist applications and a third-party partner ecosystem for the straight-through processing of the entire risk mitigation lifecycle. Backed by 16 major industry participants and market infrastructures, AcadiaSoft is used by a community of more than 1100 firms exchanging approximately $700B of collateral on a daily basis via its margin automation services. AcadiaSoft is headquartered in Norwell, MA and has offices in London, New York and Tokyo. For more information, visit acadiasoft.com. Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AcadiaSoft_ and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/acadiasoft-inc/. About Hazeltree Hazeltree is the leading treasury management and portfolio finance solutions provider, serving hedge funds, private markets, asset managers, fund administrators, insurance companies and pension funds with powerful, proactive performance enhancement and risk mitigation capabilities that generates alpha from streamlined operations and reduces a range of liquidity and funding risks. Hazeltree's integrated solution includes comprehensive cash management, securities financing, collateral management, counterparty management and margin management capabilities. Hazeltree is headquartered in New York with offices in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit www.hazeltree.com. Tamkeen, Bahrains labour fund, has received The Best Governmental Agency of the Middle East Supporting Entrepreneurship award at the World Congress WBAF 2020 held recently in Turkey. The award ceremony took place at the World Congress WBAF 2020 VIP Gala dinner where Tamkeen was selected amongst a group of participating organizations from the Middle East. This award highlights Tamkeens role and efforts within the entrepreneurship sector since it provides various services and programs for entrepreneurs and contributes to the countrys social and economic status. Shaikh Mohammed bin Essa Al-Khalifa, chairman of Tamkeen commented on the achievements Bahrain has attained with its strong presence within the region especially through its programs and services offered to entrepreneurs. According to him, this represents a promising plan to develop the national economy, pointing out that this award also reflects the countrys vision of improving its economy and supporting the entrepreneurship sector. Dr Ebrahim Mohammed Janahi, chief executive of Tamkeen said: This is one of the most prominent international awards hosted by the World Congress where more than 1500 participants from all around the world attend this event to discuss the most important and recent topics around global economic developments in addition to investment opportunities and how to strengthen the development of sustainable global economies. Baybars Altuntas, chairman of the Board of Directors, World Business Angels Investment Forum (WBAF) extended his congratulations to Bahrain on this achievement and expressed his confidence in the contribution of Tamkeens role in supporting the startup ecosystem and entrepreneurship. This Award is presented to organizations that demonstrate best practices in the region and salute those who stand out in imagining, discussing, and shaping the future of an entrepreneurial world, he added. Chief of Planning and Monitoring of Tamkeen, Dr Jarmo Kotilaine participated in a panel discussion on developing startup and FDI ecosystems and increasing cross-border investment. The World Congress WBAF 2020 is considered one of the worlds most important fixtures for early and post-early stage equity and capital markets. It provides a unique opportunity for executives of private equity funds, wealth management institutions, family offices, banks and stock exchanges, among others. Moreover, it features seven key summits including: Angel Investors Summit 2020, Global Startups Summit 2020, CEO Investors Summit 2020, Foreign Direct Investment Summit FDI 2020, Science, Technology & Innovation Summit 2020, Global Woman Leaders Summit 2020, and FinTech Summit 2020. TradeArabia News Service On Saturday, 20,000 people demonstrated in Thuringias state capital Erfurt against the political conspiracy of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Free Democratic Party (FDP) and fascist Alternative for Germany (AfD). Now, the Left Party is collaborating closely with the CDU, reacting to the enormous opposition against fascism and war by moving further to the right and closing ranks with all the establishment parties. On Monday evening, former Thuringia state premier Bodo Ramelow proposed on behalf of the Left Party that former CDU state premier Christine Lieberknecht be appointed head of the state executive. According to Ramelows proposal, Lieberknecht, who headed the state government from 2009 to 2014 and pushed through radical social cuts, should form a technocratic government with three ministers for about 70 days and prepare the election of a new state legislature. Christine Lieberknecht (left) and German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2014 [Credit: AP Photo/Michael Sohn] The same party, which has close ties to the fascists of the AfD, and which ten days ago, in a political provocation, elected FDP politician Thomas Kemmerich as state premier in alliance with the AfD, is now to take over the government. At the protest rally on Saturday, Left Party officials had called Kemmerichs election with the votes of the AfD a coup from the right. Now, the Left Party is proposing the putschists take over the government. The Left Party could hardly express more clearly that it is part of the political conspiracy that has made possible the rise of the AfD. In the face of growing opposition to the AfD and the shift to the right of the entire political establishment, the Left Party is forging an alliance of all establishment parties in order to strengthen the state apparatus and implement a policy of blatant social inequality. Former head of government Ramelow justified his proposal on Tuesday morning by saying he wanted to open a non-partisan path acceptable to all and make a contribution to the stabilization of the federal state. He would not run for the office of state prime minister for the time being, he promised. Thuringia needed a government that is capable of acting, he said. The leader of the Left Party in Thuringia, Susanne Hennig-Wellsow, explained a timetable for Ramelows proposal. According to the schedule, the state parliament would be dissolved at the beginning of March and agree to new elections. After that, the technocratic state government with Lieberknecht at its head would be installed. Seventy days later, a new government would be formed following fresh elections. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) reacted enthusiastically and applauded. Thuringias SPD state leader Wolfgang Tiefensee welcomed Ramelows proposal, saying, This is a very good plan. Ramelow deserved high respect for stepping aside and placing the interests of the federal state and good governance at the centre of his actions. The negotiating group of the Thuringian CDU faction reacted cautiously on Monday and asked for time to consider the matter. On Tuesday afternoon, they in turn went on the offensive and set conditions. The election of Christine Lieberknecht as state premier was a good proposal, but the stability of the federal state demanded by Ramelow did not allow for immediate new elections and a limitation to three ministers. Instead, the state executive must be fully staffed and formed across party lines by appointing experts. Such a government, headed by Lieberknecht and the CDU, would have to draw up the budget for the coming year and pass it in parliament. Rushed new elections would not help, said a CDU spokesperson. Last week, Ramelow had offered the CDU to renegotiate the state budget already approved by the previous red-red-green (SPD-Left Party-Green Party) governmentat that time, to try and persuade the CDU to support his own re-election as state premier. On Wednesday, Lieberknecht finally turned down Ramelows offer: I was prepared to lead a transitional government if it would cut the Gordian knot. The goal would have been to finally create stable political conditions again, she told German daily Die Welt. But the negotiating partners are simply too far apart on a key issue. The Left Party wanted to create stable conditions by holding new elections quickly. That is not how my party sees it. The Thuringian CDU wanted to pacify the situation in the existing state parliament. Lieberknecht is now urging her own party to form a coalition government with Ramelow and the Left Party. We will only get this stability if the CDU and the Left Party agree on reliable parliamentary cooperation, she said. It is not clear how the political conspiracy in Erfurt will unfold. What is certain, however, is that the Left Party is providing the hated CDUwhich is losing votes massively in federal and state elections and is making deals with the AfDwith critical government responsibility. In the most recent election in Thuringia, the CDU, whose leader has been federal chancellor for 15 years, lost almost 12 percent, plummeting to 21 percent. In recent polls, it now only reaches 13 percent in Thuringia. The collaboration of the Left Party with the CDU is neither new nor surprising. For years, the Left Party has supported the policies of the federal government consisting of the SPD and CDU/CSU on all important issues. In Thuringia, it is now clearly visible that this cooperation extends to and includes the AfD. While millions of people are appalled that the CDU had elected a state premier together with the AfD, the Left Party supports the CDU, even though the boundaries between it and the AfD are fluid. A large part of the AfD cadre comes from the CDU, and the CDUs conservative wing is seeking close cooperation with the AfD. Recent developments in Thuringia make it abundantly clear that the Left Party is also willing to cooperate with the AfD. In mid-January, Stefan Moller, parliamentary secretary of the AfD faction in Erfurt, emphasized to the media that his party was quite willing to cooperate with Ramelow and the Left Party on important legislative projects. His party did not operate an all-out opposition, and there had already been legislative projects and political decisions in the last legislative period, where the AfD was definitely also on the line of the red-red-green camp. On behalf of the Left Party, Benjamin-Immanuel Hoff, acting head of the Thuringia State Chancellery, replied at the time that there were a number of issues on which both the governing parties and all opposition parties would have to cooperate in the interests of the federal state. Hoff added, I will certainly not make a law with [AfD leader] Mr. Hocke in which the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin is described as a monument of shame. But problems of municipal fiscal equalization could certainly be discussed and resolved with local politicians of the AfD. Hoff has now also helped to draft the Lieberknecht plan, which provides that he will remain head of the state chancellery under the CDU state premier. In its collaboration with right-wing parties, the Left Party is no different than its sister party Syriza in Greece. The Radical Left (Syriza) coalition led by Alexis Tsipras concluded a pact with the right-wing populist and ultra-nationalist Independent Greeks (ANEL) in spring 2013 to defend Greeces national interests. Two years later, as massive opposition to the EUs devastating austerity measures developed in Greece, and Syriza won the elections, Tsipras formed a coalition with the radical right-wing party and passed even worse social cuts than the conservative governments before them. The Left Partys cooperation with the CDU is not limited to Thuringia but is particularly evident there. This right-wing development is driven by far-reaching changes in the political situation. The same weekend that Ramelow and Hoff arranged their political coup with Christine Lieberknecht, the Munich Security Conference was taking place, where transatlantic tensions and imperialist antagonisms broke out in a big way. In response to this, Germanys military rearmament, which had already been drastically increased last year, is once again being significantly stepped up. This is associated with massive attacks on social provisions and democratic rights and is meeting with fierce resistance from workers and young people. The Left Party reacts to this intensification of class struggles with an appeal to the state to maintain peace and order. It is not opposed to the right-wing conspiracy but is part of it. The only way to fight the rise of the far-right is an independent movement of workers, directed against all parties in the Bundestag (federal parliament). This is what the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party, SGP) is fighting for. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Fulya Ozerkan and Philippe Rater (Agence France-Presse) Istanbul, Turkey/United Nations, United States Thu, February 20, 2020 08:15 692 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad206589bfe 2 World #Russia,Syria,Turkey,United-Nations,conflict Free Russia on Wednesday warned Turkey against intervening in Syria as it blocked a UN bid to end the Damascus regime's brutal assault on the last rebel enclave. Syrian aid workers called urgently for a ceasefire and international help for nearly a million people fleeing the regime onslaught in the country's northwestern Idlib province -- the biggest wave of displaced civilians in the nine-year conflict. Turkey, supporter of some rebel groups in Idlib, has been pushing for a renewed ceasefire in talks with Russia, which backs the Syrian regime. Ankara is eager to prevent another flood of refugees into its territory adding to the 3.7 million Syrians it already hosts. The Syrian NGO Alliance said displaced people are "escaping in search of safety only to die from extreme weather conditions and lack of available resources". "We have hundreds and thousands of people who are fleeing... not just from bombardments but from lack of insulation, from the weather, a lack of heating. It feels like doomsday," Razan Saffour, of the Syrian Expatriate Medical Association, told AFP in Istanbul. The group said a total of $336 million was needed for basic food, water and shelter. Education resources were also needed for 280 million displaced school-age children. Talks fail between Turkey, Russia Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said talks with Moscow over the past fortnight had so far failed to achieve "the desired result" and warned that Turkey would launch an offensive into Syria unless Damascus pulled its forces back by the end of the month. "An operation in Idlib is imminent.... We are counting down, we are making our final warnings," Erdogan said in a televised speech. He called for Syrian forces to retreat by the end of this month behind Turkey's military posts in Idlib, which were set up under a 2018 deal with Russia designed to hold off a regime advance. The Kremlin quickly responded to Erdogan's threat, saying that Turkey should instead act against "terrorist groups" in Idlib. "If we are talking about an operation against the legitimate authorities of the Syrian republic and armed forces of the Syrian republic this would of course be the worst scenario," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in Moscow. With Turkey moving large numbers of reinforcements into Idlib in recent weeks, Defence Minister Hulusi Akar emphasised that it was "out of the question for us to withdraw from our observation posts". "If there is any sort of attack against them, we will retaliate in kind," he told reporters in Ankara. Russia objects to UN bid Russia, which along with Iran backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, has repeatedly vetoed UN resolutions on the conflict as it hopes for the triumph of the regime. At the United Nations, diplomats said they were unable to produce a statement on ending the fighting due to Russian objections. "We tried very hard to have a press statement calling for cessation of hostilities and humanitarian access to Idlib," said Nicolas de Riviere, the French ambassador to the United Nations. "Basically Russia said 'no', which is very painful," he told reporters. The UN envoy to Syria, Geir Pedersen, confirmed that no progress had been made either in several rounds of talks between Turkey and Russia held in Ankara and Moscow. "To the contrary, public statements from different quarters, Syrian and international, suggest an imminent danger of further escalation," he told the UN Security Council. Earlier this week the United Nations said the displaced were mainly women and children. It warned that babies were dying of cold because aid camps are full. The Syrian NGOs called for the warring parties to allow safe access for humanitarian groups and for a "complete ceasefire and end to human rights violations". According to the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the regime offensive has killed more than 400 civilians since it began in December, adding to the toll of more than 380,000 who have died in the years of unrest. "The violence in northwest Syria is indiscriminate. Health facilities, schools, residential areas, mosques and markets have been hit," the UN head of humanitarian affairs and emergency relief, Mark Lowcock, said earlier this week. The head of the World Health Organization said Tuesday that out of nearly 550 health facilities in northwest Syria, only about half were operational. "We repeat: health facilities and health workers are not a legitimate target," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists in Geneva. Syrian troops have reconquered swathes of Idlib and retaken the key M5 highway connecting the country's four largest cities as well as the entire surroundings of Aleppo city for the first time since 2012. Oxfam said that two of the British aid group's local workers died in an attack on Wednesday elsewhere in Syria in the southern Daraa area. Could American Eagle Outfitters, Inc. (NYSE:AEO) be an attractive dividend share to own for the long haul? Investors are often drawn to strong companies with the idea of reinvesting the dividends. Yet sometimes, investors buy a popular dividend stock because of its yield, and then lose money if the company's dividend doesn't live up to expectations. In this case, American Eagle Outfitters likely looks attractive to investors, given its 3.9% dividend yield and a payment history of over ten years. We'd guess that plenty of investors have purchased it for the income. The company also bought back stock equivalent to around 8.2% of market capitalisation this year. Before you buy any stock for its dividend however, you should always remember Warren Buffett's two rules: 1) Don't lose money, and 2) Remember rule #1. We'll run through some checks below to help with this. Explore this interactive chart for our latest analysis on American Eagle Outfitters! NYSE:AEO Historical Dividend Yield, February 20th 2020 Payout ratios Companies (usually) pay dividends out of their earnings. If a company is paying more than it earns, the dividend might have to be cut. Comparing dividend payments to a company's net profit after tax is a simple way of reality-checking whether a dividend is sustainable. In the last year, American Eagle Outfitters paid out 36% of its profit as dividends. This is a middling range that strikes a nice balance between paying dividends to shareholders, and retaining enough earnings to invest in future growth. Plus, there is room to increase the payout ratio over time. In addition to comparing dividends against profits, we should inspect whether the company generated enough cash to pay its dividend. Of the free cash flow it generated last year, American Eagle Outfitters paid out 49% as dividends, suggesting the dividend is affordable. It's encouraging to see that the dividend is covered by both profit and cash flow. This generally suggests the dividend is sustainable, as long as earnings don't drop precipitously. Story continues While the above analysis focuses on dividends relative to a company's earnings, we do note American Eagle Outfitters's strong net cash position, which will let it pay larger dividends for a time, should it choose. Remember, you can always get a snapshot of American Eagle Outfitters's latest financial position, by checking our visualisation of its financial health. Dividend Volatility Before buying a stock for its income, we want to see if the dividends have been stable in the past, and if the company has a track record of maintaining its dividend. American Eagle Outfitters has been paying dividends for a long time, but for the purpose of this analysis, we only examine the past 10 years of payments. During this period the dividend has been stable, which could imply the business could have relatively consistent earnings power. During the past ten-year period, the first annual payment was US$0.40 in 2010, compared to US$0.55 last year. Dividends per share have grown at approximately 3.2% per year over this time. Slow and steady dividend growth might not sound that exciting, but dividends have been stable for ten years, which we think is seriously impressive. Dividend Growth Potential Dividend payments have been consistent over the past few years, but we should always check if earnings per share (EPS) are growing, as this will help maintain the purchasing power of the dividend. Strong earnings per share (EPS) growth might encourage our interest in the company despite fluctuating dividends, which is why it's great to see American Eagle Outfitters has grown its earnings per share at 29% per annum over the past five years. Earnings per share have rocketed in recent times, and we like that the company is retaining more than half of its earnings to reinvest. However, always remember that very few companies can grow at double digit rates forever. Conclusion Dividend investors should always want to know if a) a company's dividends are affordable, b) if there is a track record of consistent payments, and c) if the dividend is capable of growing. Firstly, we like that American Eagle Outfitters has low and conservative payout ratios. That said, we were glad to see it growing earnings and paying a fairly consistent dividend. All these things considered, we think this organisation has a lot going for it from a dividend perspective. Companies that are growing earnings tend to be the best dividend stocks over the long term. See what the 14 analysts we track are forecasting for American Eagle Outfitters for free with public analyst estimates for the company. Looking for more high-yielding dividend ideas? Try our curated list of dividend stocks with a yield above 3%. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong) Co., Ltd. (HKG:517) shareholders should be happy to see the share price up 17% in the last quarter. But that cannot eclipse the less-than-impressive returns over the last three years. In fact, the share price is down 34% in the last three years, falling well short of the market return. View our latest analysis for COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong) While the efficient markets hypothesis continues to be taught by some, it has been proven that markets are over-reactive dynamic systems, and investors are not always rational. By comparing earnings per share (EPS) and share price changes over time, we can get a feel for how investor attitudes to a company have morphed over time. During the three years that the share price fell, COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong)'s earnings per share (EPS) dropped by 3.5% each year. The share price decline of 13% is actually steeper than the EPS slippage. So it's likely that the EPS decline has disappointed the market, leaving investors hesitant to buy. The image below shows how EPS has tracked over time (if you click on the image you can see greater detail). SEHK:517 Past and Future Earnings, February 20th 2020 It might be well worthwhile taking a look at our free report on COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong)'s earnings, revenue and cash flow. What About Dividends? It is important to consider the total shareholder return, as well as the share price return, for any given stock. The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. It's fair to say that the TSR gives a more complete picture for stocks that pay a dividend. In the case of COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong), it has a TSR of -22% for the last 3 years. That exceeds its share price return that we previously mentioned. And there's no prize for guessing that the dividend payments largely explain the divergence! Story continues A Different Perspective While the broader market lost about 1.0% in the twelve months, COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong) shareholders did even worse, losing 11% (even including dividends) . Having said that, it's inevitable that some stocks will be oversold in a falling market. The key is to keep your eyes on the fundamental developments. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 2.8% per year over five years. We realise that Buffett has said investors should 'buy when there is blood on the streets', but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. Case in point: We've spotted 2 warning signs for COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong) you should be aware of, and 1 of them is significant. But note: COSCO SHIPPING International (Hong Kong) may not be the best stock to buy. So take a peek at this free list of interesting companies with past earnings growth (and further growth forecast). Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. The second foldable smartphone from Samsung is landing in India very soon. So soon in fact, that the pre-orders for the Galaxy Z Flip are now underway. This can be yours for Rs 1,09,999 and Samsung promises the premium white-glove delivery experience with the phone when shipping starts later this month. The Galaxy Z Flip has a 6.7-inch foldable display which is called the Infinity Flex display and Samsungs proprietary Ultra-Thin Glass (UTG). The Galaxy Z Flip becomes the second foldable smartphone in Samsungs line-up of smartphones in India, joining the Samsung Galaxy Fold. Last year, Samsung introduced the biggest breakthrough since the mobile phone - the Galaxy Fold. This year, with the Galaxy Z Flip, we are changing the shape of the future. With a first of its kind foldable glass display and our smallest hideaway hinge yet, the Galaxy Z Flip gives you all the advantages of a large screen in a stylish and compact form factor that fits in the palm of your hand. Our specially designed foldable UX allows consumers to reimagine how they take selfies and discover hands free video chatting like never before. With Galaxy Z Flip, were redefining what a mobile device can be, and what it enables consumers to do, said Aditya Babbar, Director, Mobile Business, Samsung India. When folded, the Galaxy Z Flips tiny display at the front comes into relevance since it will push notifications and call details without you having to un-flip the phone. The hinge has been designed to allow the display to be angled as it may be relevant to you at the timefor video calls, watching a video, taking a selfie or more. To that effect, this is the first time the Google Duo app is getting a deeper embed into the phone app on Samsung Galaxy phones. And if you like playing with multiple apps at the same time, the Multi Active Window feature allows you to split the display into dedicated space for two apps, at the same time. There are dual 12-megapixel cameras at the back and a 10-megapixel selfie camera. In terms of connectivity this is dual-SIM with one slot for a physical SIM and one e-SIM. The e-SIM services in India are currently offered by Reliance Jio and Airtel. Oh, and you will also get four months of free YouTube Premium subscription with the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip. The Samsung Galaxy Z Flip arrives in India ahead of the expected launch of the Moto Razr, the foldable phone priced at $1500 (around Rs 1,08,000 before taxes etc.) and has not been off to a good start with early adopters in the US reporting issues with the display. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 20:52:59|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- The impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on China-South Korea economic cooperation and people-to-people exchanges will only be temporary, Chinese President Xi Jinping said in a phone conversation with South Korean President Moon Jae-in on Thursday. Xi said he believes that following the victory against the novel coronavirus disease, the friendly feelings between the Chinese and South Korean people will grow even deeper, and bilateral exchanges and cooperation more flourishing. Baylor denies accusation that chapel speaker prayed to mother mystery at service Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment Baylor University has denied accusations by a conservative student group that a recent chapel service included a prayer to Mother Nature or mother mystery. On Feb. 12, Native American author and poet Kaitlin Curtice spoke at a scheduled chapel service at the Waco, Texas-based Christian school. During her opening and closing prayers, she did not name God or Jesus, but used the word "mystery." Following the chapel service, the Baylor chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas expressed multiple concerns with Curtice's remarks in her 40-minute lecture. A video of Curtice's talk and prayers can be seen here and at the bottom of this article. Very disappointed that the Chapel staff has elected to ignore our conversation last year and chose to bring in another speaker, Kaitlin Curtice, whose message ignored the gospel and instead focused on woke politics, tweeted Baylor YCT last week. As Christians, we dont pray to Mother Mystery. We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages ... In another tweet last week, the student group went on to label Curtice as the most recklessly anti-Christian speaker yet to speak at a Baylor chapel service. However, Baylor Assistant Vice President of media and public relations, Lori Fogelman, told news station KWTX that no such prayer happened. Fogelman told KWTX that, after reviewing videos of three chapel sessions, they could not find an instance in which Curtice gave a prayer to Mother Mystery or "Mother Earth." However, in a video of her remarks posted by Baylor Chapel on Vimeo, Curtice can be heard giving an opening and closing prayer, each addressed to "o mystery," and she describes the Creator as " ... the one who is not here or there, not this or that ..." She also spoke at one point of trying more to listen to "mother earth as she speaks" as she reconnect to the Native American side of her family. In a response to the allegations, Curtice also denied using the term mother mystery and defended her overall remarks at the service. I mean, I spoke on decolonizing our spirituality by breaking down systems of white supremacy. Who doesnt love that? Now I know who doesnt love that, she replied on Twitter. Also Ive never used mother mystery in a talk but definitely going to now. In response to the denials, the student group stands by their initial claim, telling Relevant magazine in comments published Tuesday that they had multiple sources. We have had several people confirm to us that they also heard her say that, and the College Dems Presidents statement also matched up with that, Baylor YCT, told Relevant. If she did not say that, we would apologize for specifically highlighting that, but it was only one of many problems." SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS -- Every morning, Cheryl and Paul Molesky wake up behind a guarded fence to the sound of a bugle. A bugler plays a reveille at 5:45 a.m. sharp -- a wake-up call for the soldiers stationed on the Lackland Air Force Base. It reminds the Moleskys and all the other civilians at the San Antonio base that they are stuck, once again, in a coronavirus quarantine. The Moleskys, of Syracuse, have been away from home for more than a month. Much of that time has been spent quarantined in Japan on the Diamond Princess, a cruise ship plagued by the largest outbreak of COVID-19 outside of China. After being flown back to the United States, couple and other evacuees from the ship are now days into a two-week federal quarantine. We dont know whats going to happen now, Cheryl Molesky said in an interview with Syracuse.com | The Post-Standard. Over 75,200 cases of COVID-19 have been confirmed worldwide, the World Health Organization reported Wednesday. All but 924 of the people sickened by the deadly virus are in China, reported the WHO. As of Wednesday, the virus had killed over 2,000 people. Two passengers sickened by COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess have died, the Japan Times reported Thursday. The Moleskys and hundreds of other Americans were evacuated from the Diamond Princess on Sunday after spending close to two weeks quarantined on the ship. They spent hours stuck on a bus before boarding a cargo plane where sick passengers were separated from healthy passengers by a sheet of plastic. We felt highly vulnerable and very exposed to the virus at that point, Cheryl Molesky said, calling the flight beyond-words awful. Cheryl Molesky said she, her husband and her brother-in-law and sister-in-law are now settling into life on the Air Force base in Texas. They are staying in two-room barracks that look like hotel rooms, she said, and are given three meals a day. Were starting to recoup from our harrowing plane experience, Cheryl Molesky said. Were feeling a little better, a little more positive, a little more rested now. While in quarantine, the Moleskys temperatures are taken twice a day. Theyll be retested for COVID-19 this week, Cheryl Molesky said Wednesday. The barracks where the quarantined Americans are staying are surrounded by a fence and guarded by armed U.S. Marshals, Cheryl Molesky said. In view of the guards, the Moleskys can walk outside in the fenced-in area as long as they wear masks and stay away from other people, she said. The couple is working to stay busy, Cheryl Molesky said, and will continue updating their YouTube video diary. But theyre starting to get anxious to go home. In this screenshot from the Moleskys' video diary on YouTube, Cheryl and Paul Molesky sit in their seats aboard a cargo plane. The Americans on the plane moved from one coronavirus quarantine in Japan to another in the United States.Screenshot from Cheryl Molesky's YouTube page Want to keep up with the Moleskys? Watch their video diary on YouTube. Thanks for visiting Syracuse.com. Quality local journalism has never been more important, and your subscription matters. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work. A gas leak in Pakistans southern port city of Karachi has killed 14 people and sickened hundreds more, Pakistani health officials said on Tuesday. The leak that started Sunday has set off a panic in Karachi and raised concerns because city officials could not immediately identify the source and type of gas involved. Officials said there was no suspicion of sabotage. The apparently odorless gas, which causes severe breathing problems, has sickened hundreds since striking Karachis coastal neighborhood of Kamari and residents began rushing to local hospitals. Zafar Mahdi, a senior health official, put the death toll at 14 on Tuesday. Authorities said they were planning to evacuate residents from Kamari to safer places by Tuesday evening. Scientists and chemical experts from the army and navy were deployed to the affected area to try to detect the source of the leak. Syed Murad Ali Shah, chief minister in Sindh province, acknowledged that authorities were still unable to determine what caused the gas leak, which he said had not spread to other parts of the city. Hundreds of residents rallied Tuesday demanding the source of the leak be traced quickly. All of the stricken peoplehospitals said they had treated more than 650were residents of Kamari. A patient in a Karchi hospital, Babar Bahadur, said Monday he first felt an ache in his eyes and pain in chest. My heart started beating suddenly very, very fast, he told The Associated Press. He recounted how he immediately was rushed to the hospital where he was treated and felt better after quite some time. Bahadur said his son experienced some of the same symptoms and was also briefly treated at the hospital. Port officials insisted no gas leaks occurred at any of their facilities. Karachi is the capital of southern Sindh province, Pakistans largest city, and the countrys chief commercial hub. It has oil refineries nearby and a key installation of Pakistans navy is also located there. By Adil Jawad The High Court has ruled that a Financial Fund, and receivers appointed by it, are entitled to an injunction granting them possession of a property in South County Dublin where 15 people are believed to be residing. Everyday Finance DAC and receivers Stephen Tennant and Nicholas O'Dwyer secured the order against Paul White, his wife Jane Gleeson and persons unknown occupying 96 Avoca Park, Blackrock, Co. Dublin. The injunction is to remain in place pending the full hearing of the action. Represented by Eamon Marray Bl, the fund and the receivers sought vacant possession of the property which they claim is the subject of a mortgage executed in consideration of loans advanced by AIB. The loans, of which it is claimed 3m is now due and owing, were acquired by Everyday Finance from AIB. The couple, with an address at Roney Beach, Gorey, Co. Wexford, had opposed the application on grounds including that the receivers appointed in 2017 were not validly appointed. It was also claimed that there was no debt due and owing by Ms Gleeson, and that she was entitled to the benefit of rent or any other form of payment in respect of her interest in the property. The plaintiffs claimed there are approximately 15 people occupying the premises, and that the defendants had not co-operated with the receivers. In reply, Mr White told the court that since 2002 the premises was let, with the knowledge of AIB, to a single tenant and he did not know how the property came to be occupied by anyone else. In his judgement today, Mr Justice Mark Sanfey said he was satisfied the plaintiffs had shown a strong case likely to succeed at trial. Taking all the circumstances into account the judge said it was appropriate to make orders enabling the fund and the receivers take possession of the property. The judge added that issues raised in the application could only be determined at a full hearing of the action, and could not be decided on at this stage. The judge said the defendants had not shown there was an issue of any substance concerning the validity of the appointment or the powers of the receivers. Mr Justice Sanfey noted the couple do not reside at the property and it was not disputed that Mr White is in very substantial arrears. The judge added the current situation with the property with an estimated 15 people living there was "completely unsatisfactory". He noted that Dun Laoghaire Rathdown County Council and the HSE had inspected the property but were not taking any enforcement action. He said that none of the parties seems to be aware of the situation regarding rent, although it had been claimed by Mr Tennant that the defendants "continue to derive a substantial income" from the premises. The judge said that it was appropriate that a stay be placed on any sale of the house pending the determination of the proceedings. This, he said, would regularise the situation and any rent derived from the property could be kept in escrow till the matter had been finalised. The judge adjourned the matter for a week when final orders in the application will be dealt with. The Congress on Thursday alleged that the BJP-led central government was surreptitiously shutting down the crop insurance scheme by reducing its share of premium and putting the burden on farmers, leaving them in the lurch. Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala accused the BJP government of running the crop insurance scheme only to benefit their crony capitalist friends. "The farmers will not be able to pay 27 per cent premium on the crop insurance. Instead of making the scheme more farmer-friendly, the government is shutting down it in a surreptitious manner by making it completely unviable for the farmer," he told reporters. He said that in a decision taken last evening, the Modi government reduced its own share in premium from current 50 per cent to 25 per cent. "Yesterday's decision is a conspiracy of the BJP to shut down the Bima Fasal Yojna (crop insurance scheme). This is the Modi government's business model of promoting crony capitalism," he alleged. The Congress leader also alleged that of the total Rs 77,801 crore premium paid on crop insurance schemes, insurance companies have made a profit of Rs 19,202 crore so far after paying compensation to the farmers. "The central government is so broke, they are taking money from the farmers to give to their crony capitalist friends. "By reducing their own contribution, the BJP has laid most of the burden on the farmer and the state government. Hence, the so-called decision to make it 'voluntary' is bogus. The farmers will be forced to give up insurance as a result of the huge cost," he said. Surjewala alleged the central government's claim that the scheme is voluntarily is only a "farce" and the burden of the premium amount would now come on the poor farmer. He alleged that since the farmer will be unable to pay the premium of 27 per cent, he will not be able to protect his crop from the vagaries of weather. "How will India's farmers face the consequences of the wrath of nature. These are the questions to be answered and the government has the audacity to say that they have taken the scheme forward. This is shameful," he said. "If the premium burden increases, the farmer will not be able to get crop insurance and if there is no insurance, then how will the crop be protected," he asked. Surjewala said that if the backbone of the food provider is broken then the country would become weak. "The attitude of the BJP government is completely anti-farmer. In one way or the other, the party wants to weaken the farmers and fill the pockets of their capitalist friends with their share of money," he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Y ou rightly state that a public health approach to tackling knife crime is needed [We need more joined-up plans to stop stabbings, February 17]; yet successive London mayors have been woefully late to this conclusion. The Liberal Democrats have been calling for it for some time. I grew up in south London, where I still live. By the time I was 18 I knew two boys who had been murdered. I love my city; but in the past 22 months two young men have been murdered within five minutes walk of my home. I dont want my son or any other young person to feel unsafe, and I dont want any more families to mourn their lost children. Siobhan Benita / Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images Sadiq Khan has had four years to sort this issue out. Its time for a fresh approach. Siobhan Benita, who launched her mayoral campaign last week, is like a breath of fresh air; not just because of her commitment to reducing pollution and encouraging a kinder London, but because of her evidence-based policy for tackling the causes of knife crime and building a safer city. Liz Jarvis Editor's reply Dear Liz Voters will have to decide how much responsibility Mayor Sadiq Khan should bear for the rise in knife crime under his watch and whether the positive action hes taking now could have come sooner. But whatever view is taken on those points, I agree that its good to see the Lib Dem mayoral candidate Siobhan Benita coming forward with constructive ideas for tackling the violence blighting our city. Her proposal for the creation of a pan-London youth service sounds promising, for example. It would help to provide more after-school activities for pupils to keep them off the street at a time when they are most vulnerable to becoming victims of crime or targeted by gangs. Ms Benitas promised increase in the number of neighbourhood police officers could also prove helpful. Other mayoral candidates are coming forward with solutions too, so whoever is in charge in City Hall after polling day should have plenty of fresh ideas to choose from. Martin Bentham, Home Affairs Editor Labour three are humane on Trans+ Debbie Hayton expresses her disapproval of the support given by Rebecca Long-Bailey, Lisa Nandy and Angela Rayner to the Labour Partys Campaign for Trans+ Rights group [As a trans Labour party supporter Im exasperated, February 14]. Quite how Ms Hayton, who claims to be a Labour supporter and campaigner on transgender issues, believes that attacking candidates for the party leadership for fully supporting trans+ equality is constructive is difficult to believe. Given the high levels of harassment to which trans+ people suffer, it is unlikely that an individual would identify as being a member of another gender on a whim. I am not a Labour voter, but commend the three candidates for their humane stance. Keeley-Jasmine Cavendish A new name for Suss-ex royals Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex / REUTERS The Queen is quite right to insist that Harry and Meghan change their Sussex Royal branding, as exploiting their former status in this manner would be inappropriate under the circumstances. But they could easily overcome the problem (and at the same time represent themselves accurately) by simply adding a dash, so that it became Suss-ex Royal. I offer the brand management suggestion entirely gratis. Mark Graham Listen to musics talented women At Tuesday nights Brit awards, women were nominated just three times in the mixed-gender categories with a total of 25 slots available. Talented female composers, songwriters and musicians are out there and yet, last year, they made up just a little more than 14 per cent of those signed to 106 music publishers, and under 20 per cent of those signed to 219 record labels. This represents an industry-wide problem which has allowed a lack of diversity and inclusivity to persist for far too long, and as a result, the industry is lacking female role models. With advances in technology remaking many jobs and industries, its not surprising so much attention has focused on improving the skills of Canadian workers. The hope is that by investing in job-relevant training, workers displaced by new technologies will quickly find new, better jobs and the productivity of the whole economy will rise accordingly. Of course, investing in better education at all levels (from early childhood to lifelong adult learning) generates huge economic gains. But the common assumption that a lack of skills is the bottleneck holding back economic success, and that training is a silver bullet for dealing with new technology, is wrong. Its time to revisit some common myths about Canadas so-called skills gap. First, is our skills base really so inadequate? Actually, Canadian workers are better educated than ever most of all our youngest cohort. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that 58 per cent of Canadian workers in 2018 held a tertiary qualification. Thats the best in the world. In fact, millions of skilled Canadians dont get to use their skills at work. A shortage of jobs where they can apply those qualifications is the bigger brake on growth. Second, many policy-makers seem to believe that producing skilled workers, of its own accord, will somehow create the jobs that use those skills. Its a Field of Dreams approach: if we train them, jobs will come. But we need just as much emphasis on creating high-quality, skills-intensive jobs (nurturing dynamic, high-tech industries like advanced manufacturing, information technology, and specialized health and education services), to create openings for all those well-trained graduates. Perhaps the loudest skills myth is the never-ending complaint from employers that they just cant find qualified workers. This is invariably followed by demands that government spend more money to train job-ready graduates, with just the right skills that business wants right now. Once upon a time, employers did their own on-the-job training. They taught job-specific knowledge and experience, supported workers in gaining more qualifications, and funded multi-year apprenticeships. A skilled workforce was seen as a valuable asset, critical to the long-run viability of the business. And companies invested in that asset accordingly. That far-sighted approach to workforce development has been a casualty of the modern, just-in-time labour market. Employers prefer to hire and fire workers in sync with short-term fluctuations in sales. For gig workers, that insecurity occurs instantaneously. And job security isnt much better for millions of others on temporary, labour hire or contingent contracts. Why invest in job-specific skills when you dont know if youll be working next week, let alone next year? Employers have also been spoiled by many years of a buyers market. Labour market conditions were generally weak over most of the last generation, with high unemployment and underemployment, and a permanent pool of hungry workers eager for any opportunity. Employers could advertise a job one day and have a whole stack of qualified applications on their desk the next. In that environment, employers came to expect tailored qualifications and experience from their applicants. They forgot that job-specific skills should be nurtured within the workplace. Statistical studies have confirmed that employers have higher expectations of applicants when unemployment is higher. But the labour market has tightened (with unemployment at its lowest since the 1970s), and that lazy approach to skills doesnt work anymore. Its time for employers to rediscover the value of investing in their own training programs. Government must play a role, of course, but by prodding employers to do a better job, rather than letting them off the hook entirely. For example, colleges and universities can work with employers to implement more job-placement and co-op programs, which are proven to improve graduate employability. And aggressive training plans should be a core feature of any government-supported industrial programs, technology grants or infrastructure projects. The ultimate responsibility of employers to invest in their own workers can be reaffirmed through fiscal levers. With a training levy, all employers would contribute to workforce training with a premium on eligible wages (including what they pay to contractors). Firms that undertake their own appropriate training and apprenticeships would get a full refund. But firms that free-ride on the investments of others (including by poaching qualified graduates from competitors) would pay into the cost of the public training system. Canadian workers are skilled, motivated and qualified. Its time for employers to stop complaining about the supposed skills shortage and instead start doing something about it. One Toronto. Two possible futures. Ten years to get it right. Toronto has never been bigger, bolder and more successful or faced so many serious problems. To attract talent and grow sustainably, we need to address the citys transportation, affordability and infrastructure needs. If we ignore these threats, the inner city buckles. Its time to start thinking about solutions. Jim Stanford is director of the Centre for Future Work. A 100-year-old World War II veteran received an unexpected surprise during a Trump rally in Phoenix today as fans brought the man to the front of the stage. The heartwarming video shared on Twitter shows two men - one wearing a Trump hat - carrying the elderly man, Irvin Julian, down a flight of stairs and across Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum as crowds cheered and chanted 'USA! USA!'. The kind act put the Julian at the front of the action before the rally started. A World War II veteran got an unexpected surprise during a Trump rally in Phoenix, Arizona today as fans brought the man to the front of the stage The heartwarming video shared on Twitter shows two men--one wearing a Trump hat--carrying the elderly man down a flight of stairs and across Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum as crowds cheered and chanted 'USA! USA!' At the start of the President's speech he received a signed campaign hat and praise from the president himself, who later retweeted the video At the start of Trump's speech Julian received a signed campaign hat and praise from the president himself, who later retweeted the video. The President called the veteran 'a celebrity.' Phoenix is the latest stop on President's Trump's four-day trip in the West. On Tuesday, Trump held rallies in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Before coming to Phoenix, Trump held events in Palm Springs and Bakersfield, California. Doors for Wednesday's event opened around 3pm, but some supporters began lining up the day before. He recently called it quits with his girlfriend Charlotte Crosby, after the pair fell in love while competing on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! And on Wednesday, Ryan Gallagher proved to be A-OK as he shared a selfie and footage to his Instagram page after he rescued an injured kangaroo overnight. 'Saw an injured Roo hopping (probably hit by a car) with a limp not far from home last night,' Ryan captioned the post. What a hero: Newly single I'm A Celeb star Ryan Gallagher (pictured) rescued an injured kangaroo after ex Charlotte Crosby announced she's split with her co-star Ryan said he had 'wrestled with him for half hour', before adding it's not the first time he's captured a kangaroo. The reality star, who rose to fame on Married At First Sight concluded: 'I'm not sure of this fella's condition yet but hopefully his injuries aren't too bad...' His rescue comes after British reality star Charlotte Crosby confirmed she's no longer seeing Ryan. However, they 'still remain friends' and she 'loves him to bits'. Doing his bit! On Wednesday, Ryan shared a selfie and footage to his Instagram page after he rescued an injured kangaroo overnight 'When me and Ryan came out of the jungle I made no secret that I had been in a very long relationship and I wasn't ready to jump into another one,' Charlotte told the publication. She said after their stint on the popular show, she had reservations about a serious romance. 'I still wasn't looking for something serious, he's at a stage in his life where he is - so we came to a mutual decision that we'd just cool it off,' Charlotte said. 'The bubble popped': Charlotte Crosby has split with her I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! co-star Ryan Gallagher Last month, the Sydney tradesman revealed he was open to marrying the UK star. 'If we are together for a few years, maybe that might happen, who knows,' the star told The Daily Telegraph. 'We will have to wait until it comes. We won't know until we talk about it,' he added. Nearly twenty years after the original, The Matrix 4 has begun principal photography on the streets of San Francisco. After taking the world by storm with John Wick and possibly the most-loved public persona in Hollywood in recent years, Keanu Reeves has returned to the series that perhaps remains his most iconic to date. Warner Bros Heres a sneak-peek at the film crew moving through SFs streets, while filming what appears to be some kind of chase scene. Apparently being ridden around by Carrie-Anne Moss character Trinity (on what appears to be a Ducati Scrambler), Keanu casually waved at fans who called out his name - although his look for the movie seems to be way more in the direction of Wick, rather than his Matrix role of Neo. Hollywood Pipeline With John Wick 4 slated for a mid-2021 release, its not too far to assume that the actor has retained this look to be able to carry out both shootings within a reasonable timeframe. Also spotted were stunt actors, taking on the handlebars and wire-rigs to perform some of the more dangerous sequences. Hollywood Pipeline Director Lana Wachowski was spotted on the platform of the crane sporting orange hair and a black puffer jacket as she directed the scene on city streets. Hollywood Pipeline Meanwhile, fans have been deeply speculating the return of both characters, who appeared to have died in 2003s The Matrix Revolutions. Warner Brothers Either way, the media interest over the film is surging to ridiculous levels - just last month, the paparazzi hounded Keanu to Malibu beach, where they snapped the actor changing clothes before going for a morning swim. For a brief period of this January, photos of Keanus butt made their way around the internet. Keanu, as usual, gave no f*cks - laughing it off, stopping to take a few photographs of his Arch motorcycle before taking a cruise down the famous Pacific Coast Highway. Aside from Moss and Reeves, the film will also feature Neil Patrick Harris and Jada Pinkett Smith will reprise her role as Captain Niobe. Warner Brothers Theres also rumours that Priyanka Chopra will make it onto the cast - although theres no concrete word on what her role may or may not be. Reuters Either way, were pretty hyped for this release - fingers crossed, the Wachowskis still have the old magic that made the original a cult classic sci-fi flick. ST. CHARLES, Mo. (AP) Three relatives of an 11-year-old girl who gave birth in the bathtub of her suburban St. Louis home are facing criminal charges. An adult female and adult male are charged with child endangerment. A 17-year-old male is charged with incest as well as statutory rape and statutory sodomy of a child younger than 12. All three live in St. Charles. Police started investigating after the adult male brought an infant to a hospital on Feb. 11. Charging documents said the baby still had the umbilical cord and placenta attached and had a body temperature of just 90 degrees. The man initially said someone dropped the infant off on his front porch. He later explained that he was a relative. He said he did not know the girl was pregnant or that she was being sexually assaulted until she gave birth. During questioning, the teen told police he had sex with the girl about 100 times but did not know she was pregnant, according to charging documents. The woman, who was charged Tuesday, is accused of failing to provide the girl medical care when she gave birth. The man was charged last week and bond was set at $10,000 cash only. Charging documents say he entered the country illegally and was previously deported. Bail also was set at $10,000 for the woman and $25,000 for the teen. No attorneys are listed for them in online court records. The Associated Press is not identifying the family members to protect the girls identity. Deaths and infections among healthcare professionals in China continue to be a concern in the coronavirus epidemic, especially in the worst-hit central province of Hubei and its capital Wuhan. Mainland China on reported 2,118 deaths and 74,576 confirmed cases of COVID-19, with newly confirmed cases rising more slowly than in previous weeks. More than 80 percent of the country's cases are in Hubei, as are more than 95 percent of the deaths, China's National Health Commission said. Wang Ping, director of Wuhan's No. 8 Hospital, became the latest high-profile healthcare figure to be confirmed as infected with COVID-19, after the death of whistle-blowing doctor Li Wenliang and Liu Zhiming, director of Wuhan's Wuchang Hospital. A resident of Hubei's Jingzhou city surnamed Mao said news reports have indicated that the director of Wuhan No.8 Hospital is among the confirmed cases. "We saw it ... she could be in a critical condition," he said. He said restrictions are also tight in his city, with strict controls on who can leave their homes, and essential shopping trips arranged by the ruling Chinese Communist Party's neighborhood committees. "What is happening now is that people must remain in their homes," he said. Shortage of protective equipment Some 3,000 medical personnel are believed to have been infected with COVID-19, sparking concerns over how the epidemic will develop in the weeks to come. Wuhan volunteer Xu Wenli told RFA that there is currently a shortage of protective equipment for frontline medical staff, and that some medical staff are wearing protective suits for two days straight rather than changing them regularly. Social media posts have also claimed that some medical staff are fashioning their own protective equipment from different materials. Xu said the situation on the ground in Wuhan appears to be far worse than during the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003 that left around 800 people dead. "SARS wasn't this bad," Xu said. "The funeral homes of Wuhan are working overtime to cremate bodies, day in, day out." "They could cremate one or two thousand bodies in a day, but they have been cremating now for more than 20 days." A volunteer in Wuhan who asked to remain anonymous said local medical sources are saying that the relatively high mortality rate is likely due to patients only getting treated when the disease has progressed to the point that they are seriously ill. Wuhan residents have described a system under which local neighborhood committees are tasked with issuing permits for patients to leave their residential communities and travel to hospital, and that nobody without approval from local officials is being offered treatment when they arrive at the city's overwhelmed hospitals. "Part of it is ignorance, and part of it is the government's doing," the volunteer said. "They suppress the news, and if you wait until people learn about it, it's too late, and they are basically looking at dying in quarantine." "Inside information indicates that the mortality rate for critically ill [COVID-19] patients is 50 percent," he said. Crackdown on critical views A medical staff member in the logistics department at Wuhan No. 1 Hospital agreed with the volunteer's estimate. "It may start off with mild symptoms, but if they can't fight off the virus, the infection becomes severe," the staff member said. "The mortality rate for severe illness is more than 50 percent." Authorities are continuing to crack down on anyone with outspoken views about the ruling party's handling of the epidemic. Cutting edge opinion blog Dajia was deleted by social media giant Tencent on Feb. 19 and all of its archive removed from the internet after it criticized state media's coverage of the coronavirus epidemic, which it said was irresponsible and dangerously misleading. The piece, penned by veteran Chinese journalist Chen Jibing, had garnered hundreds of comments critical of the lack of press freedom under the Chinese Communist Party. Sources told RFA that the powerful Political and Legal Affairs Committee of the Chinese Communist Party has issued a directive requiring all regions begin providing "heart-warming" coverage of the epidemic. "Originally, the propaganda was controlled by the central propaganda department, but now it's the political and legal affairs committee [the arm of the Communist Party in charge of law enforcement] that is controlling everything," one source said. Reported by Qiao Long for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wong Siu-san and Sing Man for the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie. Mike Bloomberg is not the leading candidate in the race for the Democratic nomination. However, judging by the ire directed at the former New York City mayor by other candidates during the Las Vegas debate, a casual observer would think Bloomberg was lapping the field. Bloomberg, who didn't compete in Iowa or New Hampshire, has still managed to vault himself into third place nationally, thanks in large part to an advertising blitz in the hundreds of millions. But the candidate leading in national polls, Bernie Sanders, went mostly unscathed in the debate which seems like a major oversight by his competitors. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and their ilk are making the same mistake Republicans made in 2015 and 2016 during the GOP primaries. Then, candidates made the mistake of thinking Donald Trump couldn't win the nomination and instead focused on launching attacks on non-leading candidates. Jeb Bush went after Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio went after Ted Cruz. Ted Cruz went after Jeb Bush. All the while, Trump continued to rise in the polls, and, once the voting started, raked in the delegates. That looms large in the Democratic primary race, particularly on March 3, otherwise known as "Super Tuesday." For example, in a recent California primary poll, Bernie Sanders opened up an 18-point lead over his rivals with 32 per cent. The next-highest is Joe Biden, with 14 per cent, followed by Elizabeth Warren with 13 per cent. Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg were each at 12 per cent. Those are critical numbers because of the rules for California's primary. The state awards 297 pledged district-level delegates for candidates that get at least 15 per cent of the statewide vote. There are another 198 delegates among at-large and pledged party delegates available for the taking. Sanders could potentially gain over 300 delegates from California alone. Suddenly, attacking Mike Bloomberg doesn't seem like the best strategy, despite the punditocracys glee at the pile-on. The loud praise for Warren and her pointed attacks against Bloomberg loomed large following the debate. To her credit, she did land some blows, and Bloomberg was clearly not ready for it. He looked befuddled, and his responses likely had his campaign staff shaking their heads. But Bloomberg recovered in the second hour of the debate, delivering some zingers of his own, and within a week, no one will remember what Warren did in the debate. Remember, people thought Kamala Harris pushed herself to the forefront in the field when she attacked Joe Biden over the issue of busing. In the current political landscape, such moments are fleeting. The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Show all 25 1 /25 The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Bernie Sanders The Vermont senator has launched a second bid for president after losing out to Hilary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic primaries. He is running on a similar platform of democratic socialist reform Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Joe Biden The former vice president recently faced scrutiny for inappropriate touching of women, but was thought to deal with the criticism well and has since maintained a front runner status in national polling EPA The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Elizabeth Warren The Massachusetts senator is a progressive Democrat, and a major supporter of regulating Wall Street Reuters The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Amy Klobuchar Klobuchar is a Minnesota senator who earned praise for her contribution to the Brett Kavanaugh hearings Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Michael Bloomberg Michael Bloomberg, a late addition to the 2020 race, announced his candidacy after months of speculation in November. He has launched a massive ad-buying campaign and issued an apology for the controversial "stop and frisk" programme that adversely impacted minority communities in New York City when he was mayor Getty Images The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 Tulsi Gabbard The Hawaii congresswoman announced her candidacy in January, but has faced tough questions on her past comments on LGBT+ rights and her stance on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Pete Buttigieg The centrist Indiana mayor and war veteran would be the first openly LGBT+ president in American history Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Deval Patrick The former Massachusetts governor launched a late 2020 candidacy and received very little reception. With just a few short months until the first voters flock to the polls, the former governor is running as a centrist and believes he can unite the party's various voting blocs AFP/Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Beto O'Rourke The former Texas congressman formally launched his bid for the presidency in March. He ran on a progressive platform, stating that the US is driven by "gross differences in opportunity and outcome" AP The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Kamala Harris The former California attorney general was introduced to the national stage during Jeff Sessions testimony. She has endorsed Medicare-for-all and proposed a major tax-credit for the middle class AFP/Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Bill De Blasio The New York mayor announced his bid on 16 May 2019. He emerged in 2013 as a leading voice in the left wing of his party but struggled to build a national profile and has suffered a number of political setbacks in his time as mayor AFP/Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Steve Bullock The Montana governor announced his bid on 14 May. He stated "We need to defeat Donald Trump in 2020 and defeat the corrupt system that lets campaign money drown out the people's voice, so we can finally make good on the promise of a fair shot for everyone." He also highlighted the fact that he won the governor's seat in a red [Republican] state Reuters The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Cory Booker The New Jersey Senator has focused on restoring kindness and civility in American politics throughout his campaign, though he has failed to secure the same level of support and fundraising as several other senators running for the White House in 2020 Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Wayne Messam Mayor of the city of Miramar in the Miami metropolitan area, Wayne Messam said he intended to run on a progressive platform against the "broken" federal government. He favours gun regulations and was a signatory to a letter from some 400 mayors condemning President Trump's withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord Vice News The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Kirsten Gillibrand The New York Senator formally announced her presidential bid in January, saying that healthcare should be a right, not a privilege Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: John Delaney The Maryland congressman was the first to launch his bid for presidency, making the announcement in 2017 AP The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Andrew Yang The entrepreneur announced his presidential candidacy by pledging that he would introduce a universal basic income of $1,000 a month to every American over the age of 18 Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Julian Castro The former San Antonio mayor announced his candidacy in January and said that his running has a special meaning for the Latino community in the US Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Marianne Williamson The author and spiritual adviser has announced her intention to run for president. She had previously run for congress as an independent in 2014 but was unsuccessful Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Eric Swalwell One of the younger candidates, Swalwell has served on multiple committees in the House of Representatives. He intended to make gun control central to his campaign but dropped out after his team said it was clear there was no path to victory Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Seth Moulton A Massachusetts congressman, Moulton is a former US soldier who is best known for trying to stop Nancy Pelosi from becoming speaker of the house. He dropped out of the race after not polling well in key states Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Jay Inslee Inslee has been governor of Washington since 2013. His bid was centred around climate change AFP/Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: John Hickenlooper The former governor of Colorado aimed to sell himself as an effective leader who was open to compromise, but failed to make a splash on the national stage Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Tim Ryan Ohio representative Tim Ryan ran on a campaign that hinged on his working class roots, though his messaging did not appear to resonate with voters Getty The Democrat challengers to Trump in 2020 DROPPED OUT: Tom Steyer Democratic presidential hopeful billionaire and philanthropist Tom Steyer is a longtime Democratic donor AFP/Getty People such as James Carville see the long game. He asked, "Do we want to be an ideological cult, or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party?" while talking about his concerns surrounding a Bernie Sanders candidacy. Mike Bloomberg may have some baggage, and all the so-called "moderates" in the race, including Biden, are promising a progressive agenda that's further to the left of Barack Obama in 2008. Still, it's a far cry from the radical agenda espoused by Bernie Sanders. That's why it was a tactical mistake to focus on Bloomberg. Sanders continues to build his lead in the Democratic primary despite Joe Biden getting viewed in polling as the best candidate to defeat Trump, particularly in battleground states critical for Democrats to have any chance of taking back the White House. The next debate is in South Carolina on February 25, four days before the South Carolina primary. If any polls get released over the next five days showing Sanders increasing his lead nationally, the other candidates better pay attention and not pretend the guy with a lot of money to spend is the frontrunner. Otherwise, they may watch as the Democratic Party nominates a candidate who is not a Democrat to be their 2020 presidential nominee. Terrifying flight path data has shown how two planes were heading straight for each other moments before colliding and plummeting to the ground with no survivors. Four people were killed after two light planes smashed into each other 4,000 feet above sea level over Mangalore airport in northern Melbourne on Wednesday morning. Air crash investigators are scanning two crash sites on either side of the Hume Highway after the planes spiraled out of control after impact, leaving experienced pilots Pete Phillips, Igo Segev, one Thai and one Israeli passenger dead. Flight data has revealed the collision occurred just five minutes after the Piper Seminole VH-JQF took off from Mangalore airport. Flight data has shown how two planes collided mid-air over Mangalore airport in northern Melbourne on Wednesday. Pictured: police investigate one crash site after the crash The planes landed around one kilometre from each other, with the bodies of the four victims found in each of the planes. Pictured: response teams attend to the paddock crash site The Piper Aircraft took off at 11.20am and was using instruments to fly in the cloudy conditions. At 11.25am the Piper hit the Beechcraft Travel Air VH-AEM which had taken off from Tyabb airport near the Mornington Peninsula at 10.55am and was descending to land at Mangalore Airport. Both planes spiraled out of control, with the bodies of all victims found inside the plane wreckages at both crash sites in Lambing Gully Road, Avanel and Seymour-Avanel Road, Managalore. The wrecks are around one kilometre away from each other. The Beechcraft Travel Air VH-AEM took off from Tyabb airport near the Mornington Peninsula at 10.55am and was set to land at Mangalore Airport (left) while the Piper Seminole VH-JQF took off from Mangalore airport as the other plane was descending in cloudy conditions Victoria Police Inspector Peter Koger told The Herald Sun that both planes hit the ground very hard. 'You couldnt even tell it was an aircraft,' Inspector Koger said. Both planes were conducting instrument flight rules training and were flying under the common traffic advisory frequency, which requires pilots to inform others of where they are going. Tributes to the victims have flooded in, with Mr Segev being remembered as someone who died doing what they loved. 'Ido was one of a kind, a modest and loved young man, professional and extremely talented with hands of gold,' one tribute reads. Igo Sedev was one of the pilots who died in the crash, and was remembered by friends and family as someone who was extremely talented with hands of gold Civil Aviation Authority spokesman Peter Gibson said investigators are unsure what caused the planes to crash. 'We dont have any explanation of what happened. We cant speculate on that,' Mr Gibson said. The incident was Australia's first mid-air plane crash in more than a decade. Local Joanne Dwyer was on the Hume Freeway on her way to Seymour on Wednesday morning when she saw a plane 'doing what I would call a death roll.' 'Planes do practice manoeuvres around here all the time but I thought that seems to be going a bit lower than normal,' she told The Age. Specialist investigators have launched an inquiry into what caused the planes to collide. US Warns of Apparent Community Spread of Coronavirus in Countries Outside China The United States warned travelers of apparent community spread of the new virus in five countries outside of China, as well as the island of Taiwan. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recommending Americans not travel to China and is also advising travelers of the apparent spread in Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, and Taiwan. Community spread means people have been infected with the virus, including some who are not sure how or where they became infected. At this time, the extent of virus spread is not sustained or widespread enough to meet the criteria for a travel notice, the agency stated on its website. A level 1 advisory is in place for Japan and Hong Kong as the number of cases grow in each place. Multiple instances of community spread have been reported in both Japan and Hong Kong, the CDC noted. If travelers go to either place, they should take steps including avoiding contact with sick people and not touching their eyes, nose, or mouth with unwashed hands. The quarantined Diamond Princess cruise ship sits docked at the Daikoku Pier at night in Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 20, 2020. (Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty Images) Experts say one of the best ways to prevent infection is frequently washing hands with soap or water for at least 20 seconds or using an alcohol-based hand sanitizer. Most of the cases in Japan are among passengers from the Diamond Princess cruise ship thats docked in Yokohama. The United States evacuated more than 300 American passengers several days ago, quarantining them at military bases in California and Texas. Other countries followed suit or made plans to, including Australia and Canada. Two elderly Japanese passengers from the ship died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the new virus, Japanese authorities said on Wednesday. The 87-year-old man who died had bronchial asthma while the 84-year-old woman who perished didnt have any preexisting conditions, officials said. Hundreds of passengers were let go this week after testing negative for the virus in Japan, where at least 73 people not from the ship have tested positive for COVID-19. A woman wearing a mask to prevent contracting the coronavirus rides on a subway in Seoul on Feb. 20, 2020. (Kim Hong-Ji/Reuters) The other places the United States is highlighting as having apparent community spread have also reported at least 16 cases each. Singapore has the second-highest number of cases outside China behind Japan with 81 as of Feb. 19, according to the World Health Organization. South Korea on Thursday reported the first death from pneumonia caused by the virus. Thirteen other patients have tested positive at the hospital where he was bedridden. South Korea also reported 53 new confirmed cases, many in Daegu, a city about 186 miles south of Seoul. About two dozen are linked to a woman who tested positive after attending a recent church service. SK Hynix, a chipmaker in the country, said 800 workers self-isolated as a precaution after a trainee had contact with a known virus patient. An employee (L) puts a protective face mask on a child at a railway station in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Feb. 2, 2020. (Nhac Nguyen/AFP via Getty Images) Few updates have emerged from Vietnam since last week, when officials said they quarantined over 10,000 people. The country has 16 confirmed cases. Thailand, which has 35 confirmed cases, has also reported no new cases in several days. Taiwan reported the first death from the disease on Sunday and has at least 20 known cases of COVID-19. President Tsai Ing-wen took offense at the CDCs claim that community spread is taking place on the island, telling reporters that Taiwan doesnt meet the standard set for community spread. Foreign ministry spokeswoman Joanne Ou said the ministry has asked the United States to correct Taiwans status, reported the Taipei Times. The president asked members of the public not to panic and emphasized officials are working to prevent further spread of the virus. This week's feisty Democratic presidential debate, the first to feature former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, was a huge television hit with nearly 20 million viewers. The Nielsen company said the debate, seen by 19.7 million people on NBC or MSNBC on Wednesday, attracted more viewers than any Democratic nomination contest ever. It was more than double the 7.9 million people who watched ABC's coverage of a debate just before the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 7. Viewers love them: The Nielsen company said the debate, seen by 19.7 million people on NBC or MSNBC on Wednesday, attracted more viewers than any Democratic nomination contest ever DEMS' 2020 RATINGS June 26: 15.3m NBC/MSNBC/ Telemundo June 27: 18.1m July 30: 8.7m CNN July 31: 10.7m September 12: 14.04m ABC/Univision October 15: 8.34m CNN November 20: 6.6m MSNBC December 19: 6.17m PBS January 14: 7.3m CNN February 7: 7.8m ABC February 19: 19.66m NBC/ MSNBC/ Telemundo Advertisement It beat the 18.1 million people who tuned in for the second night of the first debate in this campaign season, back in June. At that point there were so many candidates, they were spread across two nights. The big jump in numbers showed how curious people were to see how Bloomberg, who had been flooding the airwaves with commercials, did the first time he met his competitors in verbal combat. It was a rough start for Bloomberg, who drew sharp attacks from his rivals, particularly Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The session's first half hour was particularly action-packed. The ratings also indicate that with Super Tuesday primaries approaching next month, voters are starting to pay closer attention. NBC said the debate attracted an additional digital audience of 417,000 viewers. The debate becomes the third-most watched primary debate of all-time. The two were the first Republican primary debates in 2015, when Donald Trump helped first Fox News secure 24 million viewers, then CNN get 23 million. The first debate saw Trump clash angrily with Megyn Kelly, then Fox News' star host, when she challenged him on his previous comments about women. However ratings for the Republican debates fell as the campaign went on and Trump boycotted two later debates. Notorious moment: The confrontation between Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly in August 2015 was the highest-rated ever primary debate, drawing in 24 million viewers for Fox News Flash A Chinese envoy said Wednesday that terrorism in Syria must be eradicated to create a favorable security environment for the political process. "Rampant terrorism has seriously affected Syria's political process and the country's future, and must be taken seriously and addressed by all parties," Wu Haitao, China's deputy permanent representative to the United Nations, told the Security Council meeting on the situation in Syria. "Idlib has become a breeding ground for terrorism and the acute problem of HTS (the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the umbrella group of the al-Qaida-linked Nusra Front) has created serious spillover effects. Countries should eliminate the safe havens established by terrorist groups in Syria in accordance with Council resolutions and international law. This is also a requirement of Resolution 2254," said the envoy. "China supports all parties concerned in continuing to seek comprehensive and long-term solutions to the Idlib problem through dialogue and negotiations," Wu said. Talking about political solution to the Syrian crisis, the envoy urged parties concerned to stay the course towards political settlement and make good use of the Constitutional Committee as a platform. "Political solution is the only way to end the Syrian crisis," he said. Political solution to the Syrian issue must be based on maintaining Syria's sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity, he added. "The establishment of the Constitutional Committee is a good start for the Syrian political process. Its role should be fully leveraged on the basis of existing outcomes. Differences among Syrian parties in the work of the Constitutional Committee, while unavoidable, should be resolved through dialogue," said Wu. "Attention should be paid to maintaining the independence of the work of the committee and creating conditions for all parties in Syria to narrow their differences and build consensus. We hope that members of the committee will demonstrate their political will, uphold the spirit of compromise, and play a constructive role in reaching consensus among all parties in Syria," said Wu. The Syrian Constitutional Committee is a UN-facilitated constituent assembly process, which seeks to reconcile the Syrian Government headed by President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian opposition, in the context of the Syrian peace process, by amending the current or adopting a new Constitution of Syria. Speaking of the humanitarian situation in Syria, Wu said that efforts should be made in this regard, "which will help advance the political settlement process." "The international community should step up humanitarian aid to Syria, support the UN in providing help for the displaced persons. Humanitarian aid to Syria should have no political strings attached in the long run," said the envoy. "We should support the Syrian Government in carrying out reconstruction in areas where the security situation is relatively stable," he added. "The international community has the moral responsibility to help Syria restore economic development and tranquility," said Wu. Two volunteers from Oxfam were killed and another was wounded in Daraa, as they inspected the state of schools in the areas reports Brocar Press. Unknown assailants targeted volunteers from an international organization after they left the town of al-Yadouda in the western Daraa countryside on Wednesday night. Brocar Presss correspondent in Daraa, reported that the attackers shot at the three volunteers from the Oxfam organization, killing two of them, Wissam Khalil Hazeem and Adel Abdel Rahman al-Halabi, who were from Damascus, and wounded Ibrahim Mohamed Omar. The three volunteers were working to assess the situation of the schools in the area when they were attacked on the al-Mazirib-al-Yadouda road in western Daraa, according to the correspondent. The Oxfam organization is working on a number of infrastructure projects in Daraa province. In a related context, the correspondent said that Youssef al-Dous, who is from Mariba east of Daraa, was assassinated on the al-Masifira-Mariba road. Dous had been a financial judge in the Dar al-Adel court before the Syrian regime took control over Daraa in July 2018. Daraa province has seen various operations targeting regime forces and those close to them on a near daily basis, especially assassinations, without any group claiming responsibility for these attacks. This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. By Park Moo-jong Everybody agrees that the upcoming April 15 general election is a crucial national event to herald what the Republic of Korea, now beleaguered with piles of difficult questions, including an economic downturn, will be like in the future. With less than two months until polling day, it is no wonder that all the political parties, either existing or newly created, are going all-out to win the support of voters with rosy campaign pledges that they claim will help better the livelihoods of the people among other promises. On Wednesday morning, I read an "old-fashioned" but "still interesting" news story on page 2 of The Korea Times. The ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), according to the article, "has vowed to slash the salary of lawmakers with poor session attendance records amid mounting criticism of the unproductive Assembly." "However, it remains to be seen if the pledge will be implemented as planned because it contains some exception clauses that lawmakers may exploit," it said. The ruling party's pledge is based on the principle of "no work, no pay," a general truth in industrial relations. Namely, when a person is employed, it is expected that the work assigned will be carried out and when this work is not done, the employee is not eligible for payment of any salary. The "no work, no pay" formula lays a strong foundation for industrial peace and harmony in the long run. Even die-hard trade union leaders respect this principle of equity and natural justice. Basically, the principle means no pay for workers on strike. Instead, the unions have to pay their striking workers with money savedfor their walkout. Unfortunately however, the principle has nothing to do with our "extinguished" lawmakers, to the humiliation of the growing public calls and their repeated promises to accept it in bygone days. Most citizens feel bad about the astronomical expenses they have to pay for the 300 legislators per year. At least 150 million won (about $125,000) is paid to one lawmaker, as well as various privileges such as free rides on the KTX, among other things. What the people remember about the incumbent Assembly is the frequent paralysis of its operation following all-or-nothing bipartisan disputes over various issues related to their interests. Boycotting plenary or standing committees sessions used to be a common practice of the parties, especially the minority ones. Our parliamentary history shows that elected politicians have been mainly engaged in an all-or-nothing struggle against their rivals to further their own interests, without agonizing over the stark reality we Koreans face every day. It must be like preaching to the wind to tell them to think of the public happiness and national interest ahead of they and their parties' interests. The only thing on their minds now seems to be how to win again in the coming election and how to chalk up more money for campaigning. A lawmaker takes office, vowing "to carry out the duty of representatives faithfully in accordance with my conscience, placing top priority on the promotion of the people's happiness and the national interest." The shameless appearance of the representatives even makes many people seriously question the need for parliamentarians in this country who think of their interests first, wasting the taxpayers' money. The ruling DPK's pledge features the idea of cutting lawmakers' monthly salary in proportion to their absence from Assembly sessions which they are required to (not have to) attend. The opposition parties have also presented similar pledges. The "no work, no pay" rule is strictly applied to cut the salary of legislators in accordance with the days of their absence in parliamentary sessions in France, Belgium, Portugal and Sweden. In France and Portugal, those who are absent from standing committee meetings three times are disqualified as their panel members. Many people still doubt the election pledge in light of the hitherto practices. As The Korea Times reported, people suspect the overture is nothing but an attempt to curry favor with voters. If the parties have the will to observe the "no work, no pay" principle, they have to rather show their determination through new legislation to that effect. The people are really sick of the National Assembly, but they still have to elect its new members April 15. Park Moo-jong (emjei29@gmail.com) is a standing adviser of The Korea Times. He served as the president-publisher of the nation's first English daily newspaper from 2004 to 2014 after working as a reporter since 1974. A pair of Coasties credited with saving lives -- one after a ship caught fire and capsized and another following a devastating hurricane -- were promoted by the Coast Guard's top officer as he announced the launch of new programs to recognize strong leaders in the ranks. Adm. Karl Schultz, the Coast Guard's commandant, promoted Nathan Newberg, a rescue swimmer, and Emily Ford, a storekeeper, to first-class petty officers on Thursday. Schultz was in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was giving a talk on the state of the Coast Guard. "The next generation of Coast Guard men and women need strong leaders coming up through the ranks -- leaders who excel in the face of adversity and leaders who embody our core values of honor, respect and devotion to duty," Schultz said, before asking Newberg, who was in the audience, and Ford, who was watching the speech from the Bahamas, to stand. Related: Coast Guard Wrapping Up Study on Why Minority Members Leave the Service Newberg helped save several people trapped in the Golden Ray cargo ship, which capsized off the coast of Georgia in September. A helicopter dropped him onto the overturned ship, and he rappelled down into the bridge to reach the captain, who was trapped there. All two dozen aboard the ship were rescued, and survivors credit Newberg and the other Coast Guard members there with saving their lives. Ford helped coordinate hundreds of helicopter rescue flights in the Bahamas that same month after Hurricane Dorian tore through the country. She's credited with helping save nearly 300 people in a week and carried out the mission as her own mom became gravely ill back home. After assisting with the devastation in the Bahamas, Ford rushed home to care for her mother during her final days, according to a Coast Guard video. No matter the situation, the video stated, she continued to serve. Their promotions, the Schultz, are part of new changes to the meritorious advancement program leaders made in response to feedback from Coast Guard members. The change was one of several new talent-management initiatives Schultz said will be crucial in recruiting and retaining the best Coasties for years to come. "For the first time in our history, every district commander has the authority to select and meritoriously advance some of the most talented people in our service," he said. Schultz said he is committed to fixing some of the Coast Guard's biggest personnel challenges by learning from studies the service is conducting. One is a study on minorities that will wrap up in June. The Coast Guard also last year conducted a study on women's retention issues. Next month, the commandant said, the Coast Guard will launch a four-year diversity and inclusion action plan, "to provide leaders at every level with the skills to realize the full potential of our talented workforce." There's also a "workforce 2030" action plan in the works to help the service meet future personnel readiness goals, he added, which is expected to be rolled out in the next year. "Collectively, all of these talent management initiatives empower our people to pursue and achieve success, and in the process, optimize Coast Guard mission excellence," Schultz said. -- Gina Harkins can be reached at gina.harkins@military.com. Follow her on Twitter @ginaaharkins. Read More: Why Are so Many Women Leaving the Coast Guard? Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (18) Bottom line: Hot on the heels of a $5 billion fine from the FTC over privacy violations, Facebook is now under fire from the IRS. The tax collection agency says that the social media giant owes taxes dating from a 2010 revenue shuffle with Facebook Ireland. The company could be stuck with a $9 billion tax bill plus interest and penalties. The Internal Revenue Service is suing Facebook for $9 billion in back taxes. The trial began on Tuesday and is expected to go on for about a month. Five Facebook executives have been subpoenaed to testify, including Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer, AR and VR Vice President Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, Chief Revenue Officer David Fischer, and two others. The IRS alleges Facebook undervalued intellectual properties when selling them to an Irish subsidiary in 2010. Shuffling money internally this way is not unusual for multinational corporations. Ireland is considered a haven because of its lower corporate tax rates. Reuter's reports that between 2010 and 2016, the subsidiary paid Facebook US more than $14 billion in royalties and cost-sharing. These payments were for the use of "trademarks, users, and platform technologies." Facebook's defense is that inherent risks of expanding overseas drove the valuation down. The deal was also penned before the company's IPO and before it had developed its digital advertising platform, which is its highest revenue earner. "[In 2010, Facebook] had no mobile advertising revenue, its international business was nascent, and its digital advertising products were unproven," Facebook spokesperson Bertie Thomson told Reuters. In addition to the IRS inflating the value of its IPs in 2010, Facebook is claiming that the tax burden lies on its international affiliates and not on the US-based parent company. "Facebook Ireland and Facebook's other foreign affiliates - not Facebook US - led the high-risk, and ultimately successful, international effort to sell Facebook ads," said the company's legal team in a brief before the trial began. While the suit lists the taxes owed at $9 billion, if Facebook loses the case, it will also have to cough up interest and penalties, which could put its settlement into the 11-figure bracket. Masthead credit: Cryptographer via Shutterstock Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald on arrival at Leinster House, Dublin, for the first sitting of the 33rd Dail (Brian Lawless/PA) Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin launched a scathing attack on Mary Lou McDonald and Sinn Fein during a heated debate on the first day of the new Dail. Mr Martin said he could not go into go into government with Sinn Fein because of the partys efforts to legitimise a murderous sectarian campaign of the Provisional IRA. Every single time an issue arises about the behaviour of people associated with the Provisionals movement and todays Sinn Fein the response is to attack and dismiss, Mr Martin said. Only when the evidence keeps piling up and the political pressure grows is there any movement. Read More Offers to meet are expressed and calls for cooperation with law enforcement are issues but nothing ever happens, he added. Mr Martin said the glorifying of the Provisional IRA isnt an accident of one Deputys exuberance in reference to Sinn Fein TD David Cullinane saying up the RA at post election event. He said Ms McDonald praised Provisional IRA units and when she ends speeches with Tiocfaidh ar la She knows full and well what the use of that phrase means. Popularised first by Gerry Adams, for decades it was shouted in our courts to signal a refusal to recognise this democratic republic, he added. Ms McDonald responded saying she did not care what Mr Martin thinks about her party. She said Sinn Fein lives rent free in Micheal Martins narrow and bitter mind. Ms McDonald also noted that Mr Martin sat around the cabinet table with people who have been jailed for corruption. A man belonging to a fringe Hindu outfit tried to immolate himself in front of the Bihar Police headquarters here on Thursday accusing the state government of "falsely implicating" people in a murder case to appease Muslims. Rajiv Brahmarshi had announced his intention to immolate himself through a video posted on social media and as a result, the police were prepared. He was caught by some police personnel as soon as he lit the fire, bundled into a waiting ambulance and whisked away to a nearby hospital, an officer present at the spot told the media. "We received inputs about a man threatening to immolate himself here. As a precautionary measure, police personnel and magistrates were deployed in front of the Sardar Patel Bhawan (the Bihar Police HQ) at Bailey Road here," the official said. "The man has been caught in time. Further action will be taken in accordance with the law," he said. In the video clip, Brahmarshi complained about Hindu activists being "falsely implicated" in cases like the Phulwari Sharif incident for the "politics of Muslim appeasement". Violence had rocked the Haroon Nagar locality of Phulwari Sharif Police Station area on December 21, last year during a state-wide bandh by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) to protest against the CAA-NPR-NRC. A 17-year-old boy had gone missing that day and his body was found from a water-filled pit covered with hyacinth a week later. Locals had claimed that some pro-Hindutva activists had pounced upon the boy for allegedly shouting slogans while holding a tricolour. Several persons belonging to fringe Hindu outfits were arrested in connection with the incident. One of these outfits -- 'Hindu Putra', which purportedly has its registered office in the city's Ashiana Nagar locality, had issued a release about Brahmarshi's self-immolation bid and described him as the sanrakshak (patron) of the organisation. Brahmarshi had claimed in the video that recently he along with some top office-bearers of 'Shri Ram Sena' had gone to the JD(U) state headquarters to meet party leader Sanjay Gandhi, a close aide of Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, with the request for intervention at the highest level. Gandhi had frowned at the sight of the Hindu activists and curtly told them to leave and try their luck with Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who is a BJP leader, he had claimed. We were appalled. It was not that we had gone there with an anti-Muslim agenda. All that we wanted was a fair and impartial probe. We have to run from pillar to post meeting parliamentarians and top bureaucrats. But there seems to be no way out of this harassment as the government is busy with its politics of Muslim appeasement, he alleged. We find ourselves driven against the wall. I am therefore going to give up my life by setting myself on fire in front of the police headquarters, Brahmarshi added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Toyota City, Japan, Feb 20, 2020 - (JCN Newswire) - Toyota Motor Corporation and Toyota Industries Corporation announce that they have jointly developed a new battery for hybrid electric vehicles (HEV). The battery has been developed in anticipation of the further development and market introduction of HEVs, forecasted to rapidly expand in the future. Moving forward, the companies will proceed to discuss matters such as target vehicle models as well as battery specifications and performance, prior to equipping Toyota HEVs with the new batteries.Additionally, in order to meet the demand for increased production of Toyota HEVs, the production of the new batteries is planned to take place at Toyota Industries' Kyowa Plant (Obu-shi, Aichi Prefecture) and at a site on company property located adjacent to their Higashiura Plant (Higashiura-cho, Chita-gun, Aichi Prefecture). In the future, Toyota Industries will work with Toyota to build and strengthen the supply structure.Moving forward, Toyota and Toyota Industries will promote the development of technology and products to support the popularization of electrified vehicles as the Toyota Group aims to help reduce CO2 emissions to help curb global climate change.About Toyota Motor CorporationToyota Motor Corporation (TMC) is the global mobility company that introduced the Prius hybrid-electric car in 1997 and the first mass-produced fuel cell sedan, Mirai, in 2014. Headquartered in Toyota City, Japan, Toyota has been making cars since 1937. Today, Toyota proudly employs 370,000 employees in communities around the world. Together, they build around 10 million vehicles per year in 29 countries, from mainstream cars and premium vehicles to mini-vehicles and commercial trucks, and sell them in more than 170 countries under the brands Toyota, Lexus, Daihatsu and Hino. For more information, please visit www.toyota-global.com.Source: Toyota Motor CorporationCopyright 2020 JCN Newswire . All rights reserved. Since the first edition of WCO Global AEO Conference held in Korea in 2012, the World Customs Organization (WCO) has brought together Customs administrations, the business community, policymakers, legal and academic representatives, as well as other government bodies to build capacity, enhance cooperation and foster a global public-private dialogue for the implementation of AEO Programmes worldwide. To ensure the success of the Conference in view of the prevailing global circumstances, Dubai Customs and the UAE Federal Customs Authority proposed to the WCO to postpone the Conference that was planned from 10 to 12 March 2020. After careful consideration, the WCO Secretariat agreed to the request of the host administration to reschedule the 5th WCO Global AEO Conference to 15 - 17 February 2021, in Dubai, UAE. The new dates will further align the Conference with the Expo 2020 Dubai, a World Expo which opens more opportunities to learn and experience the numerous successful practices of countries around the world, at all fronts including economy, culture, innovation, and many others. Cognizant of the impact that this will have on participants, speakers, sponsors and exhibitors, we are convinced that everyone will understand this decision and we seize this opportunity to invite you all to save the new dates and join us in Dubai in 2021. Further updates on the WCO Global AEO Conference can be found on our website: www.wcoomd.org The award-winning author, whose books have been translated into 21 languages, spent four months in jail in 2016 as part of a probe into a newspaper's alleged links to outlawed Kurdish militants. After her release she travelled to Germany in 2017 as soon as she received her passport back. She has been in self-imposed exile ever since. This week, when the long-running terror case in which she was accused came to court again, she was unexpectedly acquitted. "To be honest, I was very surprised. Almost everyone took it for granted that I would be convicted," the writer told AFP in a phone interview Sunday. "I still cannot believe it, but if it's not that, there will be another case," said Erdogan -- who is not related to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. An Istanbul court acquitted Erdogan on Friday of membership of an armed terrorist group and disrupting the unity of the state, while charges of spreading terror propaganda were dropped. The writer said she had risked a life sentence just because her name was on the literary advisory list of the now-closed pro-Kurdish Ozgur Gundem newspaper. The accusations "would amount to establishing an army in order to destroy the state. What's it got to do with a newspaper?" she asked. She might have escaped a long jail term, but the experience has taken a toll. In Germany she has had surgery twice for muscle paralysis of the intestine, a condition which doctors say is post-traumatic. "At the age of 52 I encountered a disease that should occur in one's 80s," she said, adding that her stint in jail also played a part. What she most longs for, however, is access to her library in Turkey. "A 3,500-book library is my only property in the world. (Without it) I feel like my arms and legs are cut off." - 'Silence prevails' - However, she has no plans to return home because the authorities could seize upon anything she might say to charge her with further offences, with potentially fatal consequences. "Another arrest would mean death for me... Under the current circumstances, I cannot return given a risk of detention," she said. Since a failed putsch in Turkey in 2016, tens of thousands of people including academics and journalists have been arrested suspected of links to coup plotters. Critics accuse the president of using the coup to silence opponents but the government argues a wholesale purge is needed to rid the network of followers blamed for the failed putsch. For the author, the political climate is worsening even though she can no longer gauge the mood for herself as she could before. "I used to speak with grocers or witness chats in a bus or metro. That was feeding me as a writer but this channel had been cut now. But I have the impression that silence prevails in Turkey." She described the political system as "fascism, neo-fascism", saying ongoing cases involving jailed author Ahmet Altan and businessman and philanthropist Osman Kavala showed the situation was "well beyond dictatorship". She added: "I don't know for sure what happens behind closed doors but such irrational cases have no other explanation. I see them as part of a strategy." Welcoming Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's comment about cooperating with the Centre for the city's development, senior BJP leader Vijay Goel urged him on Thursday to immediately release funds due to the municipal corporations and implement the Ayushman Bharat scheme. The BJP will cooperate with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government for the holistic development of Delhi, he said at a press conference. "I hope he will implement good thinks he talked about in his swearing in ceremony at Ramlila Maidan," the BJP Rajya Sabha MP said. By believing that Kejriwal would be impartial, Goel said, he would like to urge the chief minister to pay the dues to the municipal corporations "running into thousands of crores of rupees". He also expected the chief minister to meet the Lok Sabha MPs from Delhi at regular intervals to discuss development of the city. All the seven Lok Sabha MPs in Delhi are from the BJP. Also the three municipal corporations in the national capital are ruled by the saffron party. "If he (Kejriwal) wants to cooperate with the Centre, he should immediately implement Ayushman Bharat scheme and PM Awas Yojna. Also, he should try to solve the problem of dirty water supply by taking help of the Centre and the municipal corporations," Goel said. The former Union minister also requested Kejriwal to hold 'Janta Darbar' to meet people and solve their problems. A handwritten letter from George Washington to a distant relative reveals that he praised British farmers and wanted to grow wheat on his Virginia estate. The three-page document which was penned on February 20, 1796 provides insight into the first US president, his links to Britain and his thoughts on farming. The letter is one of around 18 that President Washington composed to the Scottish nobleman David Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan. This piece of their correspondence is preserved in the archives of the University of Edinburgh and is available for viewing by members of the public. Scroll down for video A handwritten letter from George Washington to a distant relative reveals that he praised British farmers and wanted to grow wheat on his Virginia estate WHO WAS GEORGE WASHINGTON? George Washington was a Founding Father and the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Formerly he had led Patriot forces to victory in the War for Independence. He hailed from a wealthy Virginian family that had made their money through land speculation. His face is immortalised on the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in Black Hills region of South Dakota. Pictured, Mount Rushmore Advertisement President Washington, then aged 63, had been holding office for seven years when he wrote the letter to Lord Eskine. In the message, he praises British farmers and agriculture, contrasting them with the 'slovenly farmers' of his own country. Unlike in the US, farmers in Scotland were forced to be careful with their use of the limited land available. In the vast States, however, farmers could afford to be more wasteful and move on to new plots of land when the old was exhausted. At the time, a year before he left the presidency, he was seeking to diversify his holdings at his Mount Vernon Estate in Virginia. He wanted to focus on growing wheat rather than tobacco, which he had abandoned in the 1760s and move from using enslaved labour to tenant farmers. In the letter, President Washington shared an advert he placed in a US newspaper encouraging tenant farmers to his estate and makes it clear that he would welcome such workers from Scotland and elsewhere in Britain. He was careful to stress, however, that he was not inviting them, which would have been illegal at the time. The President was well aware of the emerging discipline of agricultural science, which was a product of Scottish Enlightenment thinking. According to University of Edinburgh American history expert Frank Cogliano, Lord Erskine is understood to have been a distant relation of the Fairfax family. 'The Fairfaxes were the largest landholders in colonial Virginia and acted as patrons to Washington,' he explained. 'Washington's brother married a Fairfax so his sister-in-law was a Fairfax hence Buchan calling him "kinsman" in another letter.' The three-page document which was penned on February 20, 1796 provides insight into the first US president, his links to Britain and his thoughts on farming The letter is one of around 18 that President Washington (left) composed to the Scottish nobleman David Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan (right) In the letter, President Washington writes: 'I accompany the information My Lord, with an unequivocal declaration that, it is not my intention to invite Emigrants even if there be no prohibitory act of your Government opposed to it.' 'My sole object is, if there are persons on the move, who may incline to associate and become tenants on such a plan as I offer, that being apprised of the measure, they may decide how far their views would be accommodated by it.' He adds that, in Britain, 'husbandry is well understood, and the language similar.' The letter is one of many that were donated to the university collections by the Scottish antiquarian and polymath Sir David Lang in the 1870s. Analysis of the texts has been carried out by archivists and historians at the university, as well as by staff at the Washington Estate in the US. Historians hope that revisiting 18th century transatlantic correspondence will help to build a clearer picture of BritishUS relations at the time. The US and Britain would subsequently return to war in 1812, following confrontations over the latter's blockading of Napoleonic France. President Washington, then aged 63, had been holding office for seven years when he wrote the letter to Lord Eskine 'The Enlightenment is often referred to as a "Republic of Letters",' noted Professor Cogliano. 'Exchanges such as those between Washington and Buchan were the social networks of their day not only swapping ideas but advertising opportunities.' 'How familiar it seems to us today.' 'There is something quite compelling about the tangible nature of the original, created two days prior to Washington's 64th birthday before making its way to Scotland,' said University of Edinburgh's archives manager, Rachel Hosker. 'It enables us to imagine him writing it and allows us to consider the private individual in context.' WHAT DOES GEORGE WASHINGTON'S LETTER SAY? Philadelphia 20th Feb: 1796 My Lord, Having seen several persons from the vicinity of your estate of Dryburgh Abbey, with your Lordships certificates of their honest and orderly deportment; (one or two of whom I have employed, and found deserving the charecter) I take the liberty of troubling Your Lordship with the perusal of the enclosed annunciation of a design, wch I have had in contemplation two or three years, but lately only have resolved to carry it into execution. I accompany the information My Lord, with an unequivocal declaration that, it is not my intention to invite Emigrantseven if there be no prohibitary act of your Government opposed to it. My sole object is, if there are persons on the move, who may incline to associate and become tenants on such a plan as I offer, that being apprised of the measure, they may decide how far their views would be accomodated by it. The staple produce of the part of the country in which my Mount Vernon estate lyes, being Wheat, I mean to fix the Rent in that article, as most convenient and equitable for both Landlord & tenant; and I set it at a bushel and half for every acre contained in the lease; which will be all arable, with the priviledges detailed in the printed notification. In failure of a crop of this article, the Rent may be discharged in cash, at the price it bears in the Market. I have but little expectation I own, of maturing this plan so as to carry it into full effect next year; nor would I wish to do it with the slovenly farmers of this country, if I had a well founded hope of obtaining this class of Men from any other (particularly from Great Britain) where husbandry is well understood, and the language similar. Having had occasion lately, to write to Doctr Anderson (of Cotfield) on other matters, I have detailed my plan much more at large than I chose to trouble your Lordship with; and have sent him a sketch of the Farms, with their relative situation to each other, and divisions into fields, Lanes lots &ca; from whence an idea, more accurate than can be formed from the printed notification, might be had;2 but it is not my wish that any man, or set of men, should engage without first, by themselves or Agents, competently qualified & instructed, viewing the premises and judging for themselves. I pray your Lordship to present me in respectful terms, in which Mrs Washington unites, to Lady Buchan; and that you will be persuaded of the respect and consideration with which I have the honor to be Your Lordships Most Obedient & Hble Servt Go: Washington SOURCE: UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH ARCHIVES Advertisement LUCKNOW: Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) supremo Sharad Pawar has slammed the Centre for announcing a trust, which will oversee the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, but not announcing the same for building a mosque in the holy city. Addressing a gathering in Uttar Pradesh capital Lucknow on Wednesday, the NCP veteran demanded that the Centre must form a trust for building a mosque in Ayodhya similar to the trust to oversee the construction of Ram temple. "You can form a trust for a temple then why cant you set up a trust for the mosque. The country belongs to everyone, the NCP chief said. Pawars statement came hours after the members of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust, which was announced by PM Narendra Modi recently, met for the first time in Delhi to work out modalities of temple construction in Ayodhya. During the meeting, Mahant Nritya Gopal Das was elected as the head of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust while senior VHP leader Champat Rai was made the general secretary. Hours after the first meeting of the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust in Delhi, the Digambar Akhara objected to the exclusion of Yogi Adityanath from the trust. Yogi Adityanath, apart from being the Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, is also the head of the Goraksh Peeth in Gorakhpur and previous heads of this Peeth - Mahant Digvijaynath and Mahant Avaidyanath - have played crucial roles in the Ayodhya movement. The Digambar Akhara Chief Mahant Suresh Das that the Nath sect (to which the Goraksh Peeth belongs) had made immense contribution in the temple movement and deserved to have a representation in the temple trust. "It is unfortunate that this aspect has been completely ignored and Yogi Adityanath has been kept out of the trust. Mahant Suresh Das also expressed his disappointment at the fact that the Digambar Akhara had not been given a seat in the trust. "We are not begging for a place in the trust but...",he said. Hindu Mahasabha Chief Swami Chakrapani had also objected to the present formation of the trust and had said that he was `hurt`. Chakrapani said that the Hindu Mahasabha had been fighting for the temple since 1949 but they were sidelined in the formation of the trust where Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh have occupied the centre stage. It may be noted that a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court had in November, 2019 ruled unanimously in favour of Ram Lalla. It said the entire disputed land spread over 2.7-acre will be handed over to a trust formed by the government, which will monitor the construction of Ram temple at the site. The court had asked the government to give 5-acre land to Sunni Waqf Board in Ayodhya for the construction of a mosque in Ayodhya. On February 5, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the formation of `Shri Ram Janambhoomi Tirath Kshetra`, which would oversee the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, nearly three months after the Supreme Court ruling in the decades-old case. First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. 1 Timothy 2:1-2 One hundred years after President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed African peoples from the horror of chattel slavery in the United States, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King stated the following on Aug. 28, 1963: Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and the Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. Dr. King echoed the words of St. Paul, the missionary, to his younger mentee, Timothy, in I Timothy 2:1-2. Like Timothy, Dr. King was a mentee of moral leadership during his time. People like Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, a mystic and scholar, and the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Mays, the past president of Morehouse College and a global Christian leader, come to mind. Ms. Ella Baker was also an important organizing and young adult strategist who worked with King. Dr. King, St. Paul and Timothy the Apostle cared deeply about the acts of supplications, prayers, and intercessions for the people and those in leadership. Each shared a vision of a peaceful, godly and dignified life of the people shepherded by such leadership that would foster these spiritual virtues. They took risks that illustrated their commitment to this. But perhaps it was their unjust imprisonments that most dramatically displayed this or, in the case of St. Paul and Dr. King, their martyrdom. The history of African peoples inside and outside the United States bears witness to similar sacrifices made by African peoples to obtain their emancipated freedoms in 1863 and 1865 religious liberty, citizenship and the right to vote and run for elected office. Still, these gains are challenged by economic and racial structures, policies and practices that fuel the disproportionate numbers of African peoples affected by hunger and poverty. The historic and present stubborn barriers of voter suppression, the assault of reduced voter protections, and the lack of voter rights after imprisonment disproportionately affect the voting rights of people of African descent in the U.S. persist. Even in a post-President Obama presidency season, there are no viable presidential candidates from racial-ethnic groups not of European descent. How are we to end hunger and poverty without electing leaders who address these indignities? Voting at every level, completing the census, and fair representation matter! I invite you to reflect further on these themes with Bread for the Worlds Pan African devotional guides: In Times Like These A Pan-African Christian Devotional for Public Policy Engagement and Lament and Hope. I also invite you to learn more about Breads 2020 Election Platform and watch what the presidential candidates say they will do to help people living in hunger and poverty. Then I encourage you do your part to advocate for an end to these indignities! Rev. Dr. Angelique Walker-Smith is senior associate for Pan-African and Orthodox church engagement at Bread for the World in Washington, D.C. Mumbai/Pune, Feb 20 : In a significant victory over the drugs mafia, the Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) has busted a narcotics manufacturing facility at Purandare's Dive village in Pune district, officials said in Mumbai. In the raid on the factory, Shree Alfa Chemicals, the ATS sleuths have seized 10.5 kg of raw Mephedrone valued at Rs 4.20 crore, besides other raw materials and manufacturing equipments valued at around Rs 1.20 crore. The officials said the quantity was sufficient to produce at least 200 kg of the refined Mephedrone - which alters moods and has stimulant properties - valued around Rs 80 crore. Additional Director General of Police (ADGP) Deven Bharti said that in December 2019, two drug-peddlers - Mahendra P. Patil 49 and Santosh B. Adake, 29 - were nabbed in Mumbai's suburban Vile Parle and led to the recovery of over 14 kg Mephedrone worth Rs 5.70 crore from Mumbai and Pune. During investigations by ATS officials Daya Nayak and Sagar Kungir, Adake spilled the beans on the manufacturing unit in Dive village. Raids at the factory on Wednesday led to the large seizure from the factory premises and now further investigations are on to unravel the conspiracy and others involved in the matter, officials added. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 19:04:42|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close CANBERRA, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- The head of the Australian Army has warned that the nation's combat capabilities will suffer if troops are repeatedly deployed to fight bushfires. The government took unprecedented action in January by calling out more than 6,500 full-time and reserve Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel to help with recovery efforts from the bushfire crisis. Lieutenant General Rick Burr, the chief of the Australian Army, told a defence conference in Canberra recently that such deployments were a distraction from the "primary mission" of the ADF, according to The Australian report. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has flagged a greater role for the ADF in responding to domestic emergencies in the wake of the bushfires that killed at least 33 people. "Training for war is absolutely what we need to be equipped for and focused on," Burr said. "Our principal job is to prepare capabilities to conduct war-fighting, and with the resources that we have they're pretty well tied up in doing exactly that." More than 30 defence aircraft and three naval vessels were enlisted to extinguish fires and rescue hundreds of people who became stranded by the fires. Approximately 4,400 ADF personnel continue to provide support on the ground to communities hit hardest by fires. Addressing the National Press Club late in January, Morrison said that he was very conscious of testing the limits of constitutionally defined roles but there was now "a clear community expectation" that the Defence Force would assist in emergencies "where the life and property of Australians has been assessed to be under threat" at a large scale. WASHINGTON (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 20th February, 2020) US President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron discussed in a recent telephone call joint efforts to combat terrorism in Africa's Sahel region, among other bilateral issues, White House Deputy Press Secretary Judd Deere said in a readout of the call. "Yesterday, President Donald Trump spoke with President Emmanuel Macron of France," Deere said on Wednesday. "The two leaders discussed the importance of NATO, French and United States counterterrorism efforts in the Sahel, and other bilateral issues." The US Department of Defense is reportedly studying plans to possibly scale down or completely withdraw US forces from West Africa as part of a national defense strategy that seeks to address power competition from Russia and China. The Sahel is a bio-geographic zone of Africa, adjacent to the Sahara from the south in the form of semi-deserts, gradually turning into semi-savannas. Mauritania, Senegal, Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and Cape Verde are located on the territory of the Sahel in an area comparable to that of Western Europe. The Defense Department Inspector General for Africa said in a recent report that Islamist terror groups continued to gain strength in North, East and West Africa in the last three months of 2019 despite US counterterrorism efforts throughout certain parts of the region. Maryam Sanda, a woman found guilty of stabbing her husband to death, has asked the Court of Appeal in Abuja to set aside the death sentence pronounced on her. PREMIUM TIMES reported how on January 27, Justice Yusuf Halilu of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) High Court found Ms Sanda guilty of killing her husband. Ms Sanda stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife with a clear intent to kill, Mr Halilu concluded in the judgment, after a two-count homicide charge was brought by the Nigerian police against Ms Sanda in November 2017. The victim, Bilyaminu Bello, was the son of a former national chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Haliru Bello. The prosecuting counsel had urged the court to pronounce a death penalty on Ms Sanda. The judge obliged by sentencing the convict to death by hanging. While many perceived the judgment of Justice Halilu as harsh, others believe it is well deserved. Maryams appeal In her appeal against the death sentence, Ms Sanda claimed that Mr Halilu was biased and he denied her fair hearing. She contended that the conviction was based on circumstantial evidence, without evidence of witnesses, lack of confessional statement, absence of murder weapon, lack of corroboration of evidence by two witnesses and lack of autopsy report to determine the true cause of her husbands death. In the notice of appeal predicated on 20 grounds and filed by her lawyer, Rickey Tarfa, the convict said the judgment of the trial court was a complete a miscarriage of justice. According to Ms Sanda, the trial judge erred in law when having taken arguments on her preliminary objection to the validity of the charge on the 19th of March, 2018 failed to rule on it at the conclusion of the trial or at any other time. She said that the trial judge exhibited bias against the defendant in not ruling one way or the other on the said motion challenging his jurisdiction to entertain the charge and therefore fundamentally breached the right to a fair hearing of the defendant. The appellant also contended that the trial judge erred and misdirected himself by usurping the role of the police when he assumed the duty of an Investigating Police Officer (IPO). The appellant was referring to a statement made by the judge in his ruling. Justice Halilu had said that, I wish to state that I have a duty thrust upon me to investigate and discover what will satisfy the interest and demands of justice. The appellant submitted that the wrongful assumption of the role of an IPO made the trial judge fail to restrict himself to the evidence adduced before the court and instead went fishing for evidence outside those that were brought before the court. The duty of investigation is the constitutional preserve of the police, the constitutional duty of a trial court is to assess the credible evidence before it and reach a decision based on its assessment, the convict argued. Ms Sanda argued that the courts usurpation of the duty of the police by taking it upon itself to investigate and discover, negatively coloured its assessment of the available evidence and resulted in it reaching an unjust decision contrary to the evidence before it. The appellant also argued that the trial judge erred in law and misdirected himself on the facts when he applied the doctrine of last seen and held that the appellant was the person last seen with the deceased and thus bears the full responsibility for the death of the deceased, and thereby occasioned a miscarriage of justice. There is no evidence before the trial judge that the defendant was the last person who saw the deceased alive since prosecution witness in his evidence before the trial judge stated that he was called by the deceased, he saw the deceased and asked the deceased what was the problem, she said. She added that the statement of Sadiya Aminu, tendered before the trial court (who was initially charged as the fourth defendant in the amended charge), also confirmed that the deceased was alive though injured when she saw him. The circumstantial evidence which the trial court relied upon in its application of the last seen doctrine does not lead to the conclusion that the defendant is responsible for the death of the deceased, she argued. Consequently, she asked the appellate court to allow her appeal, set aside her conviction and the sentence imposed by the high court judge and acquit her. Theres quite a few new features coming in Android 11 and one of them is is a new approval system that developers will have to comply with, as it will require approval from Google Play to grant access to background location. Starting in April when things begin, any apps that want background locations access will need approval from Google first. This isnt too unlike the access that needs to be granted to an app from the user. Currently, when you use an app that needs your location, you get a prompt that asks if you want to grant it access. And you have the option of always allowing it or only for the current use of the app. Advertisement If background location data isnt needed, Google Play wont grant it The way this new change works is a little bit different than whats already available to users. As it stands right now users can grant access to the app when they use it, or allow it to have permission all the time. The permission is there though. Going forward that will change. With this new policy update, any app that wants to have this as a permission will need to have it approved by Google Play. This will apply to all new apps in the future as well as existing apps too. Advertisement For apps that already have this permission set up, Google will require developers to provide proof that they need the permission. If they dont by the time that Google has designated then the app will be removed from the store. Google has set up some guidelines that need to be met There are a handful of guidelines that Google has put in place to determine whether or not approval should be granted. All four of them are questions that developers will need to answer when submitting for the approval to use background location data. One of these questions is whether or not the app can deliver the same experience even without this permission. Advertisement If not, then presumably Google would not approve this app to have it. Other questions outlined include whether or not the app having permission for background location access gives a clear value to the user. Google also asks if users would expect the app to ask for such a permission (users might be surprised at how many apps ask for it but dont really need it for core functions). The last thing developers need to prove, is if the background location access is crucial or important to apps core functionality or features. Google says that any application which doesnt have approval by November 2 will be removed from Google Play. The Namaste Trump event in Gujarats Ahmedabad hosted for US President Donald Trump will be similar to the Howdy Modi event held in Houston in September last year, Raveesh Kumar, Ministry of External Affairs spokesperson said on Thursday. We are eagerly waiting for President Donald Trumps visit, it will strengthen our global strategic ties, Raveesh told reporters here during a weekly press briefing. The US President Donald Trump and the First Lady Melania Trump will be coming to India for a two-day trip on February 24. The visit, a first by Trumps to India, is being seen as a major boost to India-US ties. Watch l Trumps India visit l From timings to focus of talks: All you need to know Also read: Trump platter, baked delicacies: Traditional welcome in store for US president, first lady The couple will be start their visit in Gujarats Ahmedabad, and Uttar Pradeshs Agra on the first day, after which they will proceed to Delhi in the evening for an official reception and bilateral talks. Melania will likely visit a Delhi government school to see the widely appreciated Happiness Curriculum introduced by the state in July, 2018. An assorted platter of baked sweets has been put on menu for the Trumps, who are expected to stay at the ITC Maurya hotel in New Delhis Chanakyapuri. The Presidential couple is expected to dine at the hotels Indian restaurant, Bukhara, known for its iconic Dal Bukhara and non-vegetarian delicacies. While the chef has not divulged the full details of Trump platter, traditional Indian sweets or mithai may be on the menu for the US president, who is known to have a sweet tooth. Also read: Trump expects 7 million people to welcome him on Ahmedabad visit Trumps itinerary for Delhi is being expected to be a jam-packed affair, including an open-press event at Rashtrapati Bhawan on Tuesday morning, followed by a visit to the Rajghat, a lunch meeting with Prime Minister Modi at Hyderabad House, and an early evening state banquet hosted by President Ram Nath Kovind. HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) A key Connecticut congressman said Monday that President Donald Trumps proposal to reduce funding for building Virginia-class submarines is dead on arrival. Democratic U.S. Rep. Joe Courtney, whose district includes the General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, said the $19.9 billion allocated in Trumps $4.8 trillion budget plan is nearly 17% lower than current funding levels and is proposing to build the fewest number of combatant vessels for the U.S. Navy in a decade. This weak, pathetic request for eight ships of which two are tugboats is not only fewer ships than 2020, but fewer ships than the Navy told us last year it planned for 2021, said Courtney, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and chairman of House Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee. I can say with complete certainty that, like so much of the rest of the Presidents budget, it is dead on arrival, he said. Courtney said experts have warned Congress year after year about the need for greater submarine capabilities, as China and Russia increase their undersea activity and the American fleet faces an impending 20% reduction. Thats why we worked so hard to achieve and sustain the two-a-year build rate since 2011, Courtney said. Deviating from that plan now makes no sense, and I am confident we will address this incoherent decision in the 2021 defense bill. In budget documents, the Trump administration said the budget proposal ensures maritime superiority and prioritizes funding for programs that would deliver warfighting advantages against China and Russia. Trumps plan allocates funds for just one Virginia-class submarine. Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, of Connecticut, called that a dangerous departure from our long-established, bipartisan commitment to undersea predominance. Meanwhile, Democratic U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, also of Connecticut, said the Navy has purchased two Virginia-class submarines a year since 2011, adding how the states workforce and manufacturers rely on funding for the subs. Bishop Ronald Gainer addressed reporters Wednesday afternoon to explain the Roman Catholic Diocese of Harrisburgs filing for bankruptcy protection. The diocese is seeking a remedy for its ailing finances as it deals with hundreds of complaints of child sex abuse by priests. In 2018, state Attorney General Josh Shapiro released a scathing report finding widespread abuse at six Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania, including Harrisburg. The Harrisburg Diocese becomes the first in Pennsylvania to file for bankruptcy protection in light of the child sex abuse scandal. Gainer and Matt Haverstick, an attorney representing the diocese, addressed reporters. Here are some highlights from the press conference. Finances are unsustainable Gainer said the diocese is bracing for more lawsuits from those saying they were abused by priests. The dioceses bankruptcy filing says there are five active civil lawsuits by clergy abuse survivors and that there are approximately 200 survivors" associated with the diocese. The diocese said the costs of expected jury awards or settlements will surpass its resources. Our current financial situation is unsustainable going forward, Gainer said. I hope that our parishioners can see this action presents a path for our diocese to move forward, he added. Apologies to victims Gainer offered apologies to those who were abused by priests and for the dioceses failure to protect victims. I continue to offer my heartfelt apologies for the abuse you suffered, Gainer said. I also offer my apologies and deepest regret the diocese did not do more to protect you." The diocese will continue to offer counseling to survivors at no cost, he added. Apologies to parishioners Gainer apologized to the members of the diocese, which covers 15 counties and serves about 275,000 Catholics. I am so sorry that you are being put into this position because of our horrific past, he said. Compensation fund is not at risk Last summer, the Harrisburg diocese said it had paid out $12 million in settlements with more than 100 victims of clergy sex abuse. Those who agreed to settlements have been paid. That money was already paid out to victims to resolve their claims," Haverstick said. Separate entities The bankruptcy filing is related to the diocese itself. But Haverstick explained that the churches and schools in the diocese are not part of the filing. The parishes are not in bankruptcy," he said. "The schools are not in bankruptcy. The entity that is in bankruptcy is the Diocese of Harrisburg. The offering plate Haverstick stressed that parishioners putting their money in the offering plate at their churches arent making payments related to the bankruptcy. He said that money remains with their local churches. Money thats going to the collection plate doesnt go to lawyers, doesnt go to me," Haverstick said. "It stays at the parish level. Status of employees The diocese said it continues to pay its employees their full salaries and benefits. Defending bankruptcy Haverstick said bankruptcy has the unfair connotation of being a dirty word. Responding to questions from reporters, Haverstick said the bankruptcy filing isnt an attempt to lock in other survivors or litigants to settlements at lower values. I think its the most responsible thing we can do for victims and survivors," he said of the filing. This is an attempt to try to do right by everybody, not short-shrift one group over another, Haverstick said. Thanks for visiting PennLive. Quality local journalism has never been more important. We need your support. Not a subscriber yet? Please consider supporting our work. By carefully harvesting tiny samples of olfactory cleft mucosal tissue and conducting single-cell analysis, a collaborative team led by University of Miami Miller School of Medicine researchers has found compelling evidence to support olfactory neurogenesis, the ability to regrow olfactory neurons to the brain. For decades, medical researchers have wondered whether or not neurogenesis was possible in adult humans, said J. William Harbour, M.D., associate director for basic science at Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center, professor of ophthalmology, and vice chair for translational research and director of ocular oncology at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute. This study uses cutting edge single-cell sequencing analysis to present compelling evidence that the answer is yes. Dr. Harbour, a member of the Interdisciplinary Stem Cell Institute, was a coauthor of the breakthrough study, Single-Cell Analysis of Olfactory Neurogenesis and Differentiation in Adult Humans, published February 17 in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Miller School co-authors were Zoukaa B. Sargi, M.D., M.P.H., associate professor of clinical otolaryngology and neurosurgery; Sarah Kurtenbach, Ph.D., assistant scientist; Stefan Kurtenbach, Ph.D., assistant scientist; Garrett M. Goss, Ph.D., assistant scientist; Rhea Choi, M.D/Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP); and Michael A. Durante, M.D./Ph.D. student in the MSTP. Bradley J. Goldstein, M.D., Ph.D., formerly with the Miller School and now at Duke University Medical Center, was the corresponding author. The studys importance was emphasized by an accompanying News & Views column, Neurogenesis Right Under Your Nose, by three European researchers published in the same issue of Nature Neuroscience. To our knowledge, no one has done a similar kind of analysis before, they wrote, adding that the study opens up new opportunities for investigating the role of olfaction directly in healthy individuals and people with various diseases. Dr. Harbour and his research team have studied the process by which stem cells in the eye produce differentiated offspring in laboratory models, including recent studies on retinoblastoma. This type of research can progress slowly due to the difficulty in obtaining the delicate tissue samples from human subjects. In this study, the researchers were able to harvest tiny samples of olfactory epithelium neurons that send signals regarding smells to the brain from behind the nasal passages in seven patients ages 23 to 52 with benign tumors. These cases provided access to normal olfactory tissue that required removal, said Dr. Sargi. Unlike the process for diagnostic biopsies, we needed to remove this delicate tissue and keep it intact for the research team. It took us many trials before we were able to adequately collect the samples. Using these freshly obtained samples, the researchers used single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze 28,726 cells. Dr. Stefan Kurtenbach said the team used a powerful analytical platform to analyze data from the individual cells. We found that about 2 percent of those cells were neural stem cells, indicating that neuron production may continue into adulthood in humans, added Durante. Along with showing that neurons in the olfactory epithelium regenerate in adults, Dr. Sargi said the study provided new insights into the genes expressed by neurons as well as white blood cells involved in the local immune system in the olfactory tissue. Looking ahead, the researchers believe the findings have important potential clinical implications. This landmark paper confirms that single cell analysis is a critical new tool for understanding the complexity of stem cell biology in health and disease, said Dr. Harbour. In the future, it may be possible to remove the stem cells, cultivate them in the laboratory and replant them in the olfactory epithelium, said Dr. Kurtenbach. This could be helpful to older people who lose their sense of smell. Durante added that loss of olfactory function is also associated with Alzheimers disease, Parkinsons disease and other chronic conditions. By applying these techniques, we may be able to learn more about this linkage, he said. It is certainly a fertile field for many types of clinical research. Miller School of Medicine SAP has said two of its employees in Bengaluru have tested positive for H1N1 virus and as a precautionary measure, it has closed offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram and Mumbai for extensive sanitisation. The employees based in these locations have been asked to work from home, the German tech giant said in a statement. "Two SAP India employees based in Bangalore (RMZ Ecoworld office) have tested positive for the H1N1 virus. Detailed contact tracing that the infected colleagues may have come into contact with is underway," SAP India said in an emailed statement. It added that as a precautionary measure, all SAP India offices across Bengaluru, Gurugram and Mumbai have been closed for extensive sanitisation. "...all SAP employees based in these locations have been asked to work from home till further notice," the statement said. In an internal communication to employees, the company said "considering the situation, we encourage you to work from home beginning February 20 till February 28". Stating that it is monitoring the situation closely, SAP advised employees to seek medical advice if they or their family members have any symptoms of cold, cough with fever. "The health of our employees is our priority and it is critical that we provide the current information and guidance to help limit the spread of the H1N1 virus," it added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) CPRIT grant draws cell imaging specialist to Rice HOUSTON - (Feb. 19, 2020) - If you're wondering where that molecule went, Anna-Karin Gustavsson may be able to help. Single-molecule tracking and super-resolution imaging are specialties of the soon-to-be Rice University faculty member joining as a CPRIT Scholar, her recruitment funded by the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. The tax-funded state agency announced a $2 million grant to bring the researcher to Houston from Stanford University, where she has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the group of Nobel laureate W.E. Moerner since 2015. She was, in fact, the first postdoc hired by Moerner since winning the prize the year before. "I've loved my time here in the lab and W.E.'s been a great mentor, but I'm very excited to be starting up my own research," said Gustavsson, who will join Rice in August. Gustavsson studies the nanoscale structures and dynamics of single molecules inside cells and the molecular mechanisms that drive them, and designs and builds versatile imaging tools in the rapidly developing field of 3D single-molecule super-resolution microscopy. These will incorporate a breakthrough technique called light sheet illumination, the topic of a 2018 Nature Communications paper on which Gustavsson was first author. The method allows researchers to illuminate a thin slice of a live cell to see the molecules it contains. She received a National Institutes of Health Pathway to Independence Award in 2019 to refine the technique. "What I'm trying to do is to push single-molecule imaging to 3D, and to do it throughout entire mammalian cells," she said. "Compared to many other targets for single-molecule super-resolution imaging, mammalian cells are very big, and we conventionally get a lot of fluorescence background haze in our images. "That's detrimental for precisely detecting single molecules," she said. "They're so dim on their own, we need as good a contrast as we can possibly get. By only illuminating a thin plane, we optically section the cell. That reduces the fluorescence background and also reduces the risk of photobleaching what we haven't imaged yet, and of damaging the cells with the light. "This technique is much gentler for live cell imaging," Gustavsson said. The ability to combine slices to see a cell's complete structure in great detail will be a boon for cancer research, she said. One goal of her work at Rice will be to obtain full super-resolution reconstructions of living cancer cells before, during and after treatment with drugs. "Since I can see individual molecules, I can look at two different proteins and see how they interact in a healthy cell and whether those interactions are lost during disease progression," Gustavsson said. "Understanding the underlying molecular mechanisms could lead to potential targets for drug treatment to restore those interactions." Gustavsson, who will be the Norman Hackerman-Welch Young Investigator Chair at Rice, earned her bachelor's and master's degrees and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She said the collaborative nature of Rice faculty and juxtaposition to new colleagues at the Texas Medical Center were primary considerations in coming to Houston. Gustavsson's Rice lab will be at the university's recently renovated Space Science and Technology Building. The grant to Gustavsson was one of 55 awards announced by CPRIT on Feb. 19, with a total value of more than $78 million. To date, CPRIT has awarded $2.9 billion in grants to Texas research institutions and organizations through its academic research, prevention and product development research programs. ### This news release can be found online at https:/ / news. rice. edu/ 2020/ 02/ 19/ cprit-grant-draws-cell-imaging-specialist-to-rice/ Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews. Related materials: Anna-Karin Gustavsson bio: https:/ / chemistry. rice. edu/ people/ anna-karin-gustavsson Rice Department of Chemistry: https:/ / chemistry. rice. edu Wiess School of Natural Sciences: https:/ / naturalsciences. rice. edu Images for download: https:/ / news-network. rice. edu/ news/ files/ 2020/ 02/ 0224_CPRIT-1-WEB. jpg Anna-Karin Gustavsson, a specialist in super-resolution microscopy, will join Rice University with the help of a $2 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. (Credit: Photo by Bengt Schuler) https:/ / news-network. rice. edu/ news/ files/ 2020/ 02/ 0224_CPRIT-2-WEB. jpg Tilted light sheet imaging developed by Rice University recruit Anna-Karin Gustavsson produced this 3D reconstruction of the entire nuclear lamina in a HeLa cell. Gustavsson will join Rice's Department of Chemistry this August. (Credit: Courtesy of Anna-Karin Gustavsson) https:/ / news-network. rice. edu/ news/ files/ 2020/ 02/ 0224_CPRIT-3-WEB. jpg Three views of the nuclear lamina of a HeLa cell produced by a tilted light sheet imaging technique developed by Rice University recruit Anna-Karin Gustavsson. She will join Rice's Department of Chemistry this August with the help of a grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. (Credit: Courtesy of Anna-Karin Gustavsson) Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation's top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice's undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger's Personal Finance. Jeff Falk 713-348-6775 jfalk@rice.edu Mike Williams 713-348-6728 mikewilliams@rice.edu This story has been published on: 2020-02-20. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. WASHINGTON (dpa-AFX) - Netflix said it acquired exclusive streaming rights for the upcoming asteroid comedy 'Don't Look Up,' starring Jennifer Lawrence. The film tells the story of two low-level astronomers, who must go on a giant media tour to warn mankind of an approaching asteroid that will destroy the earth. Academy Award-winning director Adam McKay has written the script, and will direct and produce the movie under his Hyperobject Industries banner with Kevin Messick. McKay won the Oscar award for The Big Short. Lawrence, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance in 'Silver Linings Playbook,' will star in Paolo Sorrentino's 'Mob Girl'. The movie is to be produced by her for Universal Pictures. McKay said he is very much thrilled to make this movie with Jen Lawrence. 'She's what folks in the 17th century used to call 'a dynamite act', according to him. Scott Stuber, head of Netflix films said, 'Adam has always had great timing when it comes to making smart, relevant and irreverent films that depict our culture'. 'Even if he somehow ends up predicting planet Earth's imminent demise, we're excited to add this to our slate before it all comes to an end,' he added. Netflix said the film's shooting will commence in April, and they plan to release it later this year. Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX Werbehinweise: Die Billigung des Basisprospekts durch die BaFin ist nicht als ihre Befurwortung der angebotenen Wertpapiere zu verstehen. Wir empfehlen Interessenten und potenziellen Anlegern den Basisprospekt und die Endgultigen Bedingungen zu lesen, bevor sie eine Anlageentscheidung treffen, um sich moglichst umfassend zu informieren, insbesondere uber die potenziellen Risiken und Chancen des Wertpapiers. Sie sind im Begriff, ein Produkt zu erwerben, das nicht einfach ist und schwer zu verstehen sein kann. NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- New York based fashion brand, HIROMI ASAI, (www.hiromiasainy.com) has always been trying to revive the essence of Japanese Kimono for modern luxury fashion. The designer, Hiromi Asai, first presented Kimonos on runway at the New York Fashion Week in 2016. Then, HIROMI ASAI developed men's wears all made of Japanese Kimono textiles, which were presented at Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy and other major trade shows in USA every season since 2017. HIROMI ASAI men's wear collection won accolades and got much international media coverage. HIROMI ASAI AW20 Collection - New York Fashion Week / Paris Fashion Week HIROMI ASAI FW20 Collection - New York Fashion Week / Paris Fashion Week The sales of HIROMI ASAI men's wear collection started in April, 2019 at Flying Solo (flyingsolo.nyc), located on the prime street in SoHo, New York, which introduces and sells independent and emerging fashion brands, now recognized as the biggest fashion platform of independent designers in the United States. Flying Solo produces fashion shows to demonstrate the latest collection of the designers during the New York Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week. HIROMI ASAI has demonstrated Fall-Winter 2020/21 men's wear collection on runway on February 8, 2020 at the New York Fashion Week. Now HIROMI ASAI presents Fall-Winter 2020/21 men's wear collection with Flying Solo designers at Salons Marceau on Monday, February 24, 2020. This is the second time for HIROMI ASAI to present the latest collection at Paris Fashion Week. The theme of the collection is "The Whole Creation", represented by unique natural motifs: pythons, phoenixes, roses, etc. Inspired by these natural motifs, HIROMI ASAI develops new textiles suitable for men's wear collection with craftsmen in Japan, who usually manufacture textiles for Kimono by traditional techniques. HIROMI ASAI would like to demonstrate luxury and sustainable fashion with unique prominent textiles and sophisticated design, made by outstanding tailoring techniques in Japan. "This is second time to present HIROMI ASAI menswear collection at Paris Fashion Week. I designed our latest collection, inspired by the whole creation either real or unreal. I am so proud to demonstrate our FW20 collection in Paris," Ms. Asai, a designer of HIROMI ASAI said. "I believe that the essence of Kimono is `textile` not `form.` It is our responsibility to hand over arts of traditional textiles all over the world, including kimono textiles, to the next generation. For this commitment, I continue transforming Japanese exquisite traditional textiles to modern luxury and sustainable fashion for people all over the world." HIROMI ASAI Fall-Winter 2020/21 men's wear collection is soon available on sale at the retail shops and online store of Flying Solo as well as at several retailors in US and Europe. DETAILED INFORMATION HIROMI ASAI@ Flying Solo Fall-Winter 2020/21 Flying Solo Show at Paris Fashion Week Date and Time: Monday, February 24, 2020; 1:00pm 3:00pm Location: Salons de Marceau - 79 Avenue Marceau, Paris (RSVP only) HIROMI ASAI WEB AND SOCIAL MEDIA HP: http://www.hiromiasainy.com Flying Solo HIROMI ASAI online store: https://flyingsolo.nyc/collections/hiromi-asai Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hiromi.asai Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/modeandclassic Media Contact: Hiromi Asai [email protected] 646-242-4156 SOURCE HIROMI ASAI (Mode & Classic LLC) Related Links http://www.hiromiasainy.com Union Minister Ramdas Athawale on Thursday raised a demand for a piece of land for the construction of a Buddhist temple in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. He said he would soon meet Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath regarding this demand. "I want that around 10 to 20 acres of land should be allotted to the Buddhists and a grand Buddhist temple should be built in Ayodhya. I will soon be meeting UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath," Athawale told ANI. The Supreme Court in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title suit verdict last year gave the disputed site to the Hindus for construction of a Ram temple and ordered UP government to give 5 acres of land to the Sunni Waqf Board at an alternate place in Ayodhya for the construction of a mosque. Athawale said: "If my demand is not taken into consideration, we the people who believe in Buddhist thoughts will form a trust, acquire a piece of land in Ayodhya and construct a Buddhist temple there." Athawale said there were many Buddhist temples in India during the reign of Emperor Ashoka, before the influence of Hinduism increased. "With the influence of Guru Shankaracharya and Hindu religion, temples were constructed at several places," he said. "Later, when Mughals came to India, they started constructing mosques by demolishing the temples. However, the government has decided to pursue the construction of Ram Temple after the Supreme Court's decision," he added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Thua Thien - Hue Provincial Peoples Committee will choose the final date to host the event and will work further with the events sponsors on the rescheduling. In case the Covid-19 epidemic continues to spread, the local authorities will make further adjustments. As previously planned, the 11th Hue Festival will last from April 1 to 6 with a string of programmes including Ao dai (Vietnams traditional dress) shows, street carnivals, food festivals and many colourful art performances. There will also be cultural and community activities as well as tours to places of interests in Thua Thien - Hue Province, including Lang Co Bay, A Luoi mountainous area, and Tam Giang Lagoon. In addition to the participation of more than 20 foreign art troupes from countries worldwide, including the Republic of Korea, Japan, Israel, France, Russia and the US, among others, the event will also gather many traditional and contemporary Vietnamese art troupes. First held in 2000, the event has become a major culture event honouring Hues cultural heritage, and a unique tourism product which greatly contributes to tourism development. Sorry! This content is not available in your region OTTAWA - "The RCMP Act is clear: the minister of public safety has the ultimate authority over Canada's national police force, and has the power to direct the RCMP to enforce the law. ... So do the right thing, Prime Minister Trudeau. We cannot allow a small number of activists to hold our economy hostage and threaten thousands of jobs. Pick up the phone, tell (Public Safety) Minister Blair to put an end to this situation." Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, Feb. 14, 2020. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Protesters are seen near closed train tracks in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory near Belleville, Ont. on Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020, as they protest in solidarity with the Wet'suwet'en hereditary chiefs opposed to the LNG pipeline in northern British Columbia. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Lars Hagberg OTTAWA - "The RCMP Act is clear: the minister of public safety has the ultimate authority over Canada's national police force, and has the power to direct the RCMP to enforce the law. ... So do the right thing, Prime Minister Trudeau. We cannot allow a small number of activists to hold our economy hostage and threaten thousands of jobs. Pick up the phone, tell (Public Safety) Minister Blair to put an end to this situation." Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, Feb. 14, 2020. The federal Conservatives are decrying layoffs that have resulted from rail blockades across Canada in support of Indigenous objections to a British Columbia natural-gas pipeline. The Tories are calling on the Trudeau government to tell the RCMP to step in and enforce injunctions to remove the blockades, saying the law governing the national police force clearly permits such direction. How accurate is the Conservative claim? The Canadian Press Baloney Meter is a dispassionate examination of political statements culminating in a ranking of accuracy on a scale of "no baloney" to "full of baloney." This one earns a rating of "a lot of baloney": The assertion is the statement is mostly inaccurate but contains elements of truth. The Facts Section 5(1) of the RCMP Act says: The Governor in Council may appoint an officer, to be known as the Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to hold office during pleasure, who, under the direction of the Minister, has the control and management of the Force and all matters connected with the Force. In addition, section 18 of the act says: It is the duty of members who are peace officers, subject to the orders of the Commissioner, (a) to perform all duties that are assigned to peace officers in relation to the preservation of the peace, the prevention of crime and of offences against the laws of Canada and the laws in force in any province in which they may be employed, and the apprehension of criminals and offenders and others who may be lawfully taken into custody; (b) to execute all warrants, and perform all duties and services in relation thereto, that may, under this Act or the laws of Canada or the laws in force in any province, be lawfully executed and performed by peace officers; (c) to perform all duties that may be lawfully performed by peace officers in relation to the escort and conveyance of convicts and other persons in custody to or from any courts, places of punishment or confinement, asylums or other places; and (d) to perform such other duties and functions as are prescribed by the Governor in Council or the Commissioner. The Experts University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach has pointed out that the doctrine of police independence, as recognized in a 1999 Supreme Court decision (Campbell and Shirose), seems to qualify the terms of Section 5 of the RCMP Act. In the decision, then-justice Ian Binnie wrote: "While for certain purposes the commissioner of the RCMP reports to the solicitor general (now known as the public safety minister), the commissioner is not to be considered a servant or agent of the government while engaged in a criminal investigation. The commissioner is not subject to political direction. Like every other police officer similarly engaged, he is answerable to the law and, no doubt, to his conscience." Roach, an authority on law-enforcement powers, wrote in 2011 that "with respect to most criminal investigations, (the Campbell decision) stands for the proposition that police officers enjoy independence from the executive and should not be directed by their minister either to commence or to stop a criminal investigation or to make or not make an arrest or to lay or not lay a charge." The Supreme Court decision "did not specifically address enforcing injunctions but I would include them," Roach told The Canadian Press in an interview. Wayne MacKay, a professor emeritus of law at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said politicians have generally been reluctant to become directly involved in ordering the police to do things that are considered front-line operations. The federal cabinet can issue regulations and directives to the RCMP. However, MacKay says, "It would be pretty unusual to make a regulation about a very specific event or a thing like this. Regulations generally would be much broader in scope." The Government Response "Police independence is crucial to public trust in our institutions," said Mary-Liz Power, a spokeswoman for Public Safety Minister Bill Blair. "The minister may not attempt to influence in any way an investigation, or direct the conduct of specific police operations. Our government is committed to protecting the constitutional right to lawful peaceful protest, keeping Canadians safe and upholding the rule of law." The Verdict In its landmark decision, the Supreme Court of Canada said police independence, in the context of criminal investigation, "underpins the rule of law." Legal experts agree on the importance of the time-honoured principle of the police acting at arm's length from the state in day-to-day operations. For these reasons, the claim that the government can order the RCMP to step in contains "a lot of baloney." Methodology The Baloney Meter is a project of The Canadian Press that examines the level of accuracy in statements made by politicians. Each claim is researched and assigned a rating based on the following scale: No baloney - the statement is completely accurate A little baloney - the statement is mostly accurate but more information is required Some baloney - the statement is partly accurate but important details are missing A lot of baloney - the statement is mostly inaccurate but contains elements of truth Full of baloney - the statement is completely inaccurate BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 20 By Ilkin Seyfaddini Trend: The first Tashkent International Investment Forum, which was scheduled to be held March 5-6, has been postponed until autumn at risk of spreading of the coronavirus, Trend reports citing Uzbek media. For this reason, only about 500-600 delegates out of 1,500 expected participants have expressed the intention to attend the forum. As reported, the forum was rescheduled at the request of the participants. Recently, for a similar reason, Russian Investment Forum in Sochi, which was scheduled for February 12-14, was also postponed. However, the forum in Tashkent is bound to take place as it is very important for Uzbekistan, the report said. The initiative to hold the investment forum came from Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev; he made the proposal during his message to the parliament in January. According to Uzbek Ministry of Investment and Foreign Trade, more than 1,500 leaders of foreign and national companies, investors, exporters and international media were to be involved in the forum. The outbreak in the Chinese city of Wuhan - which is an international transport hub - began at a fish market in late December 2019. Since then over 2,128 people have died and over 75,727 people have been confirmed as infected. Some sources claim the coronavirus outbreak started as early as November 2019. The symptoms include cough, headache, fatigue, fever, aching and difficulty breathing. It is primarily spread through airborne contact or contact with contaminated objects. Chinese health authorities say that the majority of the people who have died were either elderly or had underlying health problems. Aside from Mainland China, the cases of coronavirus spreading have also been confirmed in Japan, Singapore, Thailand, South Korea, Hong Kong, Australia, Germany, the US, Malaysia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Macau, France, Canada, the UAE, India, Italy, Russia, Philippines, the UK, Nepal, Cambodia, Belgium, Spain, Finland, Sweden and Sri Lanka. --- Follow author on Twitter: @seyfaddini An angry family member of a woman who died at a hospital here following childbirth, slapped one of the doctors as he accused the hospital staff of negligence. The incident happened on Thursday at the CMRI hospital in Kolkata after a 30-year-old woman died a day after delivering a baby. Sources said that after delivering the child on Wednesday morning, she was fine and the baby was also stable. But on Thursday morning she passed away, reportedly follwoing cardiac arrest. The hospital said it provided all the necessary critical care and support to the patient. In the CCTV footage, a grieving person can be seen slapping a doctor while he was trying to explain the situation to the family in the presence of many people. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) MONTREAL Two people are confirmed dead in a crash that involved about 200 vehicles on Highway 15 in La Prairie south of Montreal, provincial police say. The confirmation came from the Surete du Quebec, which said the victims are two people who were trapped in the wreckage near a diesel spill. Whiteout conditions likely triggered the massive pileup that sent a dozen people to hospital with minor to serious injuries. The crash occurred around 12:30 p.m. on a stretch of the highway that runs along the St. Lawrence River. The pileup of vehicles extended for about a kilometre. Transport Minister Francois Bonnardel said the pileup took place in an area where heavy winds come off the river, creating sudden blizzardlike conditions. People were driving, there were strong winds ... and, suddenly, you couldnt see anything, Bonnardel said in Quebec City. And then, well, the pileup started. Two snow removal operations took place in the area in the hour before the crash, he noted. Bonnardel said the highway isnt known for particular safety issues and 65,000 vehicles use the southbound part of it on a daily basis. No coroners report relating to winter viability (of the area) has been produced for at least 20 years, Bonnardel said. The transport minister said hell await the results of an investigation before deciding if any particular measures need to be taken. Police spokesman Sgt. Stephane Tremblay said about 50 vehicles were able to drive away from the collision, but 75 others would need to be towed. Numerous vehicles were mangled, including several large trucks. About 150 people were taken by bus to a nearby community centre for treatment and to be picked up. Tremblay said police crash experts will study what caused the pileup. A school bus was also involved, but none of the high school students on board were injured, said Andree Laforest, the provinces acting public security minister. Read more about: The Company has made significant progress in its predictive modeling of gold mineralization at the LP Fault zone, and its regional exploration program. Highlights include: Identification of key geological controls to the distribution of high-grade gold mineralization along the LP Fault. High-grade gold mineralization occurs in close proximity to a steeply-dipping felsic volcanic/metasedimentary contact . Figure 1. along the LP Fault. High-grade gold mineralization . The Company has retained Mr. James Gray , P.Geo., an independent consultant from Advantage Geoservices Ltd., to assist Great Bear's geological team with gold mineralization modeling. Mr. Gray's experience includes resource definition drilling and geological modeling at the David Bell mine at the Hemlo gold deposit , formerly operated by Teck Corporation, and currently owned by Barrick Gold Corp. , P.Geo., an independent consultant from Advantage Geoservices Ltd., to assist Great Bear's geological team with gold mineralization modeling. Mr. Gray's experience includes , formerly operated by Teck Corporation, and currently owned by Barrick Gold Corp. An airborne SkyTEM (electromagnetic) survey has been completed across the property, identifying new regional exploration drill targets. The new targets have similar geophysical characteristics to both the LP Fault zone and the Hinge and Dixie Limb zones. Follow-up drilling is required. Figure 2 and Figure 3 . The new targets have similar geophysical characteristics to both the LP Fault zone and the Hinge and zones. and 13 reconnaissance drill holes were completed outside of previously drilled areas across 11 kilometres of the property. The primary purpose of this drilling was to identify favorable structural and geological settings for additional follow-up drilling. Six new occurrences of highly anomalous gold mineralization have been discovered in 9 of the 13 drill holes , as shown on Figure 4 . Highlighted results are included in the drill results table posted to the Company's website at www.greatbearresources.ca . The primary purpose of this drilling was to identify favorable structural and geological settings for additional follow-up drilling. , as shown on Highlighted results are included in the drill results table posted to the Company's website at www.greatbearresources.ca These new gold occurrences include: 1) highly deformed metasedimentary rocks (LP Fault style), and 2) quartz vein systems (Hinge zone style). The geological marker sequence (deformed meta-sedimentary rocks) previously identified at the LP Fault zone has now been intersected along approximately 7 kilometres. Drill density is insufficient at this time to determine what the gold distributions and geometries of these new gold occurrences may ultimately be. Follow-up drilling is required. The geological marker sequence (deformed meta-sedimentary rocks) previously identified at the LP Fault zone has now been intersected along approximately 7 kilometres. Drill density is insufficient at this time to determine what the gold distributions and geometries of these new gold occurrences may ultimately be. The Company has engaged consultants to assist with preliminary metallurgical testing of gold mineralized samples in advance of more advanced studies planned for 2021. of gold mineralized samples in advance of more advanced studies planned for 2021. Ongoing environmental baseline studies continue on the property. continue on the property. As previously announced on February 13, 2020 , a table of highlighted assay results, including drill locations, azimuths and dips from the central 4.2 kilometre segment of the LP Fault have now been posted to the Company's web site. The Company has also provided three dimensional .DXF files of important geological controls on mineralization. Chris Taylor, President and CEO of Great Bear said, "Ongoing drilling has shown us that the gold-mineralized system at Dixie is at least 11 kilometres in strike extent. These early reconnaissance drill results are very similar to our initial footwall drilling into the LP Fault zone in 2018 and early 2019. We now need to drill in the vicinity of these new occurrences to determine if and where high-grade gold is present, and whether these occurrences are connected. Within the LP Fault zone itself, high-grade gold adjacent to a felsic volcanic/metasediment contact marks an additional similarity to Barrick's Hemlo deposit. The gold deposits at Hemlo display similar geological and structural contexts, and have similar disseminated high-grade gold mineralization as observed at the LP Fault." Newly Identified Gold Controls Ongoing LP Fault drilling has demonstrated that most of the > 5 g/t gold intercepts and nearly all of the >10 g/t gold intercepts drilled along the LP Fault to-date occur within 50 to 100 metres of the metasedimentary/felsic volcanic contact. This gold mineralization control provides a laterally and vertically-extensive, sheet-like contact that can be targeted with ongoing drilling, and will be important to ongoing modeling of the LP Fault zone. Regional Geophysics and Reconnaissance Drilling The Company completed a high-resolution electromagnetic (SkyTEM) airborne geophysical survey over the entire Dixie property in September of 2019 and recently received the survey results. The purpose of the survey was to test if the LP Fault style of mineralization produces a resistive electromagnetic response. The LP Fault mineralization is associated with strong silica and albite alteration of felsic volcanic and metasedimentary rocks, which was expected to be electrically resistive. Results confirmed highly resistive responses below the known sections of the LP Fault in the modelled 3D inversion of the SkyTEM data (Figures 2 and 3), and several new multi-kilometre resistive trends with similar geophysical properties to the gold zone of the LP Fault have been identified and warrant follow-up field work and ultimately drill testing. The Company also repeated its exploration methods from the initial LP Fault discovery with additional regional drilling. High-contrast magnetic breaks were drilled prior to receipt of the SKYTEM data, on one to two kilometre centres along the projected strike extent of the LP Fault, and targeting additional regional features. The purpose of this program was to identify similar structural and geological settings to the LP Fault mineralization. Multiple zones of anomalous gold were intersected along an interpreted strike length of 11 kilometres. Some of these new zones display similarities to the LP Fault Zone and others are more comparable to the Hinge zone vein system. Highlights of regional reconnaissance drill holes have been included in the LP Fault results table posted to the Company's web site. Drill holes that successfully intercepted gold mineralization were: BR-052, 053, 054, 055, 056, 071, 072, 073, and 111. Seven of the nine drill holes which successfully intercepted gold mineralization are located along a possible on-strike projection of the LP Fault zone, while 2 of the gold-bearing drill holes occur at new regional targets (Figure 4). Reconnaissance drill holes that did not intersect gold were BR-048, 049, 070 and 110. Live Webinar on Thursday February 20th Great Bear reminds interested shareholders that they are invited to join a webinar detailing recent progress in the Company's ongoing fully-funded 200,000 metre drill program on Thursday, February 20th at 11:15am PST/2:15pm EST. Management will be available to answer questions following the presentation. Online registration and participation details may be found at the following link: https://bit.ly/37YvChd For those unable to participate, a recording of the webinar will be posted to the Company's web site following the live broadcast. ABOUT THE DIXIE PROJECT The Dixie Project is 100% owned, comprised of 9,140 hectares of contiguous claims that extend over 22 kilometres, and is located approximately 25 kilometres southeast of the town of Red Lake, Ontario. The project is accessible year-round via a 15 minute drive on a paved highway which runs the length of the northern claim boundary and a network of well-maintained logging roads. The Dixie Project hosts two principle styles of gold mineralization: High-grade gold in quartz veins and silica-sulphide replacement zones ( Dixie Limb and Hinge) . Hosted by mafic volcanic rocks, and localized near regional-scale D2 fold axes. These mineralization styles are also typical of the significant mined deposits of the Red Lake district. . Hosted by mafic volcanic rocks, and localized near regional-scale D2 fold axes. These mineralization styles are also typical of the significant mined deposits of the district. High-grade disseminated gold with broad moderate to lower grade envelopes (LP Fault). The LP Fault is a significant gold-hosting structure which has been seismically imaged to extend to 14 kilometres depth (Zeng and Calvert , 2006), and has been interpreted by Great Bear to have up to 18 kilometres of strike length on the Dixie property. High-grade gold mineralization is controlled by structural and geological contacts, and moderate to lower-grade disseminated gold surrounds and flanks the high-grade intervals. The dominant gold-hosting stratigraphy consists of felsic sediments and volcanic units. About Great Bear Great Bear Resources Ltd. is a well-financed gold exploration company managed by a team with a track record of success in mineral exploration. Great Bear is focused in the prolific Red Lake gold district in northwest Ontario, where the company controls over 300 km2 of highly prospective tenure across 4 projects: the flagship Dixie Project (100% owned), the Pakwash Property (earning a 100% interest), the Dedee Property (earning a 100% interest), and the Sobel Property (earning a 100% interest), all of which are accessible year-round through existing roads. QA/QC and Core Sampling Protocols Drill core is logged and sampled in a secure core storage facility located in Red Lake Ontario. Core samples from the program are cut in half, using a diamond cutting saw, and are sent to Activation Laboratories in Ontario, an accredited mineral analysis laboratory, for analysis. All samples are analyzed for gold using standard Fire Assay-AA techniques. Samples returning over 10.0 g/t gold are analyzed utilizing standard Fire Assay-Gravimetric methods. Pulps from approximately 5% of the gold mineralized samples are submitted for check analysis to a second lab. Selected samples are also chosen for duplicate assay from the coarse reject of the original sample. Selected samples with visible gold are also analyzed with a standard 1 kg metallic screen fire assay. Certified gold reference standards, blanks and field duplicates are routinely inserted into the sample stream, as part of Great Bear's quality control/quality assurance program (QAQC). No QAQC issues were noted with the results reported herein. Drill hole location information is provided below: Qualified Person and NI 43-101 Disclosure Mr. R. Bob Singh, P.Geo, Director and VP Exploration, and Ms. Andrea Diakow P.Geo, Exploration Manager for Great Bear are the Qualified Persons as defined by National Instrument 43-101 responsible for the accuracy of technical information contained in this news release. ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD "Chris Taylor" Chris Taylor, President and CEO Cautionary note regarding forward-looking statements This release contains certain "forward looking statements" and certain "forward-looking information" as defined under applicable Canadian and U.S. securities laws. Forward-looking statements and information can generally be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may", "will", "should", "expect", "intend", "estimate", "anticipate", "believe", "continue", "plans" or similar terminology. The forward-looking information contained herein is provided for the purpose of assisting readers in understanding management's current expectations and plans relating to the future. Readers are cautioned that such information may not be appropriate for other purposes. Forward-looking information are based on management of the parties' reasonable assumptions, estimates, expectations, analyses and opinions, which are based on such management's experience and perception of trends, current conditions and expected developments, and other factors that management believes are relevant and reasonable in the circumstances, but which may prove to be incorrect. Great Bear undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking information except as required by applicable law. Such forward-looking information represents management's best judgment based on information currently available. No forward-looking statement can be guaranteed, and actual future results may vary materially. Accordingly, readers are advised not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements or information. SOURCE Great Bear Resources Ltd. Two men appeared in court today accused of stealing an ice cream van in west Belfast. Darren Brownlee, 23, and Lee Johnston, 28, allegedly took the vehicle when it was stopped in the Lagmore View area on Wednesday night. The van was later found abandoned at Teeling Avenue, after reportedly colliding with a parked car. Police told Belfast Magistrates' Court a suspected threat was made to burn down the house of a witness who may have CCTV evidence of the incident. Brownlee, of White Rise in the Dunmurry area of the city, and Johnston, of no fixed address, are jointly charged with aggravated vehicle taking causing damage, criminal damage to a dash camera, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. The pair are also accused of the theft of 70 in cash, car keys and a crate of Coca-Cola valued at 150. Brownlee faces further counts of driving with excess alcohol and threats to damage property. Opposing bail, a detective said the defendants would know the injured parties. He claimed that during interviews Brownlee apparently tried to memorise the name of one witness. Defence lawyer Philip Breen, told the court that questioning of Brownlee was delayed due to the level of intoxication. He also disclosed that the alleged incident occurred just a hundred yards from his client's home. Both accused were granted bail on conditions including an alcohol ban and exclusion from parts of west Belfast. Judge Austin Kennedy told Brownlee: "There's some suggestion of memorising names of witnesses at police interview. "Strike that out of your mind entirely, otherwise, if anything does happen, you will be brought back to court. "This is not a game Mr Brownlee, police will monitor this very closely." The two defendants will appear back in court in four weeks time. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have carried out the first randomised trial of civilians with acute conflict-related wounds at two hospitals in areas affected by armed conflict. The study, which is published in The Lancet Global Health, shows that a new, more costly method of wound treatment is not more effective than standard treatment. The researchers hope to inspire new research projects in conflict zones that could improve the care for these vulnerable patients. The researchers from Karolinska Institutet teamed up with Doctors Without Borders, amongst other entities, to study wound healing in patients injured in the armed conflicts in Syria and Iraq. "We show that it's possible to conduct a randomised controlled trial of acutely injured civilians in an armed conflict context," says Andreas Alga, surgeon and researcher at the Department of Clinical Research and Education, Stockholm South General Hospital (Sodersjukhuset), Karolinska Institutet. "This patient group does not currently receive optimal care as the treatment generally is based on research with relatively low evidence value or research carried out in high-income contexts." In high-income countries, negative-pressure wound therapy (NPWT) has been used in the treatment of wounds since the 1990s. Briefly, the technique involves covering the wound with plastic film and applying a negative pressure, aiming to drain excess fluid, reduce wound size, and expedite healing. However, the method is expensive and scientific evidence of its effectiveness is weak, particularly in the case of traumatic injuries. Despite this, NPWT has been introduced in the care of civilian patients with conflict-related injuries, who are often found in areas with scarce resources. The present study was conducted at two civilian hospitals in Iraqi Kurdistan and Jordan and included patients who had undergone surgery for acute extremity injuries. The patients were randomly assigned to either NPWT or standard treatment, i.e. gauze dressings. The researchers found no difference between the groups regarding time to wound closure or risk of infection. "This means that the new, more costly form of treatment should not be used for these injuries and that the limited available resources could be better spent on other means, such as hospital staff or medication, which could ultimately lead to improved patient outcomes," says Dr Alga. The researchers also hope that the study could inspire new research projects to generate context-specific knowledge with the potential to improve the care of patients in conflict zones. "Complicated research in an armed conflict setting is associated with a number of challenges, mainly relating to security, practical and ethical issues," Dr Alga says. "Our study can hopefully demonstrate that it's possible to overcome most of these challenges with a well-conceived, pragmatic study design and a dedicated research team." ### The study was financed by Region Stockholm (ALF funding), the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare and Doctors Without Borders. Publication: "Negative pressure wound therapy versus standard treatment in patients with acute conflict-related extremity wounds: a pragmatic, multisite, randomised controlled trial". Andreas Alga, Rawand Haweizy, Khaldoon Bashaireh, Sidney Wong, Kalle Conneryd Lundgren, Johan von Schreeb, Jonas Malmstedt. The Lancet Global Health, online 19 February 2020. Flash Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met ASEAN Secretary-General, Philippine and Singaporean foreign ministers in Vientiane on Wednesday night to discuss the joint combat against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) epidemic. During his meeting with ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi, Wang said the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease to be held on Thursday will send a positive signal that China and ASEAN countries are fighting the COVID-19 epidemic together, and China-ASEAN relations will further develop. Public health is a common cause crossing national borders, and China is willing to enhance cooperation with ASEAN in this area, so as to inject new content to China-ASEAN relations, Wang said. The Chinese side hopes the ASEAN Secretariat will continue to lead and coordinate ASEAN to firmly pursue China-friendly policies, and play an active role in pushing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) to be signed as scheduled, he added. For his part, Lim said that China is an important strategic partner of ASEAN. In face of the novel coronavirus epidemic, ASEAN firmly stands with China. ASEAN is willing to work with China to strengthen cooperation on health security in the frameworks of ASEAN-China (10+1) and ASEAN-China-Japan-South Korea (10+3), he added. Next year is the 30th anniversary of ASEAN-China dialogue relations, Lim said, the ASEAN Secretariat is willing to actively push forward the docking of China's Belt and Road Initiative and the Master Plan on ASEAN Connectivity 2025. While meeting Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Wang said the Philippine government has offered firm support to China in fighting the novel coronavirus epidemic. He believed that the friendship and trust between the peoples of the two countries will be deepened and strengthened after standing the test of the battle against the epidemic. Wang said China attaches great importance to developing ties with the Philippines and will as always support the Philippines in safeguarding its own legitimate rights and interests. Wang thanked the Philippines, which serves as a coordinating country for China-ASEAN relations, for its organizing and coordinating work for Thursday's Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease, which will send out a clear signal that China and ASEAN are joining hands to meet the common challenge, and they will explore and reach new consensus on boosting cooperation on regional health. Locsin said the Philippine government and its people speak highly of and support the effective measures China has taken to fight the epidemic. The foreign secretary said the Philippines will do its best to work for the unity and cooperation between China and ASEAN. During his meeting with Singaporean Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, Wang said he hopes Thursday's Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease will not only explore on ways to cope with the epidemic, but also push forward the cooperation on public health in the region and promote the capacity of regional countries in meeting the challenges of public health such as this epidemic. Wang thanked the support Singapore has provided to China in fighting the disease which once again embodies the excellent tradition between the two countries of always supporting and helping each other in difficult times. Wang said the friendship between the two countries will be deepened in fighting the epidemic and the cooperation between the two countries will be widened after the epidemic. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic ties between the two sides and China is ready to maintain high-level exchanges with Singapore, Wang said. For his part, Balakrishnan said China has been dealing with the epidemic with a highly responsible manner and taking measures rarely seen in the world. China has also shared information with the international community at the first moment, thus offering valuable help to countries including Singapore. Singapore highly appreciates and respects China's arduous endeavour and sacrifice, said the Singaporean minister, adding that his country would continue to firmly support China. Singapore is willing to promote communication and cooperation with China, sparing no effort in decreasing the effects caused by the epidemic, in order to restore normal exchanges, Balakrishnan said. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the diplomatic relations between Singapore and China, the Singapore side expects to frequent high-level exchanges with China, steadily push forward the construction of the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor, actively promote the RCEP and participate in the Belt and Road Initiative cooperation, he noted. Wang is in Vientiane, capital of Laos, for the Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease and the fifth Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Thursday. Bollywood actress Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, who essayed the role of the twenty-three-year-old brave heart, Neerja Bhanot on the silver screen in the 2016 biopic, has shared a warm post on social media as the film completes four years since its release. The film highlighted the life and the incident that took the young flight attendants life, who suffered the terrorists bullets while trying to save passengers from a hijacked plane and passed away on September 5, 1986. Sonam took to social media and shared a series of pictures with her fans. From sharing her look from the film, Neerja, to sharing a photo of real-life Neerja Bhanot and then one with Neerjas mother. Another picture which Sonam shared is a text that reads, Neerja Bhanot has become an inspiration to one and all since the dramatic events of the Pan Am Flight 73 Bombay to New York unfolded in 1986. She died shielding three children from a hail of gunfire. Her bravery will forever be a lasting tribute to the finest qualities of the human spirit. Along with the picture, Sonam wrote, Portraying a young girl from Bombay who saved the lives of the 359 passengers on-board Pan AM Flight 73 was not only challenging but also a great honour. As the movie completes its 4th anniversary, I would want people to recall how fear gave courage to the young Neerja Bhanot. She was the true icon of bravery, strength and sacrifice for our country. She continues to be an inspiration to everyone. #4YearsOfNeerja @atulkasbekar #ShabanaAzmi #RamMadhvani @jimsarbhforreal @shekharravjiani #Saiwyn #BlingGlobal @foxstarhindi @sayunkytha. (sic) Neerja, directed by Ram Madhvani, was based on the real-life story of flight attendant Neerja Bhanot who saved the lives of 359 passengers on board the Pan Am Flight 73, which was hijacked in Pakistan. Braveheart Neerja Bhanot gave up her life two days before she would have turned 23, to save a large group of American children during a terrorist hijack of the Pan-Am flight at Karachi international airport in Pakistan on September 5, 1986. The Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the hanging of one Anil Surendrasingh Yadav who was convicted and sentenced to death for raping and murdering a three-year-old girl in Gujarats Surat. Yadav was sentenced to death by a Surat court under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO). The Gujarat high court upheld the order in December 2019. Subsequently, the Surat court had issued death warrant to hang Yadav on February 29. Yadav challenged the high court judgment in Supreme Court. Advocate Aparajitha Singh appearing for Yadav argued that the Surat court had issued the black warrant before the expiry of 60 days period, during which the convict is allowed to appeal to the Supreme Court against the judgment of the high court. Chief Justice of India SA Bobde concurred with the line of argument made by Singh. He asked Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, who was appearing for the Gujarat government, how a black warrant was issued before a death row convict exhausted his legal remedies. How are black warrants issued before the period of limitation is exhausted. How can judicial process go on like this, asked the CJI. The court then issued notice to the State government and stayed the death warrant. Roger Stone, former campaign adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, arrives for his criminal trial on charges of lying to Congress, obstructing justice and witness tampering at U.S. District Court in Washington, November 6, 2019. Tom Brenner | Reuters Outside federal courthouse before sentencing of Roger Stone, Feb. 20, 2020, Kevin Breuninger | CNBC Stone, 67, was convicted in November of charges linked to his false statements to a House committee about his contacts with the document disclosure group WikiLeaks during the 2016 presidential election, and his unsuccessful, crude efforts to force an associate, comedian Randy Credico, to endorse those lies. Stone was found guilty of five counts of false statements, and one count each of obstruction of proceedings and witness tampering. The case was one of several lodged against people in Trump's orbit by then-special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Trump railed against Mueller's probe since it began in 2017, and continued doing so after it ended last summer. Stone's case remained a thorn in Trump's side because it included evidence that suggested that Trump himself had been kept apprised by Stone of Stone's contacts with WikiLeaks in 2016. WikiLeaks that year released a set of emails that had been stolen from John Podesta, the campaign chief for 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, as well as from the Democratic National Committee. The emails, which contained information that was embarrassing to Clinton's campaign and to the DNC, were hacked by Russian agents, the Justice Department and U.S. intelligence agencies have said. Before Election Day, Stone tried to get the emails. Prosecutors said Stone kept Trump's camp aware of what he had learned about WikiLeaks' plans for releasing the emails. But Stone told a House committee the following year that he had no such conversations with the Trump campaign about WikiLeaks. Trump later told Mueller in written answers to questions, "I do not recall discussing WikiLeaks with" Stone, "nor do I recall Mr. Stone having discussed WikiLeaks with my campaign." Stone, who did not testify at his trial, denied the charges. His lawyers have asked that the judge to sentence him only to probation, with no time in jail or prison. Credico, in a letter to Jackson last month, also asked that Stone not be sentenced to prison, despite Stone having called him "a rat" and "a stoolie" and warning him, "prepare to die." "It is not justice" to send Stone to prison, Credico wrote the judge. "It is cruelty." San Antonio should keep a program aimed at protecting the Edwards Aquifer if voters choose to shift sales tax money that funds the program to instead boost public transit, city officials said Wednesday. Mayor Ron Nirenberg has sought to settle the fate of the Edwards Aquifer protection program for the past several months. He and other local officials want the $40 million raised by the 1/8-cent sales tax to instead pay for better bus service and other initiatives at VIA Metropolitan Transit. The city can continue to operate the aquifer program, aimed at securing the citys primary source of clean water, by using revenue the city gets from the city-owned San Antonio Water System, Deputy City Manager Maria Villagomez told City Council members Wednesday. The city can pay for the program to the tune of $109 million over 10 years, Villagomez said. The money would fund the programs operations albeit at half the current funding and pay down debt issued to pay for conservation easements to prevent development over sensitive areas that feed into the aquifer. The City Council is expected to vote on the proposal in March. This really does seem like an opportunity for us to both better manage and provide for lasting continuity for these initiatives, Nirenberg said. We dont have to choose between one or the other. Francine Romero, who chairs the citys Conservation Advisory Board that oversees the aquifer program, had been wary about potential changes. But she said Wednesday the new proposal basically keeps the program intact. Its a good proposal, Romero said. I dont even think of it as a compromise. On ExpressNews.com: SAWS gets ready to take on aquifer protection plan The aquifer program is popular with voters, who have passed the sales tax that funds it by healthy margins four times since 2000. The sales tax produces about $20 million annually that pays for the conservation easements on privately owned land in and around Bexar County. The other $20 million collected through the tax goes for linear parks and creekways. Nirenberg has maintained that both programs will continue in some form. At one point, he had asked SAWS to take on aquifer protection. The utilitys CEO Robert Puente told SAWS board members in January that the utility could do so without raising water rates for its customers if the program were funded at a considerably lower level than it is now. But SAWS officials and board members questioned how much more land they would have to pay to protect and when the program would end. The idea to move the program to SAWS appeared all but dead Wednesday. Puente declined to comment. Most council members appeared open to the proposal to keep the program in the citys hands. The plan reassures us as a council and, I think, reassures the community that the city is not going to give up its obligation in protecting the aquifer, District 9 Councilman John Courage said. But concerns remained about the future of the citys linear parks and creekways program. More than 100 miles of greenways have been completed or funded, officials said. But the city hasnt found the money to pay for another 71 miles, pegged at $279 million. Bexar County could pick up the cost of building 26 miles over the next five years, City Manager Erik Walsh said. But its unclear how the project would be funded beyond that. That wasnt enough for District 3 Councilwoman Rebecca Viagran. I need more assurances when it comes to our linear creeks than what Im seeing presented right now, Viagran said. Council members also worried about the specter of a SAWS rate increase. Council members voted last year to increase how much money the city receives from SAWS from 2.7 percent of the utilitys revenue to 4 percent to make up for various budget shortfalls, including a homestead exemption council members approved that summer. That fact wasnt lost on District 10 Councilman Clayton Perry. Now were saying, well, we can take some of that out and fund this aquifer protection and trailway system, Perry said. I just want to make sure everybody understands that. SAWS forked over more than $32 million to help fund San Antonios current $2.9 billion budget. Puente has previously warned that the increased take from SAWS could lead to a rate increase for SAWS customers. On ExpressNews.com: SAWS chief says agency could take on aquifer protection but at less funding San Antonio voters would have to decide in November whether to use the 1/8-cent sales tax for transit purposes. The sales tax for the aquifer, parks and creekways would expire and not be on the ballot. If city voters approve a 1/8-cent sales tax for transportation, it would fund only a portion of the priorities laid out by by the ConnectSA plan a strategy that calls for about $1.4 billion in transportation improvements including wider highways, more bike lanes, new and more frequent bus routes and 26 miles of new trails. The proposal now envisions a future bond program, probably in 2022, to raise $665 million for transportation capital projects, such as 40 miles of protected and buffered bike and scooter lanes. The last city bond was in 2017, for $850 million. The plan would allocate about $141 million for better and more frequent buses over the next five years, about $46 million of it federal funding. Joshua Fechter is a staff writer covering San Antonio city government and politics. Read him on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | jfechter@express-news.net | Twitter: @JFreports Last summer, Sara Spencer-Noggle called her gubernatorial appointment as circuit court judge her dream job. Less than six months later, Gretchen Whitmer has tapped Spencer-Noggle again, giving the judge what she calls the icing on the cake. Last Friday, Whitmers office announced that Spencer-Noggle was named as the judiciarys representative to the Mental Health Diversion Council. The Council was created in 2014 by then-Gov. Rick Snyder to help advise the governors office and craft policy proposals intended to steer people with mental illness away from the criminal justice system and towards more appropriate forms of treatment. Her appointment, which is good through 2024 and doesnt require endorsement by the state Senate, comes at a time when the state is rapidly reforming criminal justice. One component of that is finding ways to get people with mental illness into treatment, rather than use jails and prisons as de facto treatment facilities. Last week, the sheriff of Chippewa County, in the Upper Peninsula, called the states mental health system broken, saying that his jail has incarcerated a veteran deemed incompetent for trial in December but that no beds are available for placement. He said his office can provide the man with limited treatment, but nothing like what he needs. Spencer-Noggle said a similar situation exists in Isabella County. The council to which she was appointed recently completed a five-year pilot study of 10 counties so it could make informed recommendations for executive policy and legislation. One result was that when police and corrections officers received mental health training, situations involving people with mental illness had statistically better outcomes. Fewer people went to jail and those in jail saw fewer incidents involving physical force. Isabella County public safety agencies do a pretty good job at training their people, she said. The problem is that there are few resources available for round-the-clock treatment. Jails sometimes let people out after business hours, when service providers close for the day, and those people are left to fend for themselves. Most of the stakeholders in Isabella County law enforcement, the prosecutors office, the courts, mental health service providers are on board with the idea of diverting people away from jail, she said. The problem is that while there are lots of good options for people who need outpatient services, there arent places for high-risk, high-need people who need intensive outpatient services. The county also needs a fully-staffed after-hours crisis center. She said she hopes that her time on the diversion council will provide benefits in two directions. She hopes during her service on the council that she can raise attention to the countys needs and attract resources to address those shortcomings, while also allowing her experiences as a defense attorney and judge to inform her work in Lansing helping to create policy. Mental health and substance abuse issues have long been a personal passion for Spencer-Noggle. It started in a childhood where she was exposed to both. It really shaped how I see the world, she said. Spencer-Noggle is eager to start working with the rest of the council members, especially at a time when there is bipartisan support in reforming how Michigan approaches criminal justice overall and at a time when people are just coming around to realizing how poorly resourced mental health programs are in the state. Her first meeting is in March. READ MORE: Two more military-led hospitals put into use in virus-hit Wuhan WUHAN, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Two more hospitals under the control of military medics have been put into use Wednesday in the city of Wuhan, capital city of Hubei Province and the epicenter of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Following the operation model of Huoshenshan Hospital, 2,600 medical personnel from the armed forces are tasked with treating patients infected with the virus in Taikang Tongji Hospital and a branch of Hubei's Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital in Wuhan. The two hospitals, with a planned capacity of 860 and 700 beds, respectively, had not been put into operation before being transformed into specialized hospitals to admit patients during the virus outbreak. By late Wednesday, Taikang Tongji Hospital's 860 beds had been prepared for infected patients and the branch of the maternity and child health care hospital had opened two infection wards that can accept 84 patients with standard symptoms and 20 people in severe condition. So far, the armed forces have dispatched more than 4,000 healthcare professionals to support Hubei in the fight against the epidemic outbreak. GPs are being told to test people who have travelled to Bali in the past two weeks for the coronavirus if they have flu symptoms - despite the federal government remaining silent on the risk of undetected cases in Indonesia. More than a month into the coronavirus outbreak, Indonesia still has not reported any confirmed cases to the World Health Organisation, but experts say Australia's most populous neighbour likely has undetected cases. Indonesia has not reported any cases of the coronavirus, worrying public health experts. Credit:AP NSW and Victorian health authorities this week updated their advice to GPs, telling them to "consider testing patients with a clinically compatible illness" who had travelled to Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore - where multiple coronavirus cases have been detected - or Indonesia, in the 14 days before they fell ill. "This recommendation is based on the volume of travel between these countries, Australia and China, and the current epidemiology of COVID-19," the updated advice, seen by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, said. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whos risen in national polling in recent weeks, faced sharp critique over nondisclosure agreements and a much-maligned stop and frisk policy from Sen. Elizabeth Warren and four other Democrats running for president on a Las Vegas debate stage Tuesday night. Asked by NBC moderators about sexually suggestive remarks he had made in the past, Bloomberg said he had no tolerance for the kind of behavior that the Me Too movement has exposed. He also said his charitable foundation is run by a woman, and that lots and lots of women have big responsibilities in his company and get paid exactly the same as men." Warren quipped that the defense amounted to, Ive been nice to some women. The Massachusetts senator called on Bloomberg to release women from nondisclosure agreements that theyd signed after suing his company for sexual harassment and discrimination. Bloomberg described the very few" NDAs as agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet." He added that none of the complaints were about him personally other than some employees who maybe didnt like a joke I told. Bloomberg also sought to explain the stop and frisk policy under his watch, admitting that he was worried about it and embarrassed about how it turned out. He noted that the city faced more than 600 murders and he wanted to give people the right to live. But the policy got out of control, he said, noting too many people were stopped. When I discovered that we were doing too many, we cut 95% of it out, he said. I sat down with African American clergy and businessmen to learn ... talked with kids who were stopped." But he added that murders went down by half when the policy was in place. Warren asked voters to pay attention to Bloombergs apology. This isnt about how it turned out. This is about what it was designed to do to begin with, she said, arguing the policy targeted black and brown men from the beginning. If you want to issue a real apology, it has to start with the intent of the plan as it was put together." Bloomberg admitted the policy as it was implemented was a mistake and argued that everyone on the debate stage had been wrong on criminal justice at some time in their careers. Officials on Wednesday said Spirit Airlines is increasing the number of flights from Atlantic City to Florida and South Carolina. The following expanded routes were announced: Fights to Fort Lauderdale (FLL) will increase to three per day, up from two beginning on July 9. Service to Orlando (MCO) will go to 19 flights per week up from 14 flights weekly, also on July 9. And beginning on June 13, Spirt will fly to Myrtle Beach (MYR) nine times per week, up from seven. Stephen Dougherty, executive director of South Jersey Transportation Authority, which runs the Atlantic City airport, said the added flights on the low-cost carrier were in response to increased demand in the region. "We also look forward to continuing to work with Spirit and local stakeholders to secure additional services at [Atlantic City airport] in the future, he said in a statement. More than 1.1 million passengers used Atlantic City airport last year, with 91 percent of those flying Spirit, according to the SJTA, which said it aims to attract more than 1.2 passengers this year. Noah Cohen may be reached at ncohen@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @noahyc. 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. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 23:41:22|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close HONG KONG, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Carrie Lam said Thursday that she hopes the anti-epidemic fund set by the government will benefit embattled tech startups amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. During a visit to the Hong Kong Science Park, Lam said the business environment of technology enterprises, particularly startups, has become difficult since the second half of last year and the recent epidemic has even worsened the situation. In response, the HKSAR government proposed to use the fund to provide tenants and startups at the Hong Kong Science Park, industrial estates and Cyberport a six-month rental waiver, with about 1,800 tenants expected to benefit from it, she said when meeting heads of some startups. Lam said she hopes the measure will help retain innovation and technology (I&T) capability and talent, enabling Hong Kong to relaunch the sector's development down the road, adding that the government will consider rolling out more support measures. Lam said the fund also proposed to provide subsidy to participants and organizers of exhibitions and conventions, and she believed the I&T industry will also benefit from the initiative. She added that she looks forward to the early passage of the funding application of the anti-epidemic fund by the Finance Committee of the Legislative Council. During the visit, Lam also learned about the research and development of the Logistics and Supply Chain MultiTech R&D Center which had developed and produced nearly 2,000 electronic wristbands to monitor whether people under compulsory quarantine are staying at their dwelling places. A wave of influenza has been significantly waning in Japan compared with last year, government data has shown, as many people have become wary of infection with a new pneumonia-causing coronavirus. For the week through Feb. 9, the number of reported influenza cases plunged more than 60 percent from a year earlier to 44,737, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. During the same period last year, 129,989 cases were reported. The health ministry also said the number of schools that were forced to close classes due to influenza outbreaks was 1,760 for the seven days from Feb. 3, sharply down from 3,204 in the same week of 2019. The new COVID-19 coronavirus, first detected late last year in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, has so far infected more than 70,000 people and killed over 2,000. The city is a major business and transportation hub with a population of some 11 million. In Japan, daily media reports have focused the situation on the Diamond Princess, a coronavirus-hit cruise ship docked in Yokohama, prompting many citizens to wash their hands, gargle, wear masks and avoid crowds. aMany Japanese people have become serious about taking measures to prevent infection with the new coronavirus. This might be one of the reasons why influenza cases dropped this year,a said Yoko Muramatsu, a researcher at the NLI Research Institute. In Tokyo, masks and alcohol-based hand sanitizers have sold out at pharmacies and convenience stores, as medical experts have emphasized that preventive steps against the new coronavirus are similar to those against influenza and colds. LOWER MERION A section of a street in Lower Merion will have a new name in honor of an Ardmore man killed in the line of duty for his country over 50 years ago. Lower Merion officials Wednesday night renamed a section of Chestnut Avenue in Ardmore in honor of Paul T. Short, an Ardmore resident killed in the line of duty while serving his country in Vietnam. During a ceremony just before the start of Wednesday nights meeting of the Lower Merion Board of Commissioners, the 200 block of Chestnut Avenue was designed as First Lieutenant Paul T. Short, Jr., Way. Surrounded by members of his family, former township commissioner in Ardmore, Maryam Phillips, presented the proclamation. First Lieutenant Paul Short exemplified the ultimate commitment to our community and to our country, Phillips said. By having served as an officer during the Vietnam War at a time when there were not many African Americans in position as officers at the time. Short, who grew up on the block that now bears his name, was killed in action in Vietnam on Feb. 3, 1967. According to Phillips, Shorts family still lives in the community that he called home. And so this family has very long and strong roots in Ardmore, Phillips said. And it is important to remember, to recommend and to know the contributions that African Americans have made to this community and to this country. Phillips said the application for renaming the street was made by Wendell Holland Sr. with help from many others and sponsorship from the Leon Spencer Reid American Legion Post 547. First Lieutenant, Paul T. Short was a native son, and it is fitting, it is proper for this township to memorialize his status in this community because he deserves to be known by future generations that he was one of our biggest and brightest stars, Phillips said. Eric Smith, another veteran of the war in Vietnam, said he made sure to find Shorts name when he went to the Vietnam Memorial. When I came home, I had a chance to go down to the Vietnam Memorial, and Lieutenant Short was the first name I sought out, and through him, I feel as though Im home, he said. Dan Bernheim, president of the Lower Merion Board of Commissioners, while reading from the proclamation, said Short was born Aug. 9, 1942. After graduating from Lower Merion High School in 1960, he attended Temple University. After being drafted into the Army in February 1964, Short was selected for Officer Candidate School, and after graduating, he was assigned to the Panama Canal Zone to train in jungle warfare. Short was then deployed to Vietnam in July 1966 with 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division. Then, on Feb. 3, 1967, Short was killed in Tay Ninh Province, South Vietnam, after getting hit with shrapnel. His death occurred after surviving three land mines that wrecked armored vehicles that he was commanding. Paul T. Short was the first African American officer from Ardmore and Lower Merion High School to be killed in action and was the recipient of the Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, Bernheim said as he read from the proclamation. Regina Short, Paul Shorts sister, said their parents would be proud, and her brother would be happy to see the Ardmore pride. This honor will not only recognize the patriotism of our brother; it will honor the sacrifices the men and women of or community made when they too chose to protect our nation, Short said. As you know, this was not a popular war, and our returning veterans were not properly received. Many served and were never recognized or appreciated; this will be a symbolic honor to all who bravely took the oath of service. This will be a collective thank you for those who returned. My brother fought for America. The veterans fought for America. WATERLOO Heavy fire and smoke damage to Maple Lanes Bowling Center was apparently caused by more than one fire started by three unknown assailants who robbed a janitor at the local bowling alley, causing potentially millions of dollars in damage and necessitating a total rebuild. According to a report released Thursday morning, Tim Nicholas, a maintenance worker at Maple Lanes, went to nearby Waterloo Fire Station #4 just after 4:30 a.m. Feb. 4 and said he had been robbed by three people, who then set the building on fire, according to multiple reports from Waterloo Fire Rescue. Nicholas told firefighters he didnt have a phone and that three people assaulted him. Thats when he told me, then they set the place on fire, said acting Lt. Michael Spence in his report. Spence then contacted emergency personnel at 4:42 a.m., and he and other firefighters arrived on scene two minutes later to heavy black smoke coming from both sides of the roof, according to the reports. Spence said he broke a set of glass doors to enter the building and found a lot of downed ceiling, wires, duct work and debris, which they waded through until they found a fire at the front desk. In his report, Battalion Chief Troy Luck said it appeared the fire started inside two places: the main entry of Maple Lanes, as well as one corner of the building. Spences report noted three rooms of the pro shop had several spot fires, and other reports said the fire was heaviest in a back closet area of the entryway, as well as a room near that closet and a maintenance room where they bore and drill the balls. We also saw that the ATM machine at the front desk was heavily damaged, the door had been forced open and the money box/tray seemed to have been removed, Spence said in his report. Waterloo Police Maj. Joe Leibold, whose department is handling the robbery investigation, said there was nothing new to report Thursday except it was an active, ongoing investigation. No arrests have been made. Waterloo Fire Rescue Chief Pat Treloar said any arson classification would be made in the next couple of weeks after evidence was processed. Fire reached into portions of the ceiling and affected part of the roof, which had to be opened up to extinguish the blaze. Fire also caused a wall to bow in, according to reports. Twenty-six Waterloo Fire personnel were dispatched, according to the reports, and mutual aid was requested from Cedar Falls, Hudson and Evansdale fire departments, as well as the Red Cross, according to Lucks report. Raymond Fire provided drone assistance. The fire department calculated Maple Lanes losses at $400,000, or a little less than half the $824,300 estimated value for the building. About $150,000 of the contents of the building were also considered a loss, more than half of the estimated $250,000 total. But Rich Eighme, one of the buildings owners, said the information hes gotten so far estimates losses will reach in the millions of dollars. Maple Lanes wont be open for a year and a half, Eighme said. This is going to be a total rebuild. Eighme is trying to find room for 46 bowling leagues and two-thirds of Maple Lanes staff at Cadillac XBC. We are spilling over at the brim, he said. If theres a bright spot, Frans Pro Shop named for Eighmes father, Frank Eighme, its founder will make a temporary home at 700 La Porte Road, next to EZ Money. Eighme said he expects it to open by this weekend, noting its the only pro shop for 50 miles around. The beautiful thing is the bowling community has been the most supportive anybody could hope for, Eighme said. Its a family, and the amount of support, the amount of outreach, has been awesome. Photos: Fire at Maple Lanes, Feb. 4, 2020 Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 4 Angry 5 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. The first round of talks between the protesters at Shaheen Bagh and Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors ended at the same point where the protests began 66 days ago a demand for the repeal of the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA. Hundreds congregated at Road No. 13 A on Wednesday an unusual sight on the afternoon of a week day after they learnt that the Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors, senior lawyers Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran, would be visiting the protest site. Calling for a balance, the apex court noted on Monday that while people had the right to protest in a democracy, they should not be blocking roads. The protests at Shaheen Bagh, which began on December 15, have blocked one of the main connections between Delhi and satellite city Noida, causing problems for thousands of commuters. They are protesting a law that fast-tracks Indian citizenship for persecuted non-Muslim minorities from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh. The law has become controversial with protests against it around the country. In the Northeast, the protests are from the fear that the law will legitimise outsiders in an area scarce in resources. Some of the protests are against the non-inclusive and non-secular nature of the law, which has been challenged in the apex court. And some are out of the fear that the law will be used in tandem with a National Register of Citizens, although the government has said there are no immediate plans for the latter. We are all citizens here and the solution has to be found by us, said Ramachandran, addressing the protesters near the stage area. The two mediators began the process for dialogue by reading the SC order on the matter, and insisting they were present to hear the protesters and not for making any decision. After asking media personnel to leave the site, the interlocutors asked the protesters to cite their grievances and demands . Three elderly women, who have been protesting since day one and have emerged as faces of the protest, were the first ones to speak. The blockade will not end till CAA is repealed. People come here with guns, who will take the responsibility of our safety [if we open even one side of the road]. A 90-year-old is sitting here, along with other women and children, to fight for our Constitution and we will remain here till that fight continues, said Asma, one of the oldest protesters. Her reference to guns stems from the arrest of two people with guns at the protest site. Other protestors pointed out that the site covers only a 200-metre stretch of Road 13 A. It is the police who have blocked other areas of the road in the name of security. If the blockade is causing inconvenience, why not open the other barricades near Kalindi Kunj and Sarita Vihar? asked 75-year-old Sarwari. Some of the women also raised issues related to the violence at Jamia Millia Islamia which injured several students, including those who are residents of Shaheen Bagh. After listening to their grievances, Ramachandran pointed out, Everybody has rights in a democracy. You have the right to protest, and others too have the right to access hospitals, schools, and earn livelihoods. Hearing her, a woman in the audience muttered disapprovingly, She has come just for the roads [blockade]. But others were more receptive. Our belief in democracy has strengthened after the Supreme Court sent you to talk to us. We have been sitting here for over two months and nobody came to speak to us. We were called anti-nationals, said Fatima, a student of Jamia Millia Islamia. The young protester said that moving from the protest site would mean a loss of bargaining power. When they didnt listen to us while we were sitting out here in the cold for over two months, how is it possible that they will listen to our demands when we move [to an alternative protest site]? she asked. Another undergraduate student, Zainab, broke down while speaking to the mediators. The government has consistently asked us to not be scared [of the CAA]. How is that possible when they use words like goli maaro . This is blatant otherization. We have been at the receiving end of provocative slurs. There has been a constant vilification campaign against us that we protest to get money. Shouldnt these statements be probed? Hearing the two young protesters speak with such emotion, Hegde said, I am moved by what you said and the clarity it had. Your speech reminded me of the saying that liberty lies in the hearts of men and women. Prakash Devi, another protester, pointed out that the law is against all marginalised people. The ones who brought this law said Shaheen Bagh was a mini-Pakistan. But this is India and it shows that we arent divided. We believe in the rights of all who want to go to school, hospital or their work because we too do the same. But this is a bigger fight. The road will be cleared as soon as the government takes back the unconstitutional law. The meeting lasted for about two hours following which the mediators said they would visit the protest site on Thursday as well. We have had a fruitful first meeting with the protestors at Shaheen Bagh. It is very important for aggrieved parties to be heard. Everyone expressed their confidence as joint citizens of this country, a feasible solution could be found. We thank all the participants in the interaction for their discipline, they said in a statement. We are also thankful to Wajahat Habibullah for his support during this mediation process and for his petition in the Supreme Court, said a Tweet from the official handle of the Shaheen Bagh organisers later in the evening. Meanwhile, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) IT cell chief Amit Malviya shared a video on Twitter and alleged that activist Teesta Setalvad was tutoring the protesters on what questions to ask the interlocutors. The protesters said Setalvad had come to express her solidarity with the movement. Calling Malviyas allegations demeaning and a diversion, Setalvad said, Can anyone dare suggest that women who have sat through Delhis bitter cold for 65 days can be tutored? SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON February 19, 2020 - The Lima Group Ministerial Meeting will take place in Gatineau, Quebec, on February 20, 2020. The designated media centre at the Canadian Museum of History, 100 Laurier Street, in Gatineau, will be accessible from 8:00 a.m. ET to 5:00 p.m. ET. Media representatives will be required to present photo ID in order to receive their accreditation badges. Only media representatives who received confirmation of their accreditation by email will be able to access the event. Event: Opening remarks from The Honourable Francois-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada and Gustavo Meza-Cuadra, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Peru. Time: 10:00 a.m. ET Location: 100 Laurier Street, Gatineau, Quebec Notes: Open to accredited media. Media representatives wishing to participate should gather in the media filing room no later than 9:15 a.m. ET for an escort to the meeting room. A livestream will be available on: Twitter @CanadaFP and in Spanish on @EmbCanVenezuela Facebook Canadas Foreign Policy - Global Affairs Canada and in Spanish on Embajada de Canada en Venezuela Event: Family photo Time: 12:20 p.m. ET Location: 100 Laurier Street, Gatineau, Quebec Notes: Open to accredited media. Media representatives wishing to participate should gather in the media filing room no later than 11:45 a.m. ET for an escort to the Family photo location. Event: News conference Time: 2:15 p.m. ET Location: 100 Laurier Street, Gatineau, Quebec Notes: Open to accredited media. Media representatives wishing to participate should gather in the media filing room no later than 1:45 p.m. ET for an escort to the News conference location. A livestream will be available on: Twitter @CanadaFP and in Spanish on @EmbCanVenezuela Facebook Canadas Foreign Policy - Global Affairs Canada and in Spanish on Embajada de Canada en Venezuela Police armed with catapults have been assigned to protect U.S. President Donald Trump from a horde of feral monkeys during his visit to India. Between 500 and 700 rhesus macaques live near the Taj Mahal. The monkeys are notorious for harassing visitors while hunting for food in and around the monument in the northern city of Agra. Officials stepped up security after two French tourists were attacked by the animals as they took selfies in May 2018. And later that year a 12-day-old baby was killed by a monkey after being snatched from his home in the city. Local residents have expressed fears that the marauding macaques could pounce on the U.S. president and the first lady during their official two-day trip to India. The terror of the monkeys is so pervasive that women and children are scared of going up on the roof of their houses, which have almost been taken over by monkeys, one resident told India Today. If such a large troop of monkeys attacks Donald Trumps entourage, it will be a disaster," The Independent cited him as saying. While the US Secret Service are responsible for the presidents inner ring of security during the visit, the local police force has issued its officers with extra hand-held catapults to scare off any encroaching primates. Trump is due to arrive in India on 24 February. The president is also expected to pay tribute to Mahatma Gandhi, hold talks with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and meet business leaders at the U.S. embassy. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-21 02:31:48|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close ANKARA, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Turkey on Thursday urged Europe to take steps against racism and xenophobia after shootings in the western German city of Hanau on Wednesday evening. The incident is "a new and grave manifestation of rising racism and hostility to Islam," Turkey's Foreign Ministry said in a written statement. The ministry stressed that the shootings cannot be considered as an individual attack. "The insensitivity shown in the fight against increasing xenophobia in Europe causes new attacks every day," the ministry said, calling on international actors to stop these attacks. "Otherwise, racism and xenophobia will be able to reach much more serious levels and go to dangerous places," said the statement. "The way to effectively combat racism, xenophobia, and anti-Islam is, above all, avoiding this encouraging approach and taking effective measures against it," it added. Ankara called on all European countries to unite against racism and xenophobia and speak with one voice. "We are determined to show the necessary cooperation in the bilateral and international arena in combating all kinds of racism and we will continue our sincere efforts in this direction," said the statement. On Wednesday night, a German far-right extremist killed at least nine people in twin shootings. Five Turkish citizens were among the victims, semi-official Anadolu Agency quoted Turkey's Ambassador to Berlin Ali Kemal Aydin as saying. "I am confident that the German authorities will make every effort to shed light on all aspects (of the incident)," Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said. I dont know what to expect of Michael Bloomberg tonight. The conventional wisdom that his angry, jealous opponents will carve him up is plausible. But so is the view that hes smarter and more skillful than they are. The conventional wisdom might play into Bloombergs hands. His rivals want to portray him as an empty suit who has bought his way into the mix. But Bloomberg was a highly successful three-term mayor of New York City. Pete Buttigieg is a less than highly successful mayor of South Bend, Indiana. Who is the lightweight? If one compares paper credentials for the presidency disregarding age, ideology, charisma, etc. Bloomberg is more qualified than anyone who will be on the stage tonight. Only Biden can match or exceed Bloombergs credentials as an office holder. And if one throws in Bloombergs phenomenal success in business, there is no contest. This doesnt mean that Bloomberg will perform well in tonights debate. But if hes able to talk about his success as mayor and to discuss policy intelligently, rational voters wont see an entitled billionaire. Instead, they will see a quality candidate for president, at least as measured against the rest of the Democratic field. In short, Bloombergs rivals and portions of the leftist media have lowered the expectations on Bloomberg tonight. Thats an advantage for the media tycoon heading into the debate. India on Thursday strongly rejected China's objection to Home Minister Amit Shah's visit to Arunachal Pradesh, saying any criticism of visits by Indian leaders to a state of the country does not stand to reason. External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said is an "integral and inalienable" part of India and Indian leaders routinely travel to the state as they do to any other state. China, which claims as part of south Tibet, objected to Shah's visit to the state, saying it violated Beijing's "territorial sovereignty" over it. "Our position on is clear and consistent. Arunachal Pradesh is an integral and inalienable part of India," Kumar said at a media briefing. "Objecting to the visit of Indian leaders to a state of India does not stand to reason and understanding of the Indian people," he added. Shah is in Arunachal Pradesh to attend the 34th Statehood Day function and launch a number of development projects. China routinely objects to Indian leaders' visits to the northeastern state. The India-China border dispute covers the 3,488-km Line of Actual Control (LAC). China and India have so far held 22 rounds of Special Representatives talks to resolve the border dispute. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 07:42:19|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close A member of the media gets into the all new 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Z06 at the 2020 Chicago Auto Show Media Preview at McCormick Place in Chicago, the United States, on Feb. 6, 2020. (Photo by Joel Lerner/Xinhua) The 2020 Chicago Auto Show featured more than 20 brand-new vehicle introductions that made their worldwide or national debut, along with a series of interactive exhibits. CHICAGO, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Chicago Auto Show attendees have cast votes for their favorite vehicles, selecting 2020 Chevrolet Corvette as the best all-new production. The best concept vehicle this year was Acura Type S, while the 2021 Ford Mustang Mach-E rose to the top in the best green vehicle category, the show's organizer announced on Wednesday. A row of Ford Mustangs are displayed at the 2020 Chicago Auto Show Media Preview at McCormick Place in Chicago, the United States, on Feb. 6, 2020. (Photo by Joel Lerner/Xinhua) Nearly 1,000 cars, trucks and SUVs were on display during the 10-day auto show, which concluded on Monday. "The strength of our show starts and ends with the consumers who attend," said Chicago Auto Show Chairman Tony Guido in a statement. According to Foresight Research, more than 60 percent of the show's attendees intend to buy a new vehicle in the next 12 months. A 1950 Studebacker "Ice Princess" six-wheeled car from the Klairmont Collection, a private rare car collection in Chicago, is displayed at the 2020 Chicago Auto Show Media Preview at McCormick Place in Chicago, the United States, on Feb. 6, 2020. (Photo by Joel Lerner/Xinhua) The 2020 Chicago Auto Show featured more than 20 brand-new vehicle introductions that made their worldwide or national debut, along with a series of interactive exhibits. During the 112th Chicago Auto Show held at McCormick Place, consumers were offered opportunities to experience first hand the features of new cars, trucks and SUVs, as organizers set up four indoor test tracks, with more outdoor ride-and-drive opportunities. A well-known market intelligence company, Infiniti Research, has announced the completion of its latest article Surviving in China's Chemical Industry: A Guide for International Chemical Companies. This blog covers: This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005552/en/ Surviving in China's Chemical Industry: A Guide for International Chemical Companies. (Graphic: Business Wire) An overview of the changing chemical market landscape in China Strategies for international players to survive in China's competitive chemical industry Although China's chemical industry growth has receded, the region continues to remain extremely profitable for most global chemical companies. The colossal size of the chemical industry in China should not be blindly associated with the sector's stability. The industry is in the midst of a profound rapid transformation due to stringent investment pools, stricter environmental laws by the government, and changing consumer-demand trends. Furthermore, increasing economic turbulence in the region since mid-2018, related to China's economic slowdown and the turbulent US-China trade relations, adds new uncertainties in the chemical market dynamics. "As critical changes are underway in the chemical market in China, players will have to adopt a new set of strategies to survive and ensure continued growth," says a chemical industry expert at Infiniti Research. Industrial policies and changing demands in China's chemical industry is stirring new trends and growth opportunities for players. Request a free proposalfor more insights on how your business can capitalize on them. You may also like to read some of our recent articles on the chemical industry: US Chemical Market Analysis: Exploring Market Opportunities and Challenges Infiniti's Latest Success Story Increasing Market Share by 27% for a Specialty Chemicals Company Infiniti's Latest Competitive Intelligence Engagement Nurturing the Growth Momentum in the Agrochemical Industry Attaining profitable growth in China's chemical market Prioritize products matching domestic requirements China's growth prospects in the future of chemical industry cannot be denied, but the changing chemical market dynamics make market opportunities more nuanced for international companies. This means that international chemical companies need to learn to adapt. Companies must focus on products that match the domestic needs and that the Chinese state is promoting. Proactive stakeholder management International companies that seek to establish their business in China's chemical industry will need extensive approvals and support from several stakeholders both across the regulatory as well as the business landscape. Ergo, effective stakeholder management becomes vitals especially in the case of building new plants and new product introductions, especially in the regulated products category. As China currently does not have a process to legitimize the proposed chemical industry investments in a community, the concerns of environmentalists and local communities can only be addressed through hands-on stakeholder management. Our market research capabilities have helped several global players analyze new markets and identify critical growth opportunities before other players in the market with tailored and proactive solutions. Seeking similar engagements for your business? To learn more about Infiniti's Research's market intelligence solutions, Request a FREE brochure. Re-engineering the existing go-to-market strategies China's business landscape is highly relationship driven. So, having a local presence in the country becomes important to capture value from new market opportunities. Companies must seek to establish a tailored distribution approach. Appropriate distribution partner network enables international players in the chemical industry to get closer to customers and also differentiate their products in the increasingly competitive chemical market in China. Building strategic M&A partnerships M&A partnerships are the strategic approach to grow more quickly and extensively in the chemical industry in China. This will enable chemical companies to gain organic growth through increased market access and also fill product or technology gaps. Several dynamic mid-sized chemical companies have emerged in China over the recent years. This could present attractive acquisition opportunities for international chemical companies. A dedicated business development team in China can help international players in the chemical industry better meet these motives. For more insights on our services for chemical industry companies. Get in touch with an industry expert About Infiniti Research Established in 2003, Infiniti Research is a leading market intelligence company providing smart solutions to address your business challenges. Infiniti Research studies markets in more than 100 countries to help analyze competitive activity, see beyond market disruptions, and develop intelligent business strategies. To know more, visit: https://www.infinitiresearch.com/about-us View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005552/en/ Contacts: Infiniti Research Anirban Choudhury Marketing Manager US: +1 844 778 0600 UK: +44 203 893 3400 https://www.infinitiresearch.com/contact-us Barbacoa de cabeza de res is one of the oldest techniques in the beef-centric Texas/Mexican barbecue tradition. Literally translated as barbecue from the head of a cow, the original recipe called for an entire cows head to be skinned and cleaned, wrapped in burlap, placed in an underground pit over wood charcoal, covered with soil, and then cooked for 6-8 hours. Once cooked, the heads were removed from the burlap and the rendered fat and meat especially the cheek meat, or cachete were stripped off and mixed into a wondrous concoction of silky, fat-laden chopped beef. Although barbacoa certainly pre-dates the rise of the Central Texas-style of barbecue that dominates most of the headlines today, its been something of an also-ran when it comes to recognition in the current wave of mainstream barbecue coverage. Indeed, there is even the occasional debate about whether barbacoa is even really barbecue in the modern sense of the term because it is cooked by direct heat, rather than indirect heat and smoke. That also-ran status came to an abrupt end this week when the James Beard Foundation whose awards are often referred to as the Oscars of the food world recognized Veras Backyard Bar-B-Que in Brownsville as one of the six recipients of its 2020 Americas Classics Award. Veras Backyard Bar-B-Que 2404 Southmost Blvd., Brownsville; 956-546-4159 Open Friday, Saturday and Sunday only. See More Collapse That an obscure barbecue joint on the Texas-Mexico border can garner national attention is the best evidence yet that South Texas is becoming more influential in our states recent barbecue history often monopolized by Central and East Texas traditions. Veras richly deserves the accolades. Opened in 1955 by the family of current owner Armando Mando Vera, it is the last restaurant in Texas to use the in-ground technique for cooking barbacoa. Modern American health departments ban the cooking of meat underground, due to the prevalence of bacteria in soil. Thats not to say it cant be a safe way to cook indeed, cooking barbacoa the traditional way in dug-out trenches and burlap bags or maguey leaves is still a backyard tradition in South Texas. But for commercial establishments, cooking underground is prohibited. Except at Veras. Because the restaurant has been cooking this way for so long, it is grandfathered in from recent health department requirements. Still, Veras uses a more modern technique for cooking barbacoa the old-fashioned, in-ground way. Instead of a temporary dirt trench, they use a brick-lined underground pit filled with mesquite charcoal. And instead of burlap or maguey leaves, they use foodservice-standard aluminum foil to wrap the heads when they cook. The resulting barbacoa is as authentic as you can get at a commercial establishment in Texas. Unlike other contemporary barbacoa vendors that are required to steam the cow heads in above-ground pots, Veras barbacoa retains the hint of smoke that comes from the coals over which they are cooked. The recognition of South Texas as an influential player in Texas barbecue has been a long time coming. Central Texas-style barbecue has gotten its fair share of recognition in the past Louie Mueller Barbecue was named an American Classic by the Beard Foundation in 2006, and Austin pitmaster Aaron Franklin took home the Best Chef Southwest award in 2015. But starting in 2013 when pitmaster Miguel Vidal of Valentinas Tex Mex BBQ tapped into his San Antonio roots to bring a taste of South Texas barbecue to Austin, Tex-Mex barbecue has flourished around the state, especially in Houston. New-school joints and pop-ups like El Burro & the Bull, JQs Tex Mex BBQ, Eddie Os Texas Barbecue, and Texas Toros Barbeque have joined with old school joints like Gerardos Drive-in to make Houston a center of South Texas barbecue traditions. Inspired by Veras, maybe theres James Beard Award in the future for Houstons flourishing Tex-Mex barbecue scene. jcreid@jcreidtx.com twitter.com/jcreidtx Beyond the brim, Sombrero Galaxy's halo suggests turbulent past Surprising new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled "brim" of the Sombrero galaxy's disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble's sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero's vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy's central portion, typically made of older stars. These latest observations of the Sombrero are turning conventional theory on its head, showing only a tiny fraction of older, metal-poor stars in the halo, plus an unexpected abundance of metal-rich stars typically found only in a galaxy's disk, and the central bulge. Past major galaxy mergers are a possible explanation, though the stately Sombrero shows none of the messy evidence of a recent merger of massive galaxies. "The Sombrero has always been a bit of a weird galaxy, which is what makes it so interesting," said Paul Goudfrooij of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, Maryland. "Hubble's metallicity measurements (i.e., the abundance of heavy elements in the stars) are another indication that the Sombrero has a lot to teach us about galaxy assembly and evolution." "Hubble's observations of the Sombrero's halo are turning our generally accepted understanding of galaxy makeup and metallicity on its head," added co-investigator Roger Cohen of STScI. Long a favorite of astronomers and amateur sky watchers alike for its bright beauty and curious structure, the Sombrero galaxy (M104) now has a new chapter in its strange story -- an extended halo of metal-rich stars with barely a sign of the expected metal-poor stars that have been observed in the halos of other galaxies. Researchers, puzzling over the data from Hubble, turned to sophisticated computer models to suggest explanations for the perplexing inversion of conventional galactic theory. Those results suggest the equally surprising possibility of major mergers in the galaxy's past, though the Sombrero's majestic structure bears no evidence of recent disruption. The unusual findings and possible explanations are published in the Astrophysical Journal. "The absence of metal-poor stars was a big surprise," said Goudfrooij, "and the abundance of metal-rich stars only added to the mystery." In a galaxy's halo astronomers expect to find earlier generations of stars with less heavy elements, called metals, as compared to the crowded stellar cities in the main disk of a galaxy. Elements are created through the stellar "lifecycle" process, and the longer a galaxy has had stars going through this cycle, the more element-rich the gas and the higher-metallicity the stars that form from that gas. These younger, high-metallicity stars are typically found in the main disk of the galaxy where the stellar population is denser -- or so goes the conventional wisdom. Complicating the facts is the presence of many old, metal-poor globular clusters of stars. These older, metal-poor stars are expected to eventually move out of their clusters and become part of the general stellar halo, but that process seems to have been inefficient in the Sombrero galaxy. The team compared their results with recent computer simulations to see what could be the origin of such unexpected metallicity measurements in the galaxy's halo. The results also defied expectations, indicating that the unperturbed Sombrero had undergone major accretion, or merger, events billions of years ago. Unlike our Milky Way galaxy, which is thought to have swallowed up many small satellite galaxies in so-called "minor" accretions over billions of years, a major accretion is the merger of two or more similarly massive galaxies that are rich in later-generation, higher-metallicity stars. The satellite galaxies only contained low-metallicity stars that were largely hydrogen and helium from the big bang. Heavier elements had to be cooked up in stellar interiors through nucleosynthesis and incorporated into later-generation stars. This process was rather ineffective in dwarf galaxies such as those around our Milky Way, and more effective in larger, more evolved galaxies. The results for the Sombrero are surprising because its smooth disk shows no signs of disruption. By comparison, numerous interacting galaxies, like the iconic Antennae galaxies, get their name from the distorted appearance of their spiral arms due to the tidal forces of their interaction. Mergers of similarly massive galaxies typically coalesce into large, smooth elliptical galaxies with extended halos -- a process that takes billions of years. But the Sombrero has never quite fit the traditional definition of either a spiral or an elliptical galaxy. It is somewhere in between -- a hybrid. For this particular project, the team chose the Sombrero mainly for its unique morphology. They wanted to find out how such "hybrid" galaxies might have formed and assembled over time. Follow-up studies for halo metallicity distributions will be done with several galaxies at distances similar to that of the Sombrero. The research team looks forward to future observatories continuing the investigation into the Sombrero's unexpected properties. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), with a field of view 100 times that of Hubble, will be capable of capturing a continuous image of the galaxy's halo while picking up more stars in infrared light. The James Webb Space Telescope will also be valuable for its Hubble-like resolution and deeper infrared sensitivity. ### The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C. This story has been published on: 2020-02-20. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. A novel, four-week parenting rotation designed for pediatric residents has dramatically increased the amount of time resident parents can spend at home with their babies, according to a study by researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. The elective, created in 2010 by physicians at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, was set up to address the lack of maternity leave for doctors in residency programs, a time when many get pregnant. The new study, published this week in the journal Academic Pediatrics, is the first to examine the results of the program. When we first created this elective, our residents had to take vacation days, about four weeks, if they wanted time off with their newborns. Some took unpaid Family and Medical Leave combined with vacation time. For some, this meant not being able to pay back student loans. Others faced career setbacks." Dr. Melanie Cree-Green, MD, Ph.D., study's first author, pediatric endocrinologist and assistant professor at the CU School of Medicine Working with her father, Jonathan Cree, MD, MA, a family medicine residency program director, and fellow physicians at CU Anschutz, including Adam Rosenberg, MD, CU pediatric residency program director, Cree-Green created an at-home, non-core elective that turned the experience of parenting into a structured training experience for residents. "When Melanie approached me about this, it seemed the right thing to do," said Rosenberg. "It was a win-win situation. Now our goal is to expand our efforts to insure all of our trainees 12 weeks of paid leave." Cree-Green, who also works at the Center for Women's Health Research at CU Anschutz, said her aim was to increase paid time at home for new parents, "while capitalizing on the experience of parenting as a unique educational opportunity for residents." The elective, approved by the pediatric residency curriculum committee, included the following: 1) reading five articles on neonatal subjects including rashes, circumcision, maternal depression and lactation. 2) Preparing a presentation for other pediatric residents on some aspect of pediatrics they learned as a parent. 3) Reviewing a popular parenting book. 4) Attending a well-child check, a breastfeeding consultation visit. 5) Writing an essay from the perspective of a parent on how such visits might change their approach as a physician. All residents (mothers and partners) who had a new child, either biologic or adopted, could take the elective. "We found that implementation of a parenting elective providing up to four weeks of paid time at home, significantly improved income and academic outcomes in pediatric residents, while markedly increasing resident time devoted to parenting," the study reported. "In mothers, the minimum time away from the hospital tripled and nearly all resident mothers had more than seven weeks at home." Before the elective, none of the fathers or partners took more than a week at home and some took no leave at all. Afterward, 100% took leave with a mean time of four weeks. The extra time at home benefited the doctors in many ways including allowing for the establishment and maintenance of breastfeeding, important to fetal health. Shorter leave is associated with failing to establish and early cessation of breastfeeding. Cree-Green said the program has been a clear success at a time when more and more women are entering medicine and the needs of their families are becoming more apparent. For years, she said, women physicians have lagged behind in maternal leave, salary equity and other areas. "Physicians are trained to put the patient first," she said. "Physician wellness has always taken a back seat to that. It has never been a priority, but there is a growing consensus that it must be." She has been asked by numerous other medical institutions to share the details of the elective. Pediatrics, she said, is just the beginning. "I would like to see this elective expanded to other specialties like Ob/Gyn, psychiatry and family medicine," Cree-Green said. "In fact, I believe it should be explored in all types of residency to improve personal, financial and professional outcomes in medical trainees." Harvey Weinstein's lawyer has said in a TV interview that the disgraced Hollywood producer committed sins by cheating on his wife but that doesn't make him a criminal as jury deliberations continue in his rape trial. Lead defense lawyer Donna Rotunno made the comments in a sit-down interview with 60 Minutes Australia that is set to air on Sunday. The interview was filmed in New York last Friday prior to the judge ordering Rotunno not to speak to reporter's until after Weinstein's trial concludes. The gag order was issued after Rotunno wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that was published on Saturday urging jurors to find Weinstein not guilty. Harvey Weinstein's lawyer said in a TV interview that the disgraced Hollywood producer committed sins by cheating on his wife but that doesn't make him a criminal In a clip of the yet-to-air interview, Rotunno insisted Weinstein was not guilty of the rape and sexual assault charges he is currently on trial for. 'A sin is cheating on your wife,' Rotunno, who is known for loathing the #MeToo movement, said. 'Is Harvey guilty of committing sins? Sure, but that doesn't make you a criminal.' Weinstein's wife of a decade, fashion designer Georgina Chapman, divorced him after dozens of women started coming forward in 2017 accusing him of sexual assault or misconduct. Rotunno, in the interview, also addressed an argument she made repeatedly at trial that many of Weinstein's accusers needed to take responsibility for their actions. 'When you go home with someone after swiping right, act like you have no idea what you may be consenting to seems ridiculous,' Rotunno said in the clip. Rotunno has taken aim before at the credibility of the women who have accused Weinstein of assaulting them. In her closing arguments, Rotunno said the accusations were 'regret renamed as rape'. Weinstein's wife of a decade, fashion designer Georgina Chapman, divorced him after dozens of women started coming forward in 2017 accusing him of sexual assault or misconduct The interview was filmed in New York last Friday before the judge ordered Rotunno not to speak to reporter's until after Weinstein's trial concludes Prior to jurors starting their deliberations on Tuesday, the judge in Weinstein's case banned Rotunno from speaking to reporters until after the trial after the op-ed was brought to his attention. Rotunno told the judge that the opinion piece, titled 'Jurors in my client Harvey Weinstein's case must look past the headlines', was not intended to address the jury directly. 'This is an op-ed about the jury system as a whole, about the criminal justice system as a whole,' she said. Rotunno said the opinion piece, published on Saturday and titled 'Jurors in my client Harvey Weinstein's case must look past the headlines', was not intended to address the jury directly Prosecutors said the article was 'akin to jury tampering'. In the op-ed, Rotunno said jurors were asked to avoid all media coverage and outside influences but questioned whether anyone thought it was 'realistically possible' in a 'high-profile case like Harvey Weinstein's'. 'The mocking of Mr Weinstein's walker, the unflattering courtroom-artist sketches of his body, the countless critical op-eds and biased stories, and the convenient timing of the politically-motivated charges in Los Angeles were all designed to pre-determine his guilt,' she wrote. 'However, Mr Weinstein's jurors have an obligation to themselves and their country, to base their verdict solely on the facts, testimony and evidence presented to them in the courtroom. 'I implore the members of this jury to do what they know is right and was expected of them from the moment they were called upon to serve their civic duty in a court of law. The facts are the facts. Harvey Weinstein is innocent. His fate hangs in the balance, and the world is watching.' A Google Cloud manager has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife during a vacation in Hawaii with their children after a body was found on a beach. Harvard-educated Sonam Saxena, 43, reported his wife Smriti missing on Tuesday claiming the 41-year-old mother-of-two had vanished during a late night stroll on a secluded beach south of Anaehoomalu Bay, in South Kohala. The couple, from Bellevue, Washington, were on vacation with their two daughters aged 13 and eight to celebrate their eldest child's birthday - a trip they take every year. He said Smriti, a business program manager for Microsoft, suffered an asthma attack and disappeared while he went to get her inhaler from their room at the Waikoloa Beach Marriott Resort. Harvard-educated Sonam Saxena, 43, reported his wife Smriti missing on Tuesday claiming the 41-year-old mother-of-two had vanished during a late night stroll on a secluded beach south of Anaehoomalu Bay, in South Kohala Lava Lava Beach Club in Waikoloa near where her husband said she went missing during a late night stroll on Tuesday Harvard-educated Sonam Saxena, 43, reported his wife Smriti missing on Tuesday claiming the 41-year-old mother-of-two had vanished during a late night stroll on a secluded beach south of Anaehoomalu Bay, in South Kohala Sonam Saxena, 43, was arrested after a body was found near Anaehoomalu Bay, in South Kohala (pictured) the morning after he had reported her missing Police found a body yesterday morning near where she was last seen and arrested Saxena a few hours later on suspicion of second degree murder. The Hawaii Police Department has not yet released the identity of the body but said in a statement that it was 'located in the general area where Smriti Saxena was reported as a missing person and last seen Tuesday evening.' The statement added: 'The identity of the female body is being withheld pending positive identification and notification of next of kin. 'Sonam Saxena has been arrested on the count of murder in the second-degree as detectives are continuing this investigation. 'An autopsy is scheduled to determine the exact cause of death.' Before his arrest, Saxena - a product manager at Google Cloud in Seattle - posted an appeal for information on the Linkedin network. He wrote: 'My wife Smriti Saxena is missing. Can you please promote this tweet so that I can tell my daughters where their Mom is #help.' Saxena also gave an interview with West Hawaii Today and described how his wife went missing after they had been drinking at the Lava Lava Beach Club and decided to go for a stroll on the beach. The couple, who have been married for 17 years, were on vacation with their two children aged 13 and eight to celebrate their eldest child's birthday Harvard-educated Sonam Saxena, 43, reported his wife Smriti missing on Tuesday claiming the 41-year-old mother-of-two had vanished during a late night stroll on a secluded beach south of Anaehoomalu Bay, in South Kohala He said: 'She got an asthma attack right there on the beach and she was feeling weak and she didn't want to walk all the way back because it's almost a 20-minute walk back from that beach to our room. 'So, I said, 'hey, you know what? You stay here, you have your phone with you and I'll just go to the room grab your inhaler and pump and come back.' When he returned '40 to 50 minutes' later he found her purse, phone, credit card and driver's license were all there but she had gone. He said: 'I was disturbed because why would she leave her purse and her phone on the beach and head back to the room. 'It just seemed really odd,' he said. 'So I rushed back to the room. I checked the room and I saw that she wasn't in the room. So I went down stairs and that's when I dialed 911.' Saxena said he helped police and security officers scour the area. 'We called out for her but there was nothing,' he said. 'No response.' Police released an appeal to find Smriti saying she had last been seen around 10:30 p.m. wearing a black dress with a multicolored floral design and a black jacket. The pair, married for 17 years with two children, ages 13 and 8, come to Hawaii every year to celebrate their eldest child's birthday. Prior to graduating from Harvard Business School in General Management, Saxena earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Nautical Science from Mumbai University Germany Urged To Ensure Data Sharing On Call-Off Stock Arrangements by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels 20 February 2020 Germany's IT systems are not ready for the VAT "quick fix" simplifications that entered into force on January 1, 2020, according to the European Commission. The VAT quick fixes are intended to simplify VAT compliance for businesses and strengthen and harmonize EU rules ahead of the introduction of more comprehensive reforms to EU VAT law scheduled for 2021. The European Commission has sent a letter of formal notice for Germany regarding quick fixes relating to the transportation of goods from one member state to another, known as "call-off stock arrangements." "Call-off stock arrangements" refer to a situation where, at the time of the transport of goods to another member state, the supplier already knows the identity of the person acquiring the goods, to whom these goods will be supplied at a later stage, and when they will arrive in the member state of destination. The VAT rules have been simplified to avoid a situation where the supplier has to register for VAT in another member state only because of stock held there. The simplification of the rules means that member states can exchange with each other electronic information to avoid fraud. The Commission said that Germany is not ready to submit such information and will only develop the necessary technical infrastructure by the end of 2021. According to the Commission, this will affect the capacity of other member states to fight fraud and will hinder the smooth functioning of the internal market. The Commission said that Germany is therefore considered to be in breach of the principle of sincere cooperation and to be failing to fulfill its obligations under the Administrative Cooperation Regulation. If Germany does not act within the next two months, the Commission may send a reasoned opinion to the German authorities. In January, the Commission sent letters of formal notice to 14 member states regarding implementation of the quick fixes. JAMES ISLAND, S.C. - More than a half-century ago, Millicent Brown became one of the first students to integrate South Carolina's schools. The Charleston native has spent a lifetime as a teacher and activist, fighting for social and racial justice. But in recent years, as she watched her beloved coastline pounded by hurricanes and saw residents displaced by crippling floods, as spring blooms arrive too early and Lowcountry fishermen face shrinking catches, Brown has been troubled by another source of injustice: climate change. "I just don't know that in times past people associated the environment with their day-to-day lives the way they are seeing now. That's the tragedy that the past few years have brought," said Brown, a 71-year-old Democrat, on a mild winter evening this week. "There's no running away from this." As she surveys the electoral landscape, Brown said she pines for a leader "who has the capacity for trusting science and investing in a way we think is going to help the planet survive." Climate change and the environment have emerged as a front-burner issue in early Democratic primary states this presidential election cycle, in ways difficult to fathom only a few years ago. As Democrats vie for the chance to challenge President Donald Trump in the fall, candidates are talking about the warming planet and environmental justice more than ever on the campaign trail, bemoaning Trump's withdrawal from the Paris climate accord and bashing his relentless rollback of U.S. environmental regulations. In Iowa, where wind energy is booming and residents have endured historic flooding, climate change ranked as the second-most important issue among voters in the recent caucuses. It was eclipsed only by health care, according to polls conducted by Edison Media Research for The Washington Post and other news outlets. In New Hampshire, where moose populations are shrinking and winters are warming rapidly - and where exits poll four years ago didn't even mention climate change - a quarter of primary voters this month listed it as the issue that mattered most, ranking it higher than income inequality and foreign policy. And in Nevada, potential voters have singled out the issue as their second-most critical, behind health care but ahead of the economy, according to a Suffolk/USA Today/Reno Gazette Journal poll in January. Less clear is whether one Democratic candidate in particular will benefit from the shift. In Iowa and New Hampshire, climate-focused voters gravitated overwhelmingly to Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg. But then, voters of all stripes propelled those candidates to the top of the early contests. Rather than focusing intensely on climate, Democratic voters appear most concerned by the central goal of kicking Trump out of the White House, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Wednesday. By a wide margin, 58% to 38%, Democrats say they would rather nominate a candidate who can defeat Trump than one who agrees with them on major issues. At the same time, climate change - once an electoral afterthought - shows few signs of fading as the nominating contests move on to Nevada, South Carolina and the 14 states that will vote on March 3, Super Tuesday. A survey from Pew Research Center released this month showed that a majority of Americans now say combating climate change should be a key focus for the president. Nearly two-thirds of Americans also say protecting the environment should be a top policy priority - ranking the issue almost as high as economic concerns. Democrats underscored the issue during Wednesday night's debate in Nevada, with candidates promising to rejoin the Paris climate accord, halt drilling on public lands and clean up toxic waste and pollution in minority communities. "We've just got to do something now," said former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose foundation has spent hundreds of millions of collars to help close coal plants and shift to cleaner energy. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said bold action is critical to avoid "irreparable damage" in coming years. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said leaders can't just talk about climate change "in big global terms," but rather must focus on specific communities suffering because of it. Among Latino voters in Nevada and elsewhere, climate is of particular concern. Three in four Latinos are worried about global warming, according to a 2017 survey commissioned by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. Alexa Aispuro, who has seen her state battered by heat waves and wildfires, is one of those voters. "There's no way to ignore the climate crisis," said Aispuro, a 22-year-old student at the College of Southern Nevada and volunteer with Chispa, a Latino voter outreach effort by the League of Conservation Voters. "People are realizing this is urgent. We have to deal with it now, not later." Since she first worked on behalf of environmental groups during the Nevada caucus four years ago, Aispuro said she has been struck by how the climate has surged from obscurity to prominence, particularly among first-time voters. "Young people are talking about this," Aispuro said. "We want changes. We want to see how we can make this a better planet, a healthier planet." In South Carolina, climate is a concern for some voters, but the economy and education have been more prominent historically, said Scott Huffmon, a political science professor and executive director of the Center for Public Opinion & Policy Research at Winthrop University. That could change as candidates descend on South Carolina ahead of its Feb. 29 primary, said Gibbs Knotts, who chairs the political science department at the College of Charleston. "It's on people's minds," he said. "People realize how vulnerable we are in this coastal environment." In Spartanburg on Monday, Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Steyer was flanked by local black leaders as he reminded a crowd of nearly 200 that climate change remains his top priority. In part, he said, that's because the consequences of a warming world fall disproportionately on communities of color, which historically have faced more threats from polluted air and water. "Environmental justice and racial justice and economic justice are inseparable. They are one thing," Steyer told the applauding crowd in a state where the majority of Democratic voters are African American. "I've always looked at this as a human issue. And there's a gigantic racial undertone to that human issue." The next day, Charleston Mayor John Tecklenburg drove through the rain-soaked, puddle-pocked streets of his city, pointing out public works projects underway to deal with rising sea levels and increased flooding. In 2019, the city experienced more frequent flooding than any year on record. In his reelection campaign last year, Tecklenburg made addressing the problem his top issue. The city, which has an annual budget of roughly $200 million, has estimated that it would take $2 billion to make all the necessary infrastructure improvements. Tecklenburg acknowledges that it is a monumental task, one that will require time, creativity and help from state and federal officials. In his office on Broad Street hangs a poster of his priorities. At the top of the list: Protect this fragile place from rising seas and flooding. "It's the challenge of our time," he said, as he eyed storm drains, looking for problems. As many voters worry about increasing global temperatures and the flooding, fires and extreme weather in their own backyards, environmental groups have seized on the moment to try to drive climate-conscious voters to the polls. Former vice president Al Gore announced a national campaign this week to register voters, boost turnout and bolster support for climate action during the 2020 election. The League of Conservation Voters is running a $3 million effort aimed at ensuring that the 2020 Democratic nominee is committed to aggressive climate policy. The group dispatched organizers to Nevada, South Carolina and other states to press candidates on their policies and track what promises they make - and don't make. "Since we launched the program, every leading Democratic candidate has released a comprehensive plan to combat the climate crisis that is based on science, rooted in equity, and prioritizes justice," spokeswoman Emily Samsel said in an email. Nevada is one of a dozen states where Nathaniel Stinnett's Boston-based group, Environmental Voter Project, is using data analytics to identify people who care deeply about environmental issues but have not voted in the past. The group doesn't endorse candidates; it just tries to persuade people to go to the polls. The rest, Stinnett believes, will take care of itself. "Politicians care about what voters think, not what non-voters think," said Stinnett, whose group has thousands of volunteers. "Politicians go where the votes are." Stinnett says the number of environment-first voters is rising, and they don't necessarily fit the stereotype. "It is a less white, less wealthy group than most people imagine," Stinnett said. "People who are on the front lines of climate change, people who are feeling the impacts of environmental injustice - these are the people who list climate change and environmental justice as their top priority." Back in South Carolina, at her home on James Island, Brown thinks any of the Democratic candidates would provide a welcome change from a president who has dismissed the warnings of scientists and scaled back environmental protections. "If I have any optimism left in me, I believe we will have some return to decency and common sense," she said. Her family has been in South Carolina for six generations, and she has a son and grandson who will face the environmental changes that come long after she is gone. She'll think of them as she heads to the polls this year, she said. "I'm certainly concerned about this world we are abusing, that they are going to have to deal with. I have no idea what it's going to look like for them," Brown said. "We better care and raise our voices now. We can't just say we'll let another generation deal with it. We have got to call that clarion call." - - - The Washington Post's Scott Clement and Emily Guskin contributed to this report. The Victorian and NSW governments have accused the Commonwealth of holding back $1.7 billion in extra funds for the National Disability Insurance Scheme to prop up its promised budget surplus. Victorias Disabilities Minister, Luke Donnellan, and his Liberal counterpart in NSW, Gareth Ward, have written to the federal government demanding that the reserve funds, which were agreed upon in May 2019, be immediately released. The two states say that despite a "breakthrough" agreement eight months ago, the Commonwealth has repeatedly failed to release the money, which is meant to be "spent on people with disabilities so they can reach their full potential", and now the funds are being withheld until after the federal budget is handed down in May. The money is in dispute. The NSW and Victorian disabilities ministers say the delay is unacceptable, with Victoria accusing the Commonwealth of "systemic neglect" as it tries to shore up the federal surplus, which is under threat from the summer bushfire crisis and the coronovirus. Reuters US Attorney General William Barr on Wednesday questioned whether Facebook, Google and other major online platforms still need the immunity from legal liability that has prevented them from being sued over material their users post. "No longer are tech companies the underdog upstarts. They have become titans," Barr said at a public meeting held by the Justice Department to examine the future of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. "Given this changing technological landscape, valid questions have been raised about whether Section 230's broad immunity is necessary at least in its current form," he said. (Also read: Facebook Messenger VP discusses privacy as company works on integrating all its chat tools) Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says online companies such as Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc's Google and Twitter Inc cannot be treated as the publisher or speaker of information they provide. This largely exempts them from liability involving content posted by users, although they can be held liable for content that violates criminal or intellectual property law. Barr's comments offered insight into how regulators in Washington are reconsidering the need for incentives that once helped online companies grow but are increasingly viewed as impediments to curbing online crime, hate speech and extremism. The increased size and power of online platforms has also left consumers with fewer options and the lack of feasible alternatives is a relevant discussion, Barr said, adding that the Section 230 review came out of the Justice Department's broader look at potential anticompetitive practices at tech companies. Lawmakers from both major political parties have called for Congress to change Section 230 in ways that could expose tech companies to more lawsuits or significantly increase their costs. Some Republicans have expressed concern that Section 230 prevents them from taking action against internet services that remove conservative political content, while a few Democratic leaders have said the law allows the services to escape punishment for harboring misinformation and extremist content. Barr said the department would not advocate a position at the meeting but would listen to stakeholders. Doug Peterson, attorney general of Nebraska, said at the meeting that the law limits investigations into online crimes such as human trafficking, child sexual exploitation, drug sales, consumer fraud. "Some of the online providers who we feel are culpable or have aided and abetted that, should not be able to say they are safe or immune due to Section 230." Some speakers urged keeping the law in place but working with companies to bolster initiatives to report crimes, work with law enforcement and hire more people to review content. Matt Schruers, president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association, which counts Google and Facebook as members, said "there is no question more investment can and should be done in this area... but I don't think the misconduct by some bad actors can be generalised across the board." Others such as Kate Klonick, a professor at St John's University Law School in New York, said here is a "huge difference" between the handful of big platforms and the millions of online sites that facilitate harmful content on their platform. "There is a moment in techlash that is happening right now, in which it seems easy to gang up on big online platforms." She said big platforms, especially Facebook, have taken robust steps to tackle harmful content in the past few years. Klonick, whose website says she is an affiliate fellow at Yale University Law School's Information Society Project, said she does not represent any big tech company. Former Bigg Boss contestant and actor Sana Khan is in no mood to spare her ex-boyfriend and choreographer Melvin Louis. She has been unleashing a volley of accusations on him, the latest being that he got a girl pregnant and flirted with his students. Sana went live on Instagram and shared how her relationship with Melvin ended. She claimed that she broke up with him in Krabi, after he humiliated her in front of all his friends and lied about giving up alcohol. The first four months of their relationship were very nice, according to Sana, and she was hypnotised in love. Then in month of Ramzan, and she stayed mostly indoors for prayers. This is when Melvin began cheating on her, she said. Sana claimed that Melvin persuaded her to make their relationship public because he wanted fame and monetary gains out of her. She said that he restricted her from talking to people and taking up projects, even as he was being unfaithful to her. While Sana did not take any names, she said that Melvin was cheating on her with a few women who featured in his videos. She dropped hints about their identities by revealing their initials E, SD and KS and added that these were not the only women. She also claimed that he was having an affair with the woman who was handling his Bengaluru outlet and another woman who calls him bhai (brother) on Instagram but secretly engages in dirty talks with him. She said that this woman, who pretends to have a platonic relationship with him in front of the world, was dumped by her boyfriend last year. Sana said that all the women that Melvin was cheating on her with had not only met her, but would compliment them and call them a cute couple. She questioned the upbringing of these home-breakers. Also read | Bigg Boss 13: Paras Chhabra says there is no future with ex Akanksha Puri, will tell her to move on Sana alleged that Melvin had the support of his family when it came to his philandering ways. She said that after she found out that he was cheating and confronted him, she called his mother up in tears. I was crying and howling, she said, adding that his mother nonchalantly replied, Yeh sab hota hai (These things happen). At the end of her Instagram live, Sana broke down. She then put up an Instagram story saying, Sorry had to log out coz I couldnt stop getting emotional. And tears are not for him but the pain and humiliation I went through for someone not worth it. Thinking of these girls make it even worse. She added that she now understands why these girls boyfriends were unfaithful to them. In another Instagram story, Sana accused him of getting a girl pregnant. Its heartbreaking to know he made one small girl pregnant, took money from girls, flirted with students. Is that how a teacher should be? Scares me! And these so-called actors, my foot! How proud their parents must be now! Characterless people. Thats why they are all strugglers. Allah will teach you all a lesson that I will watch and I know it, she wrote. Sana Khans Instagram stories Melvin, meanwhile, has insinuated that Sanas allegations are false in cryptic Instagram posts. Without taking names, he shared a video in which he is seen spooling the string of a kite, and insinuated that her allegations are false. For the win. #BulatiHaiMagarJaaneKaNahi #Lapeto #TruthWillPrevail, he wrote. He shared another video of a scene from Judaai, in which Johnny Lever is seen fake-crying on cue, seemingly suggesting that Sanas tears are crocodile tears. However, he is yet to directly comment on the accusations levelled at him. Follow @htshowbiz for more An Australian father has blasted Coles for the way their Stikeez collectables have been designed. Greg Hughes, from Perth, went on a hilarious rant after he found an avocado Stikeez on his wall at home and at first glance thought it was a 'butt plug'. 'I decided to do the grocery shop at Coles for some of those sweet, sweet brownie points with the wife', the 34-year-old, who blogs under Dad Minus One, wrote on Facebook. Australian father and blogger Greg Hughes (pictured with his children) has blasted Coles for way they have designed their Stikeez collectables 'As I approach the checkout I see an opportunity to distract the kids when I realise they're giving away Stikeez again and so I grab a handful on my way out'. He continued: 'I hand them over to the kids, accept my praise and adoration as the greatest dad of all time and think nothing of it'. 'Thirty minutes later when the kids have tired of their new toys and moved back to destroying my house I turn around and am a little taken aback by what I see'. He went on a hilarious rant on Facebook after he found an avocado Stikeez on his wall at home and at first glance thought it was a 'butt plug' Greg revealed that he at first he thought 'there was a miniature butt plug stuck to my wall'. 'Upon further inspection I realise it's "allegedly" an avocado but all I can say is that whoever designed these bad boys knew exactly what they were doing when they created this lad right here,' he said. 'As I looked closer at my miniature suction capped sex toy that I'd inadvertently collected I drew inspiration and motivation from this little guy.' Greg explained that he eventually realised 'it was an avocado but all I can say is that whoever designed these bad boys knew exactly what they were doing when they created this lad right here' 'Sure he may spend his days as a piece of fruit and his nights surrounded by a**holes but look how goddamn happy he is doing it!' 'If that isn't a shining example of exactly how we should all live our lives then I don't know what is'. He ended: 'Even if you're surrounded by a**holes and constantly getting chewed out - stay positive'. Greg wasn't the only one who thought the Coles products looked a bit different to their intended purpose. Others pointed out the mushroom and sweetcorn also looked 'suggestive'. 'I won't ever be able to look a checkout person in the eye when asking for these,' one commenter posted. 'This has made my night,' another person added. The 2020 U.S. Census is the topic of this Making Democracy Work Town Hall meeting scheduled for 2 to 3 p.m. Wednesday, March 4, in the Community Room of the Grace A. Dow Memorial Library in Midland. The League of Women Voters of the Midland Area will present educational information on the 2020 U.S. Census. Information presented will include how the census data is collected, the use of that data and privacy concerns for local residents. Infrastructure projects must now be the "priority" in order to improve Northern Ireland's roads, technology and "failing" sewerage system, former Secretary of State Julian Smith has said. Mr Smith, who was unceremoniously sacked from his position earlier this month, oversaw the restoration of the power-sharing institutions here after a three-year impasse. In a wide-ranging personal article for the New Statesman, the Conservative MP, who was replaced in Belfast by Brandon Lewis, addressed a number of issues, including same-sex marriage and abortion. Also - writing in the Spectator - dismissed a suggestion the Prime Minister may have been "blindsided" by the New Decade, New Deal, which brought about the restoration of devolution. He welcomed Northern Ireland's first same-sex marriage held last week, saying he had "promised" ceremonies would start by Valentine's Day - "and we delivered". Read More He acknowledged abortion was a contentious issue but stressed it was "vital" that women and girls had "broadly the same reproductive rights as elsewhere in the UK". "Social reform in Northern Ireland highlighted to me the challenges that modern unionism will face in the coming years," he continued. "Our vision of the Union in Northern Ireland has to be inclusive and responsive, and must consciously build on the Good Friday Agreement." He appeared to urge unionists not to ignore those who do not identify as either nationalist or unionist. "Sectarianism is not the only force in Northern Irish politics," he added. "Young, non-aligned voters want to see the material benefits of the Union today. "We urgently need to rise to the challenge." PM does not sign off a key government deal without reading it first, alongside a phalanx of talented PJ Masks aides Julian Smith The MP also referred to the Prime Minister's much-touted North Channel bridge plan, insisting like "all well behaved former Cabinet ministers" he "would never express scepticism" about the project. However, he added the focus must be on "decisive and cost-effective intervention" in relation to local roads and infrastructure. On the issue of Brexit, he offered his full support to Mr Johnson's deal, insisting it offers us "unique economic benefits that stem from facing both the EU and UK". "Northern Ireland will continue to be at the centre of many political debates in the coming months. How we engage with them will determine whether UK leaders will have a hand in the fate of the Union for years to come," he wrote. He also insisted Stormont must ensure no repeat of scandals such as the "cash for ash" Renewable Heat Incentive scheme. "Millions of pounds of responsibility-free funding has to be a thing of the past," he added. Meanwhile, Mr Smith also rubbished speculation his Cabinet sacking had been due to Tory fears that the New Decade, New Approach deal could pave the way for prosecutions for former British soldiers, prompting speculation No.10 had not been aware of the full details. However, Mr Smith told the Spectator yesterday that a Prime Minister "does not sign off a key government deal without reading it first". He wrote: On Wednesday night the Times reported my expected fate, suggesting the reason for the chop was that Downing Street had been unaware of key details of the deal to restore Stormont. I was grateful for the opportunity to confirm to the journalist that a PM does not sign off a key government deal without reading it first, alongside a phalanx of talented PJ Masks aides. I will miss the warmth and support and passion of Northern Ireland no other part of the United Kingdom is as politically engaged Julian Smith Dominic Cummings, Mr Johnsons chief adviser, told reporters ahead of the reshuffle that the animated superhero trio PJ Masks would do a greater job than all of them (Cabinet ministers) put together. Mr Smith suggested there were signs from the Government ahead of the reshuffle that his time in the Cabinet may be coming to an end. He said: My suspicions were raised by Tuesday: my close protection apologised about the swap to a Skoda because the main car was in the garage; I received a fumbled brief about what would happen should things go badly for me in the reshuffle; and finally, I could no longer reach the team on the normal phone due to battery problems. News from my private office confirmed that indeed miracles would be required to turn this patients prospects around. After a few side glances one private secretary told me that he had got wind via the civil service net that I should be in for 8 a.m. on Thursday. He also spoke of the "massive privilege" of working in Northern Ireland. He referred to the SDLP leader Colum Eastwood as "charismatic and debonair". "I will miss the warmth and support and passion of Northern Ireland no other part of the United Kingdom is as politically engaged," he said. WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump announced that Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany, will become acting director of national intelligence, a move that puts a staunch Trump ally in charge of the nations 17 spy agencies, which the president has only tepidly embraced. Rick has represented our Country exceedingly well and I look forward to working with him, Trump tweeted on Wednesday. A White House statement Thursday said Grenell is committed to a nonpolitical, nonpartisan approach to the job. Grenell follows Joseph Maguire, who has been acting national intelligence director since August. It was unclear if Maguire would return to the National Counterterrorism Center. I would like to thank Joe Maguire for the wonderful job he has done, Trump tweeted, and we look forward to working with him closely, perhaps in another capacity within the Administration! Grenell, a loyal and outspoken Trump supporter, becomes the first openly gay member of Trumps Cabinet. He has been the U.S. ambassador to Germany since 2018. He previously served as U.S. spokesman at the United Nations in the George W. Bush administration, including under then-Ambassador John Bolton. News of the announcement was quickly criticized by those who said the job should be held by someone with deep experience in intelligence. Trump named Grenell acting national intelligence director, meaning he would not have to be confirmed by the Senate. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Trump had selected an individual without any intelligence experience to serve as the leader of the nations intelligence community in an acting capacity. Warner accused the president of trying to sidestep the Senates constitutional authority to advise and consent on critical national security positions. The intelligence community deserves stability and an experienced individual to lead them in a time of massive national and global security challenges, Warner said in a statement. Now more than ever our country needs a Senate-confirmed intelligence director who will provide the best intelligence and analysis, regardless of whether or not its expedient for the president who has appointed him. The Intellience Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 was signed by President George W. Bush after 9-11 to improve the sharing of information among all the intelligence agencies. The law states that the president shall appoint a national intelligence director with the advice and consent of the Senate. It also states: Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise. Susan Hennessey, a fellow in national security law at Brookings Institution and a former attorney at the National Security Agency, tweeted: This should frighten you. Not just brazen politicization of intelligence, but also someone who is utterly incompetent in an important security role. The guardrails are gone. Trump named Maguire to the position after Texas GOP Rep. John Ratcliffe removed himself from consideration after just five days amid criticism about his lack of intelligence experience and qualifications for the job. Maguire became acting director the same day that former National Intelligence Director Dan Coats resignation took effect. It was also the same day that deputy national intelligence director Sue Gordon walked out the door. Democrats denounced the shake-up at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and accused Trump of pushing out two dedicated intelligence professionals. In this March 26, 2018, photo, President Moon Jae-in and Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan stand with government officials and workers of Korea and the United Arab Emirates in front of unit 1 of the Barakah Nuclear Power Plant. Yonhap By Nam Hyun-woo Korea's first nuclear reactor export to the United Arab Emirates is now an official success after the Middle Eastern country gave the first reactor at the Barakah Nuclear Plant built by Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) the go ahead. However, questions remain as to whether Korea can continue exporting its nuclear reactors and related technologies, as the current government is attempting to phase out nuclear power from the country's main energy resources. The UAE Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation issued an operating license for unit 1 of the plant, and following this, fuel will start to be loaded and full commercial operation commenced within several months. In December 2009, the state-run KEPCO won the project to build four APR-1400 reactors in Barakah and broke ground in July 2012. Initially, unit 1 was expected to begin commercial operations in 2017, but the UAE government postponed it several times for extensive reviews and inspections. Industry officials said the Barakah operation could be proof of the technological prowess of KEPCO, but will not likely be a springboard for Korea to gain momentum in exporting nuclear reactors, given the political drive to phase out nuclear power here. Since winning the Barakah project in 2009, KEPCO and its subsidiary Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP) have been vying to win additional orders in overseas nuclear projects, but are yet to see any noticeable outcome. According to the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy, there are approximately 20 nuclear plants in the U.K., Poland, Saudi Arabia, the Czech Republic, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Bangladesh which are yet to finalize a bidder on reactor provision, meaning they are up for grabs for nuclear power firms across the world. After KEPCO lost its preferred bidder status in the U.K.'s Moorside nuclear project in July 2018, KEPCO tapped into projects in the Czech Republic, Poland and Saudi Arabia, but these have a long way to go. According to the KHNP, the Czech government is seeking to build a 1,200 megawatt nuclear plant at Dukovany and plans to select a final bidder in 2022. Initially, the preferred bidder was expected to be announced last year, with President Moon Jae-in asking Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis to allow Korean companies to participate in the bidding process in November 2018. Also, the KHNP is vying for a project to construct six nuclear reactors in Poland by 2043. The Polish government plans to select a site this year and a bidder by 2021. Since the two projects are at a critical juncture weighing between different bidders, industry officials said the state-wide support and political influence is also working. However, Korea appears to be falling short of its rivals, as its sales pitch contradicts the government's policy to phase out nuclear energy in the country. "Despite KEPCO and other nuclear related businesses' bid to win reactor-related orders, the response appears to have been lukewarm," an industry official said. "For ordering countries, it is natural to have doubts on long-term maintenance and securing operating personnel when they give projects to Korean firms, because the country is no longer pursuing nuclear energy on its home soil." Along with state-run firms, private companies are also scaling down their workforces as the "nuclear business" declines here. Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction, whose main business is manufacturing equipment for nuclear power plants, said Tuesday it will launch a voluntary retirement program for employees older than 45, citing its deteriorating bottom line. "The global power generation market has been facing headwinds for the past several years and so has Doosan Heavy due to the uncertainties in the domestic market," the company said in a statement. "We have been practicing a package of self-recovery efforts for new businesses including gas turbines, wind power and hydrogen energy, but we cannot avoid workforce restructuring." "It seems that the government thinks it can fool importing nations so easily," said Lee Duck-hwan, a professor at Sogang University. "Promoting nuclear power plants to other countries while scaling them down at home citing safety concerns is an unethical approach." "Korea is celebrating the operation of the Barakah Power Plant, but it remains uncertain who will operate the plant, because Korea is losing its nuclear-related workforce," he added. "As seen in Doosan Heavy's job cuts, the Korean nuclear industry is on the verge of collapse and the outlook for nuclear reactor exports is very negative." New Delhi: We have all heard stories of the popular legends that belong to the Hindu culture and one such is of Lord Shiva and how he held the mighty Ganga in his matted locks. On the occasion of Maha Shivratri, let's take a look at one of the legends associated with Lord Shiva and Ganga. King Bhagiratha succeeded in pleasing Brahma after his great-grandfather Sagara angered Sage Kapila by accusing him of stealing the sacrificial horse meant for performing the Ashwamedha Yagya. The horse was actually stolen by Indra who feared Sagara would grow more powerful than him after performing the Yagya. Sage Kapila cursed Sagara and his descendants by saying they will never be able to attain Moksha until they bring the divine Ganga to earth from the heavens. Brahma, who gets pleased by Bhagirathas prayers, asks Ganga to descend to the earth. But Ganga takes offense to this and decides to destroy the earth with her mighty force. Brahma who knew of Gangas fury, asked Bhagiratha to seek Lord Shivas help to combat Gangas rage. Lord Shiva agrees to help Bhagiratha. Ganga, who is oblivious of Shivas power, descended with tremendous force thinking she would wash him away. But Shiva, the lord of the lords that he is, held her tightly in his matted hair. Ganga realised Shiva was no ordinary being and calmed down. The underlying meaning: Only a stable, strong and an invincible mind can control the temptations of the materialistic world. Nothing can lure him. Hence to attain the truth, one needs to be unshakable. Stability alone can bring in peace and happiness. To defeat arrogance, pride and ego, one needs to have strong mind. In this case,(Gangas force) is arrogance and Shiva symbolises strong mind. Since Shiva held Ganga, he is known as Gangadhar. Ukraine was included in the list of countries, which economies went down during the period 1990-2017 as Interfax-Ukraine reported citing Permanent IMF Representative in Ukraine Gosta Ljungman. Ukraine is one of 18 countries, whose economies reduced during the period starting from 1990 until 2017, showing the fifth result from the end of the list, on average minus 0,2% annually, Ljungman said. According to him, in the period from 1990 until 2017, the investment in Ukraine made only 20% from the GDP, including 16% from the GDP in 2010-2017, when the average level is 26% from the GDP. As we reported, the International Monetary Fund noted the progress of Ukraine in holding of the reforms. It also expects the fulfillment of the approved preliminary measures for the final agreement of the new three-year EFF program for $5.5 billion by the board of directors. Besides, the EU will assign the second tranche of macro-financial aid after the Ukrainian side lives up to the IMF conditions. Edenderry councillor Noel Cribbin has labelled the town "open for business and development" again after the partial resolution of a sewage issue in the town. The Fine Gael councillors said he "warmly welcomed" the positive news given to him from Irish Water officials at a private meeting this week. Irish Water officials hold meetings with elected representatives every quarter and Cllr Cribbin says it is an opportunity he always avails of. He indicated that his concern for the last number of months has been the capacity issues at the local sewage plant in Edenderry which was at full capacity and was therefore potentially holding back development in the town. "This situation was of great concern to me and I expressed that strongly and thankfully at Mondays meeting, I was informed that Irish Water have taken on board my concerns and have managed to increase the capacity there." "This means that potential developers, builders or business people have that potential obstacle taken out and means Edenderry is open for business again," Cllr Cribbin claimed. "Officials also informed me that the sewage system is on the list of works for substantial upgrade works and we are now included on that list," he added. He also made representations regarding longstanding flooding of houses in Greenwood Park which he says has "destroyed homes and has the owners living in fear of the next flood." "I proposed that Irish Water contact local engineer Mark Mahon to survey this work and to work with OCC in resolving this longstanding problem. Hopefully, this issue is resolved in the near future," Cllr Cribbin concluded. An investigation by the Police Ombudsman's Office recommended the officers be disciplined Two police officers have been disciplined over failings in an investigation of a head-on crash near Lisburn in January 2018. It follows a Police Ombudsman investigation into a complaint from a driver who suffered a broken wrist and ankle in the crash. She complained after the collapse of a court case against the other driver, who was acquitted of causing grievous bodily injury by careless driving. The complainant stated that it had become clear during the court hearing that the investigating police officer had failed to carry out a number of fundamental investigative actions at the incident scene and in follow up enquiries. She also alleged that the officers manager had not properly supervised the case, given that the investigating officer had only three months experience at the time of the incident and had never before investigated an injury road traffic collision. A Police Ombudsman investigator interviewed the police officer who was in charge of the investigation, and obtained accounts from a witness and other police officers who had been at the scene. Accounts were also taken from the barrister who presented the prosecution case at court and the Judge who heard the case. The Police Ombudsman investigator identified a number of failings including the investigating officers failure to take any measurements, or note the position of the cars or condition of the road surface at the collision scene. She also failed to take useable photographs or to check either car for mechanical malfunction. In addition, she failed to check whether either driver had been using their phones immediately prior to the crash, and did not follow her line managers instruction to interview the suspect driver under caution. Instead she stated that she had recorded a witness statement from him under caution. Enquiries also showed that the police officer did not take a statement from a witness until 10 months after the collision. By that stage the witness, who had spoken to the suspect driver shortly after the crash, could not be sure of exactly what had been said. The Police Ombudsman investigator said these failings had had a negative impact on the court proceedings and concluded that the investigation was not conducted in a prompt, thorough, impartial and careful manner. She also found that the investigating officers line manager had not given her the support and professional guidance required for a probationary officer conducting her first injury road traffic collision investigation. The Police Ombudsman recommended that both officers should be disciplined, and the PSNI has since implemented the recommendation. Solar alignment happens twice a year: on 22 October, marking the Pharaoh's coronation; and on 22 February, marking his birthday. On Saturday, 6:23pm, and for about 20 minutes, the sun rays will illuminate three of the four statues in the inner sanctuary of Aswan's Abu Simbel Temple: the statue of King Ramses II as well as of gods Amun-Re and Re-Hur-Akhty. The fourth statue, that of the god of darkness Ptah is left unlit as a symbol of his connection to the underworld. The solar alignment ceremonies usually attract thousands of visitors each year. The 3,200-year-old temple of Abu Simbel, built by king Ramses II, was rediscovered in 1813 by Swiss researcher Johann Ludwig Burckhardt after it had been buried in the desert for centuries. In 1959, UNESCO launched an initiative to dismantle and rebuild the Abu Simbel Temples away from and above their original location to save them from being flooded under Lake Nasser following the building of the Aswan dam in 1960. The restoration and relocation of the Abu Simbel Temples was completed in September 1968. Search Keywords: Short link: The fierce two-hour Democratic debate in Las Vegas exposed deep divisions, both political and personal, among the six candidates on the stage: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg; former vice president Joe Biden; Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; Sen. Amy Klobuchar; and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg. Wednesday's debate marked Bloomberg's first moment facing the rhetorical volley, and he quickly became a target for his rivals. They challenged him on everything from the stop-and-frisk policy, which the Democrats decried as a form of racial profiling, to alleged disparaging comments about women to the use of his personal wealth to muscle his way into the primary contest. But the impassioned argument didn't all revolve around Bloomberg. Buttigieg and Klobuchar, who have been competing for centrist voters while both straining to court minority support, squared off in starkly personal terms about experience - even knowledge. As in previous debates, a through line was the contest between pragmatism and transformational change, with candidates like Klobuchar and Biden making the case for reversing policies of the Trump administration without making what they described as overly ambitious promises. Warren, and to an even greater extent Sanders, countered that the incremental path would lead only to defeat. - - - Warren on Thursday defended her aggressive posture toward Bloomberg and her other Democratic rivals during the Nevada debate, saying the party could lose to President Donald Trump if it picks the wrong nominee. "I've been told to sit down and stay quiet enough in my life. I'm ready to stay in this fight," Warren said during an appearance on ABC's "The View," after being asked why she targeted fellow Democrats rather than Trump early in the debate. "If we get the wrong nominee, we lose to Donald Trump, and that's why I started the way I did." Warren focused most of her comments during Thursday's broadcast on Bloomberg, calling the former New York mayor "a billionaire who has a history of harassing women." "Michael Bloomberg is a risky candidate for the Democrats," Warren said. "We need someone with rock-solid values, with a history of getting change done and who knows how to fight." - - - Biden announced support on Thursday morning from 32 elected officials and leaders in the Super Tuesday state of Virginia. The new endorsements "demonstrate the growing support for Biden in the Commonwealth," his campaign said in a news release. The list of new supporters included elected officials at the state and local level, as well as community activists and leaders. "If we're serious about repairing the fabric of our communities and restoring opportunity in America, we need to start by electing leaders like Joe Biden who can unite us behind a common goal of propelling this country forward," Virginia state Sen. Lynwood Lewis Jr. said in a statement highlighted by the Biden campaign. The campaign said the new endorsements bring the total to more than 50 in Virginia and 1,400 across the United States. - - - Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner said she does not worry that voters will be swayed by Bloomberg's attack on the senator from Vermont as being both a socialist and a "millionaire with three houses." "What Mayor Bloomberg was doing was deflecting," she said during an MSNBC appearance Thursday morning. Turner sought to draw a distinction between the wealth and records of Sanders and Bloomberg. She noted that Bloomberg is worth $60 billion and argued that he has not built "a grass-roots movement like Senator Sanders has over the years." She also pointed to the former New York mayor's stop-and-frisk policy and veto of a sick-leave bill. "There is a contrast here," Turner said. "The question becomes, whose side are you on?" Sanders, she continued, has always been on the side of working people. Sanders also defended his Medicare-for-all plan - which came under attack from his more moderate rivals Wednesday night - in an op-ed for Essence magazine. The piece - titled "Medicare For All Will Help Improve The Lives Of Black Women" - argues that women of color stand to be among the biggest beneficiaries of his plan, which would replace most private insurance with government-administered insurance. His plan, Sanders writes, "will help prevent Black mothers from being discriminated against as they're poised to give birth - left laboring in hallways because of their perceived inability to pay." "It also means that large numbers of Black Americans who live in southern, Republican-controlled states like Mississippi will no longer have to suffer because local legislators rejected President [Barack] Obama's Medicaid expansion," Sanders says. "Medicare For All will provide long-term home health care and community-based services for everyone." The clout of African-American voters in the Democratic nominating process is about to grow, as South Carolina and other states with sizable black populations prepare to hold primaries. - - - The morning after the debate, the Biden campaign resurrected a clip from a 2012 radio show in which Sanders cast doubt on whether gun manufacturers should be held responsible for mass shootings. The issue dogged Sanders during his 2016 presidential run, as his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton sought to highlight his past support for shielding firearms manufacturers and dealers from lawsuits when crimes are committed with their products. Sanders later voiced support for changing the law to allow gun manufacturers who "act irresponsibly" to be held liable. Biden has sought to press the same issue against Sanders during the 2020 campaign. In a tweet, the Biden campaign shared a video featuring audio from a radio appearance by Sanders in the hours after the mass shooting at Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. On the program, Sanders was asked if parents of the victims had "any recourse against the gun manufacturer." "I don't know that you hold a gun manufacturer responsible for what obviously a deranged person does," Sanders said. The Biden video went on to note the death tolls at Sandy Hook and other recent mass shootings. "IT'S TIME TO HOLD GUN MANUFACTURERS ACCOUNTABLE," the video concludes. Bernie Sanders came to Denver last weekend and for fun I took my family to his Sunday night rally. Since we are all Republicans, this was a true walk on the wild side in the form of opposition research. As Sun Tzu said, If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. Held at the Colorado Convention Center, the rally drew thousands according to local media. There were no lines to get in, other than at the obligatory metal detectors now seen at everything from political rallies to sporting events. My photo Since Colorado is part of the upcoming Super Tuesday, other candidates are visiting too, but the Bernie culture is rather unusual compared to other candidates supporters. Volunteers were attempting to register voters. Andrew Romanoff, former Colorado House Speaker, was working the security line, shaking hands and asking for votes for his US Senate bid to unseat Colorado Senator Cory Gardiner. The Bernie rally started off with some local officials whipping up the crowd, including one young woman with a high-pitched voice screeching unintelligibly, a metaphor for the Democrat party, made worse by the dismal acoustics in the convention center. Finally, Bernie, the man of the hour, took stage and launched into his standard stump speech. Trump is a racist, sexist, homophobe. (So is Michael Bloomberg based on recent revelations, but Bernie hasnt gone there, yet.) America is a racist country through and through, he told the raucous throngs. The solutions are the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. As predictable as sunrise and sunset. It was indeed a walk on the wild side. As Lou Reed sang in the iconic song, Everybody had to pay and pay. A hustle here and a hustle there. Every one of Bernies proposals was a hustle. Everybody, not just the rich, has to pay and pay. Interestingly, four years ago, Bernie railed against millionaires and billionaires. Now that he is in the former category, he only mentions billionaires. Who of course arent paying their fair share of taxes. My photo His attention was directed particularly at billionaires trying to buy the election, specifically one whose ads appear on television and radio constantly. Mini-Mike is buying everyone and everything in order to secure the nomination, but its his money to spend as he wishes, and in accordance with the law. And remember that he is running as a Democrat. Its their party and if they allow an oligarch to buy the nomination, they can sell that to the Bernie Bros. Bernies rally was uninterrupted, unlike what happened a few hours previously at his Las Vegas rally where several topless women took the stage protesting animal agriculture. Bernie passively stood aside for the boobs for cows ladies, showing he isnt much of a fighter. He was certainly not a feisty Ronald Reagan at a 1980 presidential debate punching back with I am paying for this microphone. Bernie probably doesnt pay for much of anything (few socialists do). A fight broke out at the rally between a Bernie Bro and another man wearing a Black Guns Matter t-shirt, but nothing like the fight that will break out if the DNC screws Bernie out of the nomination again. The crowd was younger than what one might see at say a Trump rally. More piercings and tattoos as well, but everyone was mostly polite and enthusiastic over their modern-day Karl Marx. Whats Breadline Bernies appeal, other than free stuff? Over a post-rally dinner with my family, my millennial-aged kids gave their take on the matter. Teenagers are told they must go to college, so they do. Many receive degrees in subjects that are difficult or impossible to monetize, like in the social sciences and humanities. Graduating with huge debt and no job prospects, other than part time minimum wage work, they often have no health insurance and no savings, a high cost of living, and a crushing debt. With dismal future prospects for financial independence, Bernies guaranteed minimum wage, free health care, cancellation of student debt, and social justice platitudes are appealing options. President Trumps trade deals, conservative judges, roaring economy, and regulatory rollback offer little appeal when one holds a near-worthless college degree. Bernie is throwing them a lifeline, even if it is simply a piece of rope, attached to nothing. He is selling snake oil, a hustle here, a hustle there. The Bernie hustle is paying off. Bernie has 38 percent odds of winning the Democrat nomination, according to FiveThirtyEight, more than three times higher than his closest rivals, Biden, Bloomberg and Buttigieg, in that order. Interestingly Bernie is tied with no one as a primary outcome, which means the oddsmakers think that a brokered convention and a royal s**t show for the Democrats is now just as likely as Bernie winning the nomination. Following the money, PredictIt has Bernie at 48 cents, compared to Mini-Mike at 32 cents. They also have Trump over Bernie in the general election 53 to 30 cents. Rasmussen, in their Daily Presidential Tracking Poll, has Trump at 50 percent total approval, the same as Obama exactly eight years ago. This is despite the constant negative media barrage against Trump. The President also has some upcoming campaign rallies where Bernie may draw thousands, but Trump draws tens of thousands. To his credit, Bernie is consistent, praising the wonders of socialism for decades. Warren and Biden have new political views based on the necessities in a Democrat primary. Bloomberg, once a Republican, is now a Democrat and busy backpedaling on formerly sensible policies like stop and frisk. Mini-Mike also has MeToo problems and some unwoke comments about racial minorities that he is trying unsuccessfully to run away from. Mayor Pete, like Obama, is a blank canvass where one can project ones own politics. But he is still a red diaper baby and his communist roots are hard to disguise. A few weeks before Super Tuesday, Bernie is the clear Democrat frontrunner, not surprising given the enthusiasm at his rally. Will the DNC try to rig the remaining primaries against Bernie? Which is worse, a socialist at the top of the Democrat ticket or telling millions of Bernie Bros to pound sand, again? A recent NBC poll may provide an answer. A combined 67 percent say they have reservations or are very uncomfortable with a candidate being a socialist. Fifty-seven percent have reservations/are very uncomfortable with someone who had a heart attack in the last year. Fifty-three percent have reservations/are very uncomfortable with someone whos older than 75. Bernie checks all of those boxes. Brace yourself: I for one will be voting for Bernie. In the Democrat primary at least. As I am registered unaffiliated, I receive the Democrat and Republican ballots. Trump is quite safe in securing the Republican nomination, but Rush Limbaughs operation chaos looks like more fun. The November presidential election likely will be a full-on capitalist versus an unabashed socialist. What could be better as the ultimate referendum on Americas future? Brian C Joondeph, MD, is a Denver based physician and freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in American Thinker, Daily Caller, and other publications. Follow him on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and QuodVerum. The past year or so has revealed a flurry of womens personal stories about opting to have their silicone breast implants removed. Acting on a range of reasons including Allergans July 2019 recall of its Biocell textured implants due to their link to a particular cancer, as well a two-day FDA hearing in March about various implant risks the outspoken have included a handful of public figures, from Victoria Beckham and Sharon Osbourne to Yolanda Hadid and Crystal Hefner. Another vocal sharer on this front has been former reality TV star Adrianne Curry, who has been documenting her painful and complex explant journey on her blog and on social media, and who has now been eliciting a flood of comments from women on her honest and inspiring Thursday social media posts. Former reality-TV star Adrianne Curry, now an Avon representative, credits the beauty products for making her feel better after a complicated explant surgery: "It helps." (Photo: Facebook) Supportive comments from women are a blessing, as most women are pretty bad to one another, especially on the internet, Curry tells Yahoo Lifestyle, who adds that her implant-explant journey has taught her a valuable lesson about herself. That I foolishly wasted a lot of time in my life trying to impress other people, and I wont waste one more singular moment doing so ever again, she says. A healthy and happy life far outweighs a so-called relevant and glittery one. On social media, her posts offered an honest update of her implant removal, in which she discusses going down more than two cup sizes and struggling with insecurities surrounding her body image. Story time, begins Curry, who became famous after winning the first season of Americas Next Top Model and then co-starred in the reality series My Fair Brady while she was married to now-ex Christopher Knight. I lost most my breast tissue in my right breast due to massive scarring/ flesh swimming in silicone. My doctor then decided to reduce my left breast to try to even me out. When I awoke, she was upfront about my results & discussed possible fat transfer. But, explained Curry, now an Avon representative who is married to voiceover actor Matthew Rhode, I am not interested in more surgeries. I was a c cup and a b cup prior to surgery. Now? Not even a double A. Most women go back to what they had before and some are even bigger. I was hoping I'd be bigger since I gained weight since implanting. She adds, Ive tossed the dice and lost EVERY time I did ANYTHING for vanity. Dont do it, guys. Story continues Curry decided to have her implants removed after many years of pain, complications and deformity, even after swapping out one pair for another and seeing no improvement. A lot of vulnerable, scared and suffering women come to the internet in search of answers regarding having crammed foreign objects in their bodies to look more visually appeasing. I was one of them, she wrote on her personal blog post in 2019. Years ago, she explains, she embarked upon a thorough and at-times discouraging search for the right surgeon which came with many red flags, unprofessional situations and the feeling that some doctors were running breast implant factor[ies]. Then came an explant delay due to a different surgery, in 2017, when she underwent (and shared about) a myomectomy, or the surgical removal of uterine fibroids. Eventually, Curry settled on an explant surgeon in Chicago, in part because she is a believer in breast implant illness (BIA) a collection of physical symptoms, ranging from chronic pain to brain fog, that advocates have been working to legitimize within the medical community for years. Discussion of BIA has recently gained traction in the U.K. as well as in the U.S., where about 400,000 women get breast implants annually, 300,000 for cosmetic reasons and 100,000 for post-mastectomy reconstruction related to breast cancer, making breast augmentation the top plastic surgery procedure since 2006, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). But, also according to the ASPS, nearly 30,000 patients have their implants removed every year. And Curry is among them, following an early-January surgery that came with complications including leaked silicone and the removal of breast tissue in an attempt to even out her appearance. Now, shes not holding back when it comes to sharing about her body-image struggle, admitting in her Thursday social media posts, I am uncomfortable with my body currently, but I will learn to live with it. It's still healing and will be for 4.5 more months. Curry also calls out those who might mean well but who instead wind up minimizing her emotional experience with explanting. All the at leasters tell me at least you have your health! At least (insert dumb shit that doesnt make you feel better at all here)! Its the most toxic & unhelpful thing I've experienced so far. The complete dismissal of my inner feelings and voice. She continues, I got fake boobs due to massive insecurity. My entire life was molded on how I look. Good LUCK shaking THAT brain washing! I do feel better physically. No phantom knife shank pains but learning to love a new version of yourself takes time. I went in due to insecurities. I look down and feel like I am looking at someone else. My chest is completely foreign to me. She also explained that her husband has been her rock, noting, It took me 5 years to get comfortable enough to go braless in front of my husband. Now, we are back to square one! T shirt sex!! Currys posts have been resonating with her followers across Facebook and Instagram. I really appreciate your openness with your experience, noted one Instagram fan. Hopefully it inspires girls and women to know they are good enough natural despite any insecurities our toxic society has bred. No judgements to people who choose to enhance but know that we are all made perfectly imperfect. Another added, I admire you for being so frank. You are beautiful in every way. My hope for you is to find inner peace, confidence, and the desire to rip that shirt off and enjoy that man skin to skin-chest to chest soon. Curry also took the time to respond to various commenters and inspired at least one woman to forgo augmentation. You are teaching women to love themselves for who they are, and your husband is teaching men to love women for who they are!! said the follower. You will get there, I went from a really small B cup before kids to a large C and droopy boobs after kids and had thought about getting a lift and implant, but after hearing your stories and many others I have decided against it. I pray that someday you will love yourself [through] your eyes like your husband loves you through his!! Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle: S ainsburys has issued body cameras to staff at a number of UK stores over fears for its workers safety. Members of staff at the supermarkets Bedford Place Local store in Southampton will now sport the neck-worn recording device amid calls by local business leaders for a crime crackdown in the area. A Sainsburys spokesperson told the Standard the new safety measures had been rolled out in a small number of branches, but they were unable to release details of the other locations. Meanwhile, Southampton residents have said the need for such systems was shocking and extreme. Southampton's Bedford Place Local store is trialing the new device / Google streetview The devices, which are worn on a string around the neck, can be switched on and off by staff to record audio and video. The spokesperson said: Weve recently introduced personal safety devices in our Bedford Place store. The safety of our customers and colleagues is extremely important to us and we regularly review the security measures in our stores. A local woman told the Daily Echo paper the need for the devices was shocking. Lorraine Barter said: It is shocking that this is necessary in what was once the most up market and desirable area of the city. It comes after Southampton business chiefs voiced fears that the city centre had become lawless. Bosses at GO! Southampton Business Improvement District (BID) wrote to Hampshire Police and Crime Commissioner earlier this month calling for a crime crackdown, according to the Daily Echo. One BID member described the city centre as lawless, citing a sharp rise in uncontrolled aggressive begging, staff intimidation and public drug use in the city centre. We have been aware of the severe issues faced by the manager and staff at Sainsburys on Bedford Place for some time and have tried to support them, said Giles Semper, executive director of GO! Southampton. It is no surprise that they have now had to resort to such extreme measures. Progressive activists, as they do every year, are calling for new state taxes on the rich, but this year they have some new arguments about why it would politically benefit suburban Democratic senators worried about their 2020 reelection campaigns. There are two basic ways to approach the states $6.1 billion budget deficit. Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins want to avoid tax hikes. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie wants to increase tax revenues. Stuck in between are swing district Democratic senators who the party needs to protect to keep its grip over the state Legislature. Facing calls for an array of new taxes on the ultra-wealthy, pied-a-terres, real estate investors, luxury yachts and jets, stock transfers and corporate stock buybacks Democratic senators from Long Island have largely avoided taking a stand. On Feb. 19, activists gathered outside the district offices of several Long Island Democrats who flipped state Senate seats in recent years, aiming to convince them that raising taxes in an election year is in their political interests. If they do want to get reelected, theyre going to need to bring home some money for schools, said Charles Khan, organizing director for the Strong Economy For All Coalition, an umbrella group favoring tax increases. Theyre going to need to make sure peoples health care is not being cut. If they want to do that, then they are going to have to tax the (top) 0.1% in New York. Efforts by activists, lawmakers and union leaders to raise taxes on the wealthy is nothing new, but they do have some new tactics and threats this budget season. The $6.1 billion budget deficit injects more urgency into the yearslong effort to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers. New polling suggests that it might even be more popular with voters including suburbanites than centrist Democrats fear. Activists are also criticizing Senate Democrats for making bail reform a top priority at the potential cost of raising more tax revenues to fund public schools, health care and other services. Unions are playing a key role in placing a political wedge between Cuomo who is aiming to reduce Medicaid spending by $2.5 billion and the state Senate. United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew told state lawmakers at a Manhattan meeting earlier this month that the union would support lawmakers who held the line against Cuomo. The intended audience for this promise was not limited to the New York City lawmakers who were present that day, according to Assembly Health Committee Chairman Richard Gottfried. I think the legislators in the room were not concerned about their own reelections, but whether some of their more moderate colleagues might be worried, he told City & State. But those fears could be misplaced. A poll of New York registered voters commissioned by the United Federation of Teachers and conducted by Hart Research Associates, which has worked for major news outlets like NBC and The Wall Street Journal, found that more than 90% of respondents supported higher taxes on the wealthy, with negligible differences between New York City, its suburbs and upstate. For those of you who are afraid about raising taxes on the wealthy right now and have been reluctant to do so, the poll indicated that 72% of New Yorkers would be more likely to vote for you in fact voted for these measures, Ron Deutsch, executive director of the Fiscal Policy Institute, told lawmakers at a mid-February legislative budget hearing on taxes. New York State United Teachers meanwhile hit the airwaves the next day with a new ad campaign. The state teachers union is supplementing the efforts to sway lawmakers to raise taxes on the wealthy. While support for keeping income taxes and property taxes low can help win votes in swing districts in the Hudson Valley and Long Island, that does not mean that suburban voters categorically oppose tax increases, according to Lawrence Levy, executive dean of Hofstra Universitys National Center for Suburban Studies. The fewer individuals the tax affects, the more likely it is to have a chance with suburbanites, he said. Anybody who believes that suburbanites in New York, and even more so on Long Island, are anti-tax hasnt been paying attention to school budget elections. They are willing to consider whether the proposal will deliver value and be aligned with their values. There are a few signs that some suburban senators are also open to hearing arguments in favor of raising taxes on the wealthy in one form or another. Activists say they spotted Long Island state Sens. James Gaughran and John Brooks at a Feb. 13 briefing held by the Strong Economy For All Coalition in Albany. There are also tax proposals coming from lawmakers like state Sen. Jen Metzger of the Hudson Valley, who is leading efforts in the chamber to impose a new tax on stock buybacks by corporations. But political alliances can fray when one side does not get what it wants from another. Progressive groups backed the Democratic takeover of the state Senate in 2018 and celebrated the legislation it passed on issues like voting rights, rent reforms and climate change. But such support is evidently contingent on Democratic senators getting on board with raising taxes on the wealthy while not also making a deal on bail reform. My fear is that legislators who are looking for rollbacks on bail might get pitted against education and (that would) come at some cost to schools, said Jasmine Gripper, executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, an advocacy group pushing for billions in new funding for public schools per a 2006 state court decision.. Such arguments have yet to convince Long Island Democrats. A spokesman for state Sen. Todd Kaminsky said he remains opposed to raising taxes. Other members of the so-called Long Island Six, the half-dozen Democratic senators from the island, are laying low on the issue until the Senate releases its own funding proposal in the coming weeks. But activists are continuing to pressure swing district Democrats, including through new ads on Facebook. If Democrats were to raise billions of dollars through new taxes on the wealthy, they could theoretically have enough money to plug the budget deficit while also increasing spending on public schools and health care enough to placate their critics on the political left. But this would require Cuomo and Stewart-Cousins to give ground on an issue that they have been firm on thus far this year. There could be some wiggle room for them as budget negotiations get underway among Cuomo, Heastie and Stewart-Cousins. The governor has previously supported new levies on pied-a-terres and hedge fund managers. We would have to review the specifics, Cuomo spokesman Rich Azzopardi said about the governors support for such proposals moving forward. Stewart-Cousins meanwhile has said tax increases are not the first fallback position for her conference. But taxes targeting billionaires would not exactly violate her stated commitment to protecting middle-class and low-income New Yorkers. Fiscal conservatives have warned that any attempt to raise taxes on the wealthy could hurt the states bottom line. The top 1% of income tax filers paid 37% of the states income taxes, according to research by the Citizens Budget Commission. The state is more dependent than ever on taxes from a few dozen billionaires at the very top, and if just a few of them move out of state, then it could make a big difference in the states revenues, fiscal watchdogs warned. Balancing the budget ultimately comes down to something more than dollars and cents. Senate Democrats worry that backing increased taxes on the wealthy could hurt their hold on swing districts in the chamber, which would in turn jeopardize progressives ability to get bills through the state Legislature. But activists on the political left are challenging that assumption this year by pushing the idea that supporting higher taxes on the wealthy is to the political advantage of Democratic lawmakers. Show me the money, Deutsch said. This is the year the Legislature has to get a spine. An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of Charles Khan and mischaracterized a 2006 state court decision. Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone departs after he was sentenced to three years and four months in prison for charges that include lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering, at U.S. District Court in Washington, U.S., February 20, 2020. REUTERS/Leah Millis A federal judge on Thursday sentenced President Donald Trump's long-time adviser Roger Stone to three years and four months in prison and said his lies to lawmakers investigating Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election posed a threat to American democracy. After US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentenced the veteran Republican operative in Washington, Trump indicated he has no immediate plans to pardon Stone and would let the legal process play out, while adding that "at some point I'll make a determination." "I personally think he was treated very unfairly," Trump said in Las Vegas. In a stern lecture during a 2-1/2-hour sentencing hearing, Jackson delivered an implicit rebuke to Trump, who has attacked her along with the jury and prosecutors in the high-profile case. "There was nothing unfair, phony or disgraceful about the investigation or the prosecution," Jackson said, citing words that the Republican president has used. Stone's lawyer had asked that he get no prison time. The 67-year-old Stone, who has been a friend and adviser to Trump for decades, was convicted on November 15 on all seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice and witness tampering. "He was not prosecuted - as some have complained - for standing up for the president. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president," Jackson said. "The truth still exists. The truth still matters," Jackson added. "Roger Stone's insistence that it doesn't, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to our fundamental institutions - to the very foundation of our democracy." The judge also said Stone "knew exactly what he was doing" when he posted an image on social media last year with a gun's cross-hairs placed over her head. "The defendant engaged in threatening and intimidating conduct toward the court," Jackson said. "This is intolerable to the administration of justice." Stone declined to speak at the hearing. Clad in a dark gray pinstripe suit with a polka dot handkerchief in the pocket, Stone stood at a lectern as the judge delivered the sentence. After leaving, Stone - still subject to a judicial gag order - told reporters, "I have nothing to say." In a chaotic scene outside the courthouse, Stone walked through a throng of people with a slight smile on his face and climbed into a waiting vehicle. Stone's lawyers have asked Jackson for a new trial, and his allies have complained that some of the jurors have expressed anti-Trump sentiments on social media. Some Trump's allies have urged him to pardon Stone. At a Las Vegas event for rehabilitated prisoners, Trump praised Stone as a "good person" and "smart guy" while repeating his claim that the trial's jury forewoman was "totally tainted." Trump said he would not use the presidency's "great powers" as Stone seeks a new trial, but left open the possibility of a pardon. "I'm going to watch the process. I'm going to watch it very closely," Trump said. Democrats said a pardon would be a green light for others to break the law to further Trump's interests. "To pardon Stone when his crimes were committed to protect Trump would be a breathtaking act of corruption," Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, who led the impeachment drive against Trump that ended in his Senate acquittal this month, wrote on Twitter. On Tuesday, Trump granted clemency to prominent convicted white-collar criminals including financier Michael Milken and former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. Jackson's sentence fell well short of the seven to nine years initially recommended by the case's original prosecutors before they were overruled by the Justice Department after Trump complained publicly. Those prosecutors quit the case. Jackson, appointed by Trump's Democratic predecessor Barack Obama, said the department's reversal did not influence her sentencing decision. The judge also fined Stone $20,000. "This was still a very substantial sentence, especially for a non-violent, first-time offender of his age," said Mark Allenbaugh, a consultant who formerly worked for the US Sentencing Commission. Stone was one of several Trump associates who were convicted or pleaded guilty to charges stemming from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation that detailed Russian meddling in the 2016 election to boost Trump's candidacy. He was convicted of lying to the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee about his attempts to contact WikiLeaks, the website that released damaging emails about Trump's 2016 Democratic election rival Hillary Clinton that US intelligence officials have concluded were stolen by Russian hackers. Defense attorney Seth Ginsberg said Stone's career as a self-described "dirty trickster" overshadowed other aspects of a spiritual man who has served as a mentor, loves animals and is devoted to his family. "Mr. Stone is, in fact, not simply that public persona, but a human being," he said. The judge noted Stone was not charged with or convicted of having any role in conspiring with Russia. But Jackson said Stone's effort to obstruct a congressional investigation into Russian election meddling "was deliberate, planned - not one isolated incident." The investigators were not some "secret anti-Trump cabal," Jackson said, but lawmakers on a committee led at the time by Republicans. Stone's career has stretched from the Watergate scandal era of the early 1970s to Trump's campaign four years ago. Stone has labeled himself an "agent provocateur" and famously has the face of former President Richard Nixon tattooed on his back. Wearing sunglasses and a dark fedora as he entered the courthouse accompanied by an entourage of family, friends and lawyers, Stone strode past a giant inflatable rat dressed as Trump and a sign calling for his pardon. One onlooker shouted: "Traitor!" After prosecutors made their sentencing recommendation last week, Trump called them "corrupt" and railed against this "miscarriage of justice." Attorney General William Barr intervened and the Justice Department overruled the recommendation. Congressional Democrats have accused Trump and Barr of politicizing the U.S. criminal justice system and threatening the rule of law. SINN Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald is seeking a meeting with the Jewish Representative Council (JRC) in a bid to quell the controversy over alleged anti-Semitic remarks by one of her TDs. Kildare North TD Reada Cronin has apologised for comments made in a number of Twitter posts in recent years including linking Israel to Nazism. Ms Cronin said Israel "have taken Nazism to a new level" and responded to a picture of monkeys at computers by suggesting it was the Israeli embassy while serving as a Kildare County Councillor in 2014. JRC chairman Maurice Cohen who said he was "astounded and offended" by Ms Cronin's comments and said "they fall into typical anti-Semitic tropes". In her first public response to the controversy on Thursday, Ms McDonald said: I am very glad that Reada has withdrawn those tweets and she has apologised for them. That apology is meant and is accepted by me. I know Maurice Cohen and I intend speaking to him. I think its very important that we clear their air on this issue. "Any form of racism or bigotry is wrong and certainly anti-Semitism is absolutely wrong and I say this as somebody who has a very strong political position and this party has very strong views and positions as regards the Middle East and the Palestinian people in particular. But thats a whole different kettle of fish from any suggestion of anti-Semitism. "Reada has been very clear that she is very sorry for the hurt caused and that is sincerely meant and well go and well talk to Maurice Cohen. [That], I think, is the most direct way to give easement on this." Expand Close Newly elected Sinn Fein TD Reada Cronin. Photo: Tony Gavin / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Newly elected Sinn Fein TD Reada Cronin. Photo: Tony Gavin Mr Cohen was not immediately available for comment - but it is understood the JRC would be willing to meet with Ms McDonald to discuss the tweets by Ms Cronin. Meanwhile, Ms McDonald said she hoped it would not be April before a government is formed as Sinn Fein continues its discussions with other parties. "I do know this much, I know that nobody voted for a return of Fianna Fail and Fine Gael," she said. Ms McDonald is expected to win more votes than any other candidate for Taoiseach in the Dail later on Thursday with the support of 37 Sinn Fein TDs, including herself, and the five TDs from the RISE-Solidarity-People Before Profit left-wing movement. A car fatally struck a 10-year-old girl as she bicycled to school Thursday morning amid recently built subdivisions on the far West Side, officials said. The girl, a student at Kallison Elementary in the Northside Independent School District, was riding alone on Ranch View Road at around 7:30 a.m. The weight of her backpack may have caused the fifth-grader to veer off a sidewalk and fall into oncoming traffic less than a mile from the school, Bexar County Sheriff's deputies said. She was immediately hit by a passing SUV, sheriffs office spokesman Deputy Johnny Garcia said. The girl was not wearing a helmet, he said. Her name was withheld pending notification of next of kin by the Bexar County Medical Examiners Office. School nurses were the first medical responders to tend to the girl but to no avail, Garcia said. Emergency medical personnel rushed her to University Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at about 8:30 a.m. FIND OUT FIRST: Get San Antonio breaking news directly to your inbox It was unclear how far the girl had traveled in the windy, cold morning before being struck. Northside ISD spokesman Barry Perez said the girls home address did not qualify for bus transportation. Students who live less than two miles from a school typically don't qualify to take the bus unless there is construction or new development in the area that might hinder their trip, Perez said. A lime green bike lay in the middle of debris scattered across the divided two-lane road as investigators tried to determine why the driver didn't see the girl fall. Both lanes were blocked to traffic for about half a mile after the accident. A team of mental health counselors were dispatched to the school as part of Northside ISDs crisis action plan. Kallison Elementary, opened in 2017, is part of the school districts fast-growing area in western Bexar County outside Loop 1604. The stretch of roadway where the accident occurred runs through an open area between a pair of upscale neighborhoods off Culebra Road. The traffic there was light, even with a school nearby, Garcia said. A witness who was driving behind the SUV said the sky was overcast but it was light out, so we know the darkness didnt play a factor in this, he said. On ExpressNews.com: Schools should rethink active shooter drills, teacher unions say Everybodys very sad and really in shock, said Kimberly Ridgley, the districts executive director of social and emotional learning. Parents of the girls classmates were invited to be in the classroom when counselors delivered the news to the kids, Ridgley said. At some point in the afternoon, counselors were to sit on the floor with them in a circle and tell them their their friend had died, and theyll stay available in the school library for several days while educators keep an eye on kids and teachers who might be grieving. What we know about grief is, you might not have known the student but your grandmother died, or your dog died, or your dads deployed, so grief comes in a lot of different forms. Especially young children will revert to the grief thats personal, Ridgley said. Kallison will need support for a long time because grief is grief, loss is loss. Investigators said there may have been two other witnesses walking in the area and are asking anyone with information to call 210-335-6070 or email bcsotips@bexar.org. Taylor.Pettaway@express-news.net; krista.torralva@express-news.net AUSTIN Texans are so worried about funding for education and low pay for teachers that 6 in 10 people said they are willing to support higher taxes to better fund local schools, a poll recently released by the advocacy group Raise Your Hand Texas shows. Teacher pay is too low, according to 70 percent of the respondents who participated in the inaugural statewide poll of Texans attitudes toward public education. About 62 percent prefer a political candidate who supporters higher school funding over a candidate who wants to reduce or hold funding steady. And perhaps surprisingly for this traditionally tax-averse state, 62 percent say they would support raising taxes to try to improve the public schools in their community although just 15 percent offer strong support, the report said. Texas Take: Get political headlines from across the state sent directly to your inbox About 48 percent of respondents said they somewhat support raising taxes, compared with 23 percent who somewhat oppose raising taxes and 15 percent who strongly oppose it. Texas lawmakers have been reluctant to raise taxes but will return to Austin for the 2021 legislative session likely having to consider how to continue covering the growing costs in education, health care and other services, along with a $13 billion influx of education money approved in 2020. The poll of the general public did not ask what kind of taxes Texans would be willing to pay, though schools in Texas are funded largely with property tax revenue. For subscribers: Texas teachers embrace $11.5B windfall for education. But will it last? The poll of 1,161 Texas adults conducted in late November and early December found respondents said a lack of money or financial support for public schools is the top issue facing their local public schools, followed by bullying and a lack of discipline and childrens behavior. The poll included an oversampling of K-12 school parents and has a 3.6-percentage point margin of error. The poll is modeled after the national PDK Poll of the Publics Attitudes Toward the Public Schools. The survey found 77 percent of Texans expressed trust and confidence in their teachers well above the 61 percent of people surveyed nationwide. In Texas, 70 percent of respondents said the salaries for teachers in their community are too low, compared with 66 percent nationally. Texas ranks 27th in the country for teacher pay, with the average teacher making $54,155 in the 2018-19 school year. The average salary nationally that year was $61,782, according to the National Education Association. andrea.zelinski@chron.com CLYDE Real Estate, the commercial property company set up by former 'Dragons' Den' investor Sean Gallagher and telecoms entrepreneur Colm Piercy, has secured 20m of debt from UK-based real estate asset manager PMM Group. The loan facility will be used to part finance Clyde's acquisition of mixed-use office and manufacturing sites in Dublin, Shannon, Dundalk and Carlow, a significant office and residential development site in Cork as well as residential sites in large urban and regional locations. Since it was set up in 2015, Clyde has been actively securing tenants and buying and selling commercial properties including acquisition of more than one million sq ft of office and industrial space. The group's current tenants include a mix of Irish businesses as well as global blue-chip firms such as Intel, Nokia and Citibank. After acquiring the 323,000 sq ft Alcatel-Lucent facility in the IDA Blanchardstown Business and Technology Park, which was part let to Alcatel-Lucent and Citibank, it subsequently sold the 160,000 sq ft of manufacturing section on eight of the acres to global data centre firm Equinix which has been granted planning permission for a large data centre campus on the site. CEO Mr Gallagher told the Irish Independent the firm retained the Clyde House part of this property with its 120,000 sq ft of office space as well as 60,000 sq ft of high quality storage/assembly space. In Carlow, Clyde has persuaded the county council to rezone Clyde's 30-acre former Braun factory facility in Carlow town. The group acquired this 225,000 sq ft production and storage facility when it was zoned industrial and last week the council rezoned it to accommodate general enterprise and employment. "This move should make it more attractive to potential occupiers for either production, life sciences or storage," Mr Gallagher said. "Existing facilities of this size are difficult to find now in Ireland and with prices on the rise in Dublin and space limited, companies are increasingly looking to locations such as Carlow as a potential home - given its close proximity to Dublin, the excellent road infrastructure, affordable resi accommodation and the local Institute of Technology. "Over the past five years our strategy has been to acquire and asset manage a number of significant properties both in suburban Dublin and Cork as well as in major regional locations. We have also been successful in divesting a number of key assets to a mix of international data centre companies and global investment funds." These include Equinix, Corum, Keppel Data Centre Reit, K2 Data Centres which is part of the Kuok Group in Singapore, and Fine Grain Property, whose backers include the Government's ISIF investment fund. Clyde's sales include Stratus House, a 31,215 sq ft office and data centre building on the IDA College Business and Technology Park in Blanchardstown, which it sold to Fine Grain Property, the Irish and Singaporean property fund. Clyde sold BCI, Ballycoolin, Dublin 15 to K2 Data Centres. Also in Ballycoolin it sold B10 to Keppel Data Centre Reit, a Singaporean Reit. In 2017 it sold on the Voxpro Campus One on about 6.8 acres at Mahon in Cork adjacent to the City Gate Centre, The purchaser, French investment fund Corum, said at the time that the whole transaction including all costs amounted to around 17.5m. But the actual price was not disclosed. Adding value to this deal was the fact that Clyde had previously secured Voxpro as the tenant for this 120,000 sq ft of prime office space. Prior to the sale Clyde retained a four-acre portion of the original 10.9-acre site for further commercial or residential development and is currently undertaking a design and feasibility study on its possible future use. In Shannon it acquired an 80,000 sq ft office facility across four floors with Intel as the anchor tenant having 66pc of the space along with Wipro. Clyde filled the remaining space by adding a new FDI tenant, Digital River. In the Finnabair IDA Park in Dundalk, its properties include the Science Services Centre - a 10,000 sq ft office facility which is fully let. In Finnabair it has also received planning permission to refurbish Rebus House, a 73,000 sq ft industrial unit which is vacant. Mr Gallagher says the PMM debt facility will support "our ongoing objective of acquiring and developing additional commercial and residential sites throughout the country". PMM has more than 750m (900m) of assets, across Ireland, the UK and Germany. PMM provides a range of real estate investment opportunities to global investors. Since its inception in 2017 the fund has loaned more than 120m across the UK and Ireland. "We are pleased to be able to support Clyde Real Estate, one of Ireland's leading real estate investors, as we continue to grow our portfolio of high-quality loans. This is our first transaction alongside Clyde and we are delighted to support both their current asset mix and overall strategy. We look forward to continuing to work with them," said Gareth Williams, head of real estate finance at PMM. A suspect in two shootings in Germany that killed at least eight people was found dead at home, police said on Thursday. "The likely perpetrator was found dead at his home in Hanau. The police special intervention forces have also discovered another body there. The investigation is ongoing. Currently there is no indication there are other perpetrators," police in the central state of Hesse said on Twitter. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The NSW curriculum review will aim to arrest an "unmatched" 20-year decline in Australian students' results in international tests by finding ways to stop students from falling behind year after year. "In the [early 2000s] students in NSW were performing among the highest in the world but over the period since the turn of the century there's been a significant decline," said Professor Geoff Masters, who is leading the review, which is the biggest shake-up in 30 years and is due to be finalised this year. Professor Geoff Masters speaking at the Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit on Thursday. Credit:Janie Barrett "That decline is almost unmatched in the rest of the world, it's very hard to find places that have seen such a steady decline over such a long period," Professor Masters told The Sydney Morning Herald Schools Summit on Thursday. "I believe that the reform of the curriculum is one of the factors that can arrest the decline and turn it around." A Hollywood sex therapist and former fiancee of comedian Drew Carey appears to have been strangled before she was thrown off the third-floor balcony of her Hollywood Hills apartment, the Los Angeles County coroner's office said Thursday. Amie Harwick, 38, died Saturday and her ex-boyfriend Garth Pursehouse was charged with murder and first-degree residential burglary with the special circumstance allegation of lying in wait, making him eligible for the death penalty, prosecutors said. Pursehouse's arraignment has been postponed to March 4. The public defender's office, which is representing the 41-year-old, did not immediately return a request for comment. The coroner's office ruled Harwick's death a homicide on Monday and attributed the cause to blunt force injuries, according to its website. Amie Harwick, 38, died Saturday and her ex-boyfriend Garth Pursehouse was charged with murder and first-degree residential burglary with the special allegation of lying in wait The coroner's office ruled Harwick's death a homicide on Monday and attributed the cause to blunt force injuries, according to its website Harwick's autopsy showed evidence of 'manual strangulation,' coroner's spokeswoman Sarah Ardalani said Thursday in an email, noting that the fatal fall from the balcony occurred after an 'altercation.' Officers found evidence of a struggle and a forced entry to the home, police said. Detectives learned Harwick had recently expressed fear about an ex-boyfriend and had previously filed a restraining order against him, according to a police statement. The restraining order had expired. Harwick's website described her as a marriage and sex therapist. She appeared on TV and radio and wrote a book called 'The New Sex Bible for Women.' Carey dated Harwick for two years before the pair split in 2018, months after announcing their engagement. 'I hope youre lucky enough to have someone in your life that loves as much as she did,' Carey said on Twitter. CBS canceled the 'Price is Right' game show for the week while he mourns. Pursehouse was initially arrested Saturday and posted $2 million bond. He was re-arrested Wednesday on a no bail warrant. The special circumstance allegation of lying in wait means that he is eligible for a death penalty sentence in California if he is convicted. Harwick was formerly engaged to the Price is Right host Drew Carey but they split in November 2018 after dating for more than a year Cops were called to Harwick's Hollywood Hills home in the early hours of Saturday morning after reports of a 'woman screaming'. She was suffering grave injuries and died in hospital from blunt force injuries to the head and torso. Authorities said she was attacked and Pursehouse was subsequently arrested in connection to her death. He was freed on bond Tuesday but re-arrested Wednesday. Pursehouse appeared in court on Thursday. The arrest comes after it emerged that Harwick allegedly suffered a catalog of abuse at the hands of her ex-boyfriend, who became obsessed with her after she dated him a decade ago. Harwick, who was a well-known sex therapist and former Playboy model, issued restraining orders against the photographer in 2011 and 2012 detailing a series of physical attacks. Amie Harwick, 38, died Saturday and the LA coroner says she was manually strangled in an altercation and then thrown from a third-floor balcony Ex-boyfriend Garth Pursehouse was charged with murder and first-degree residential burglary with the special circumstance allegation of lying in wait Harwick was found unconscious after falling from a third-floor balcony in her home, pictured Court documents reviewed by DailyMail.com detail how he once pushed her out of a car on the freeway, and in another incident forced her onto the ground and viciously kicked her in the face. Harwick accused Pursehouse suffocated her in May 2011, saying he punched her, slammed her head onto the ground and covered her mouth to keep her from yelling after they got into a fight. He then kicked her leaving her covered in bruises and unable to walk. 'There were multiple arguments in which Gareth Pursehouse choked me, suffocated me, pushed me against walls, kicked me, dropped me to the ground with force, force-restrained me, slammed my head into the ground and punched me with a closed fist,' she wrote in court paperwork dated June 22, 2011. On June 18, 2011 Pursehouse is said to have pushed her out of a car and left her on the freeway late at night. Harwick obtained a temporary restraining order against Pursehouse in 2011 and was granted another one less than a year later, which expired in April 2015. In California the maximum length of a restraining order is five years. Harwick had seen Pursehouse in January this year at the XBiz adult-industry awards ceremony in downtown Los Angeles where he was working as a photographer. She was a guest at the show, hosted by porn star Stormy Daniels, and was pictured posing on the red carpet. Harwick and Pursehouse saw each other at the XBiz Awards on January 16, which was said to reignite his obsession with her Pursehouse pictured circled in red at the XBiz Awards, was working as a photographer and allegedly harassed Harwick. The porn star Stormy Daniels, pictured in the silver dress, hosted the event A friend told the Los Angeles Times that seeing her seemed to 'reignite his obsessive preoccupation with her'. Harwick was the author of the book The New Sex Bible for Women. She was formerly engaged to the Price is Right host Drew Carey but they split in November 2018 after dating for more than a year. She received her degree in psychology from California Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. Harwick also earned her masters of arts in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University. In 2015, Harwick appeared in the popular online documentary titled Addicted to Sexting. She offered weekly therapy sessions at $200 per session, according to her site. South Africa: New university to advance tech innovation in SA Higher Education, Science and Technology Minister, Blade Nzimande, has welcomed President Cyril Ramaphosas announcement on the establishment of a new University of Science and Innovation. During his State of the Nation Address (SONA) on 13 February, President Ramaphosa announced that a new University of Science and Innovation will be established in the City of Ekurhuleni, a major economic hub and seat of a growing aerotropolis, which provides vital services to the economy of the entire continent. Nzimande said the university will be closely linked to driving high impact and cutting edge technological innovation with current and future industries, sectors and firms to drive the frontiers of a future economy. In a statement, Nzimande said Ekurhuleni is the only metro without a university, and government wants to address this through the new institution, which will have to develop a dynamic relationship with the industrial and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) heartland of the country. We believe that this location -- together with fresh new challenges arising from the revolution in science and technology in the third decade of the 21st century -- offers an opportunity for a new initiative to provide cutting-edge science and technology innovations across crucial areas such as data science, machine-learning, artificial intelligence, block chain, robotics, hydrogen-powered technologies, including smart transportation and logistics systems, Nzimande said. In leading this project, Nzimande will work with relevant government and industry partners, the City of Ekurhuleni and the Gauteng Provincial Government, while drawing on South Africas extensive international network in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries, Japan, Europe and elsewhere for innovative partnerships. The Minister is expected to provide details on the establishment of the new university during the departmental budget vote later this year. Student accommodation Turning to the issue of student accommodation, Nzimande said it is critical for adequate provision to be made. Through the Student Housing Infrastructure Programme (SHIP), we aim to develop large-scale student housing projects at universities and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) colleges. Governments goal is to provide 300 000 new beds at the 26 public universities and 50 public TVET colleges over 10 years, the Minister said. President Ramaphosa had announced during SONA that a further R64 billion will be set aside for student accommodation, with the prospects of leveraging the same amount from the private sector over the next decade. Nzimande on Thursday said the department is currently developing large projects comprising 7 273 new beds at various universities, where there is gross shortage of student accommodation. For the two new universities of Sol Plaatje and Mpumalanga, 2 331 beds have been funded from the New Universities Infrastructure Grant to the tune of R772.950 million. We have made strides by commencing the building of nine new TVET college campus sites, scheduled for completion in 2020. Construction will commence with a new campus site for Mitchells Plain in 2020, Nzimande said. Contracts will be awarded for a further four new campus sites in 2019/20. The sites include Balfour, Giyani, Nkandla B and Vryheid. SAnews.gov.za This story has been published on: 2020-02-20. To contact the author, please use the contact details within the article. A Wytheville native is breaking barriers in the Army. Abby Blount is one of only a few female Apache helicopter pilots and is one of only 92 women to graduate from the Armys grueling Ranger School. She is the only female pilot in all branches of the military with a Ranger tab. The mystery shrouding the identity of Gumnami Baba, who many claimed was Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose in hiding, has deepened further with CFSL, Kolkata, saying the electropherogram of the reclusive sadhu's teeth was not available with it. An electropherogram shows a sequence of data that is produced by an automated DNA sequencing machine and is used for deriving results from genealogical DNA testing. Replying to an RTI query by Sayak Sen, a Netaji enthusiast, B P Mishra, the chief public information officer of CFSL said, "The electropherogram report of this case is not available at CFSL Kolkata." In the reply dated February 4, 2020, he said,"The appeal, if any, may be made before director, appellate authority, CFSL-Kolkata in this regard within 30 days from the date of receipt of this letter."The Vishnu Sahai Commission looking into the mysterious death of Netaji had cited a report of the Central Forensic Science Laboratory (CSFL), Kolkata, to claim that Gumnami Baba was not Bose. "The disclosure by CFSL has a direct bearing on the finding of Justice Vishnu Sahai Commission that Gumnami Baba was not Netaji. Justice Sahai in his just-released report used the CFSL report to the hilt to reject outright the view that Baba was Netaji," Sen said in a statement, annexing the reply to his RTI query. Sen claimed Justice Sahai merely cited Justice Mukhejee Commission's 2005 report in his own report, rather than order a fresh test as demanded by many. "In view of accusations of foul play, I wanted to consult independent DNA experts to verify the test by the CFSL, and hence I filed this RTI application," said Sen. CFSL, Kolkata had performed DNA test on three teeth of Gumnami Baba, who lived in Faizabad town of Uttar Pradesh and died on September 16, 1985. Two teeth were tested in CFSL, Hyderabad, and the result was inconclusive, while that of CFSL, Kolkata, said the DNA sample did not match Netaji's. "We have been saying that the DNA report relied upon by the Mukherjee Commission was fudged. The DNA report submitted to the commission did not have electropherogram, a must to analyse the DNA. Now the truth has been proved," Sen said. Netaji's grandnephew and BJP leader Chandra Kumar Bose rubbished the allegation. "The RTI reply is saying that electropherogram report of this case is not available at CFSL, Kolkata. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. It is a baseless allegation," Bose said. The report of the one-member Vishnu Sahai Commission was tabled in the Uttar Pradesh assembly in December last year and it said Gumnami Baba was not Subhas Chandra Bose in disguise. Bose was said to have died in a plane crash on August 18, 1945 in Taiwan. However, a section of people believes he survived the crash and went into hiding to escape the British. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) . , The Hill, , ... A new to science species of land snail was discovered by a group of citizen scientists working together with scientists from Taxon Expeditions, a company that organises scientific field trips for teams consisting of both scientists and laypeople. Having conducted a vote on how to name the species, the expedition participants and the local staff of the National Park together decided to name the mollusc Craspedotropis gretathunbergae. The species name honours the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg for her efforts to raise awareness about climate change. The study is published in the open access journal Biodiversity Data Journal. "The newly described snail belongs to the so-called caenogastropods, a group of land snails known to be sensitive to drought, temperature extremes and forest degradation", says snail expert and co-founder of Taxon Expeditions, Dr. Menno Schilthuizen. All individuals were found very close to the research field station (Kuala Belalong Field Studies Centre) at the foot of a steep hill-slope, next to a river bank, while foraging at night on the green leaves of understorey plants. Citizen scientist J.P. Lim, who found the first individual of Greta Thunberg's snail says: "Naming this snail after Greta Thunberg is our way of acknowledging that her generation will be responsible for fixing problems that they did not create. And it's a promise that people from all generations will join her to help". The expedition team approached Ms. Thunberg who said that she would be "delighted" to have this species named after her. However, this is not the first time that Taxon Expeditions team names a species in honour of an environmental advocate. In 2018, they named a new species of beetle after famous actor and climate activist Leonardo DiCaprio. Mr. DiCaprio temporarily changed his profile photo on Facebook to the photo of "his" beetle to acknowledge this honour. ### Original source: Schilthuizen M, Lim JP, van Peursen ADP, Alfano M, Jenging AB, Cicuzza D, Escoubas A, Escoubas P, Grafe U, Ja J, Koomen P, Krotoski A, Lavezzari D, Lim L, Maarschall R, Slik F, Steele D, Ting Teck Wah D, van Zeeland I, Njunji? I (2020) Craspedotropis gretathunbergae, a new species of Cyclophoridae (Gastropoda: Caenogastropoda), discovered and described on a field course to Kuala Belalong rainforest, Brunei. Biodiversity Data Journal 8: e47484. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.8.e47484 Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzgg5KqDArY&list=PLX3yqTYoVOgqvaCtNfE5YBKtJKyOnRQJB&index=3 About Taxon Expeditions: Founded in 2017 and based in Leiden, The Netherlands, Taxon Expeditions is an organisation which focuses on education and biodiversity discovery. It organises expeditions to remote areas for people interested in nature and science and help them make scientific discoveries. International experts are engaged to guide them through all steps of real scientific research. Together, they discover, name, and publish completely new species of wild animals. With only 20% of the world's species estimated to be currently known despite the last 250 years spent in research conducted by professionals, the mission of Taxon Expeditions is to harness the power of citizen science for biodiversity discovery and its conservation. Contact: Menno Schilthuizen (co-funder of Taxon Expeditions and the first author of the paper) Email: info@taxonexpeditions.com Tel. +31-6-220-303-13 Iva Njunjic (director of Taxon Expeditions) Email: info@taxonexpeditions.com Tel. +31-6477-00-593 Jonathan Pat Lim (citizen scientists who joined the Expedition and found the new snail) Email: jonplim@gmail.com Invest in the USA Seminar to promote June 2020 Vietnam delegation to Washington, D.C The seminar is part of the US Mission to Vietnams ongoing recruitment for the June 2020 SelectUSA Investment Summit in Washington, DC. The third annual Invest in the USA seminar described the benefits of investing in the US, home to the largest consumer market in the world with a GDP of $20 trillion. The seminar provided Vietnamese companies with practical guidance on Vietnamese requirements for outbound foreign direct investment (FDI), US legal and regulatory considerations for inbound FDI, US tax considerations for Vietnamese Permanent Establishments, visa instructions for non-resident investors, and US federal and state government resources available to assist the investors in their search. In addition, the Consulate also discussed the valuable online tools that Vietnamese companies can utilise to research the worlds largest consumer market to maximise their companys expansion to the US. The seminar on investment in the US attracted the participation of more than 100 Vietnamese companies During her keynote remarks, Consul General Marie Damour stated, Ambassador Kritenbrink and I continue to make it one of our top priorities to promote a commercial relationship with Vietnam that is developed on the foundation of free, fair, and reciprocal trade and contributes to the prosperity of both of our countries. "I often speak about the benefits of purchasing US manufactured products, but there is another aspect of the US-Vietnam commercial relationship that has only recently begun to develop Vietnamese investment in the US, she continued. The US Mission to Vietnam will lead a delegation of local companies to Washington, DC to attend the SelectUSA Summit on June 1-3, 2020. The Summit is an unparalleled opportunity to bring together investors from all over the world, economic development organisations from every corner of the US, and senior government officials to facilitate investment in the US. In 2019, the US Department of Commerce in Vietnam recruited a 35-member investor delegation to attend the summit, the largest from the ASEAN region. The spread of the new coronavirus has prompted some Japanese companies to alter their work schedules, or even tell staff to stay home. Telecom giant NTT has told its group employees to telework or revise their office hours. The move affects about 200,000 staff. More than 40 percent of employees at one group firm worked from home on Wednesday. Some employees at NTT Communications Tokyo headquarters held a sales meeting through video conference with staff at home. In a further effort to prevent infections, the company's cafeteria has stopped offering buffet-style meals. Elsewhere, online flea-market operator Mercari has ordered all employees at its Tokyo headquarters to telework. Staff are holding online meetings with colleagues and customers. The change applies to job interviews, too. Mercari says the new rules will be in place from Wednesday until at least February 28. Meanwhile at Sony and Fujitsu, employees are also encouraged to work remotely. Staff who must attend the office are being told to avoid commuting during rush hours. Some students and alumni have pushed back after first lady Melania Trump was awarded the 2020 Woman of Distinction award from Palm Beach Atlantic University, highlighting a divide at the Christian school just a short drive from Donald Trumps Mar-a-Lago resort. The first lady, who recently changed her formal address to that Florida resort in West Palm Beach, said that she was grateful to accept the award, which the schools website said is given to those who cherish community and family and want to preserve these ideals for others. As the first lady of the United States, it is a great honor to serve the people of this incredible country, Ms Trump said at the schools annual Women of Distinction luncheon, where she also discussed her Be Best campaign that purports to take on cyberbullying and opioid abuse among the nations children. When we teach our children to cherish our values and care for each other, they are better prepared to carry on Americans legacy of compassion, service and patriotism, she said. It is our duty as adults and parents to give children the best opportunities in life. Proceeds from that luncheon will go toward scholarships for female students. The university said in an announcement that it chose the first lady the first since starting the program in 1991 as an emphasis on encouraging the potential of each person aligns with Mrs Trumps platform as First Lady. Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia Show all 5 1 /5 Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia A wooden statue of Melania Trump has been erected in the first ladys home country of Slovenia REUTERS Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia The conceptual statue depicts Ms Trump standing in the blue outfit she wore to her husbands inauguration REUTERS Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia The monument is set in the fields near the town of Sevnica REUTERS Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia Locals have complained that the wooden sculpture does not look like Ms Trump at all AFP/Getty Images Melania Trump wooden statue prompts complaints in Slovenia The statue was commissioned by US artist Brade Downey and created by artist Ales Zupevc AFP/Getty Images But students and some alumni have pushed back. This award has historically gone to women whose character and impact in Palm Beach has shaped the culture of our home, and I have not been convinced that the first lady's character or impact here is worthy of that recognition, Graysen Boehning, a senior at the school, told The Hill. While many students were excited that the school was bringing in the first lady of the United States to speak, others felt that her character was not representative of the community of love for people of all backgrounds and beliefs that PBA houses and fosters, he said. Tyler Whitehead, the president of the schools College Democrats, said in a statement that the organisation was displeased and confused. The vast majority of students and faculty that I have spoken to about the decision were disappointed by what seems to be a politically-motivated move on the university's part, he said. Bill Fleming, the president of the university, told the Palm Beach Post meanwhile that he had enthusiastically accepted the boards recommendation, and that it was the honorable thing to do. SANTIAGO, Chile, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- COLBUN, S.A., a publicly traded stock corporation (sociedad anonima abierta) organized under the laws of the Republic of Chile (the " Company ") announced today that it has commenced a cash tender offer (the " Tender Offer ") for any and all of its outstanding 4.500% Notes due 2024 (the " Securities ") listed below. The Tender Offer is being made pursuant to an offer to purchase dated February 20, 2020 (the " Offer to Purchase ") and the related notice of guaranteed delivery (the " Notice of Guaranteed Delivery " and, together with the Offer to Purchase, the " Offer Documents "), which set forth the terms of the Tender Offer. The following table sets forth certain information relating to the Tender Offer: Title of Security CUSIP No. and ISINs Principal Amount Outstanding Purchase Price (per U.S.$1,000 principal amount) 4.500% Notes due 2024 144A ISIN: US192714AB90 144A CUSIP: 192714AB9 Reg S ISIN: USP2867KAE66 Reg S CUSIP: P2867KAE6 U.S.$500,000,000 U.S.$ 1,087.50 Following consummation of the Tender Offer, the Securities that are accepted for purchase will be retired and cancelled. Holders of Securities that are validly tendered prior to or at 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on February 26, 2020 or, in each case, any other date and time to which the Company extends the Tender Offer (such date and time, as it may be extended, the " Expiration Date ") and that are accepted for purchase will receive the Purchase Price plus accrued and unpaid interest on such Securities validly tendered and accepted for purchase from the last interest payment date up to, but not including, the settlement date. Holders will be permitted to withdraw tendered Securities at any time prior to the earlier of (i) the Expiration Date, and (ii) if the Tender Offer is extended, the 10th business day after the commencement of the Tender Offer, by following the procedures described in the Offer to Purchase. Securities subject to the Tender Offer may also be validly withdrawn by following the procedures described in the Offer to Purchase if, for any reason, the Tender Offer has not been consummated within 60 business days after commencement, but not thereafter. Holders who validly tender their Securities pursuant to the guaranteed delivery procedures described in the Offer Documents must deliver their Securities no later than 5:00 p.m., New York City time, on February 28, 2020, the second business day following the Expiration Time. Completion of the Tender Offer is conditioned on the satisfaction or waiver of certain conditions described in the Offer to Purchase. The Company has the right, in its sole discretion, to amend or terminate the Tender Offer at any time, subject to applicable law. BofA Securities, Inc., J.P. Morgan Securities LLC and Scotia Capital (USA) Inc. are acting as dealer managers for the Tender Offer (the " Dealer Managers "). Global Bondholder Services Corporation has been appointed as the tender agent and information agent for the Tender Offers (the " Tender and Information Agent "). For additional information regarding the terms of the Tender Offer, please contact BofA Securities, Inc., Attn: Liability Management Group, One Bryant Park, New York, NY 10036, (888) 292-0070 (toll-free), (646) 855-8998 (collect), J.P. Morgan Securities LLC, Attn: Latin American Debt Capital Markets, (866) 846-2874 (toll-free), (212) 834-7279 (collect), or Scotia Capital (USA) Inc. Attn: Debt Capital Markets, (800) 372-3930 (toll-free), (212) 225-5559 (collect). Requests for a copy of the Offer Documents can also be obtained from Global Bondholder Services Corporation at (866) 470-3700 (toll-free) and (212) 430-3774 (collect) or at https://gbsc-usa.com/Colbun. All deliveries and correspondence sent to the Tender and Information Agent should be directed to Global Bondholder Services Corporation, 65 Broadway Suite 404, New York, New York 10006, Attn: Corporate Actions. Neither the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, any U.S. state securities commission nor any regulatory authority of any other country has approved or disapproved of the Tender Offer, passed upon the merits or fairness of the Tender Offer or passed upon the adequacy or accuracy of the disclosure in the Offer Documents. This press release shall not constitute an offer to purchase or a solicitation of acceptance of the offer to purchase, which is being made only pursuant to the terms and conditions contained in the Offer Documents. The Tender Offer is not being made to, nor will the Company accept tenders of Securities from, Holders in any jurisdiction in which the Tender Offer or the acceptance thereof would not be in compliance with the securities or blue sky laws of such jurisdiction. Forward-Looking Statements Statements in this press release may be "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the U.S. Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Other than statements of historical fact, information regarding activities, events and developments that we expect or anticipate will or may occur in the future, including, but not limited to, information relating to our future growth and profitability targets and strategies designed to increase total bondholder value, are forward-looking statements based on management's estimates, assumptions and projections. Forward-looking statements also include, but are not limited to, statements regarding our future economic and financial condition and results of operations, the plans and objectives of management and our assumptions regarding our performance and such plans and objectives. Many forward-looking statements may be identified by the use of words such as "intend," "believe," "expect," "anticipate," "should," "planned," "projected," "estimated" and "potential," among others. Forward-looking statements contained in this press release are predictions only and actual results could differ materially from management's expectations due to a variety of factors, including those described in the section titled "Risk Factors" in the Offer to Purchase. All forward-looking statements attributable to us or persons working on our behalf are expressly qualified in their entirety by such risk factors. The forward-looking statements that we make in this press release are based on management's current views and assumptions regarding future events and speak only as of their dates. We assume no obligation to update developments of these risk factors or to announce publicly any revisions to any of the forward-looking statements that we make, or to make corrections to reflect future events or developments, except as required by the federal securities laws. DISCLAIMER This press release must be read in conjunction with the Offer Documents. This announcement and the Offer Documents contain important information which must be read carefully before any decision is made with respect to the Tender Offer. Holders should seek their own legal, tax, accounting and financial advice, including as to any tax consequences, from their stockbroker, bank manager, attorney, accountant or other independent financial or legal adviser. Any individual or company whose Securities are held on its behalf by a broker, dealer, bank, custodian, trust company or other nominee or intermediary must contact such entity if it wishes to participate in the Tender Offer. None of the Company, the Dealer Managers, the Tender and Information Agent and any person who controls, or is a director, officer, employee or agent of such persons, or any affiliate of such persons, makes any recommendation as to whether holders of Securities should participate in the Tender Offer. SOURCE Colbun, S.A. Villagers take advantage of lower water levels in the Mekong River to search for gold nuggets in northern Thailands Chiang Khong district, Feb. 14, 2020. Tiem Ngern-tok pointed at the water level, shook his head and talked about dragon boat races to explain how dams in China and Laos have disrupted the lives of Thai people whose villages abut the Mekong River. During annual boat races the water was high, said Tiem, a government hydrologist at a water-measuring station in Ban Sob Kok, a village in Thailands northernmost Chiang Rai province. A colleague interrupted him: Three meters high. With water levels usually reaching about 10 feet in April, Tiem said this years numbers were exceptionally low. In previous years, the levels were a bit over 1-meter high, but that was during the driest time in April, not this soon, he told BenarNews. In March and April, it will get worse. The Mekong is the worlds 12th-longest river, stretching 4,350 km (2,703 miles) through six nations before draining into the South China Sea. More than 60 million people depend on the Mekong and its tributaries for food, transport and water. Experts say it hosts 474 species of fish the worlds most biodiverse after Brazils Amazon River. Thai farmers said their troubles on the river began when the turbines of the Xayaburi Dam started churning upstream from Nong Khai in Laos seven months ago, further disrupting the river flow that was already drying out even at the end of the rainy season. Lately there is no water. Its very dry, Mr. Chai, a fisherman in Chiang Saen who declined to provide his first name, told BenarNews. There are impacts from the dams. We can see the sandy river bed. Last month, the Mekong River Commission (MRC), an inter-governmental agency that works with regional governments to manage the rivers resources, warned that water outflows could potentially drop as Beijing said it was testing equipment at one of its 11 dams on the upper Mekong. Laos has built dozens of hydropower dams on the Mekong and its tributaries in its quest to become the battery of Southeast Asia, exporting the electricity they generate to other countries in the region. Vientiane is preparing to build scores more dams in the years ahead while aiming to sell 95 percent of the Xayaburi Dams generated power to Thailand. NGO: Villagers report unprecedented bluish water But environmentalists say that dams threaten fish populations, alter the Mekongs natural hydrology and cause major soil erosion. Last week, members of the Network of Thai People in Eight Mekong Provinces submitted additional evidence to the Thai Supreme Administrative court, describing damage to fisheries and dramatic changes to the Mekongs ecosystem, while also challenging the legitimacy of a power-purchase agreement between Laos and Thailand. During this period, downstream of the dam, stretches of the Mekong in seven Thai provinces experienced sharp and unusual water fluctuations, and clear blue water a phenomenon that signals an absence of the nutrients and sediment that are critical to aquatic lives and fisheries, the International Rivers NGO said in a press statement about the submission. Thailand last year said it would develop its own solar energy section, while officials said they were also reconsidering the governments decision to purchase large amounts of hydropower from Laos. Niwat Roykaew, co-founder of the Chiang Khong Conservation Group, based in Chiang Rai, and the Thai Peoples Mekong Network in Eight Provinces said the unprecedented bluish water underscored the fluctuations in water levels. These indicate troubles along all stretches of the river; impacts on fish migration, river bank erosion, impacts on flora in the Mekong, Niwat told BenarNews. The fluctuation endangers some trees, especially the water croton which is important to the Mekong, he said, referring to a shrub that helps prevent soil erosion during spawning season. Xayaburis impact, according to the dams critics, has been observed in parts of Thailands Loei province, as well as in Nong Khai, Bueng Kan, Nakhon Phanom, Mukdahan, Amnat Charoen and Ubon Ratchathani provinces. Niwat said Bangkok hadnt done enough to push for solutions. The Thai government should leverage discussions about dams water control management, how to, how much to, in accordance with seasons to keep the ecology functions, not to be severely affected like in the present, he said. But the government isnt enthusiastic to do so. Early this month, Bangkok responded to the environmental protests by rejecting Beijings plan to open up a stretch of the Mekong River in northern Thailand by blasting about 60 miles of rocks and dredging the riverbed. Chinas plan was aimed at creating a river link that would open up trade from its Yunnan province using massive cargo ships that would go through the five other Mekong countries Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. But according to International Rivers, Beijing has already built seven megadams and 20 more are under construction or being planned in Yunnan, Tibet and in Chinas landlocked northwestern province of Qinghai. The scheme will drastically change the rivers natural flood-drought cycle and block the transport of sediment, affecting ecosystems and the livelihoods of millions living downstream in Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam, the NGO said in a statement posted on its website. Impacts to water levels and fisheries have already been recorded along the Thai-Lao border, it said. A study released by the Mekong River Commission in August 2018 showed that fish stocks in the river could fall by up to 40 percent, with a 97-percent reduction in the amount of sediment going downstream as a result of the dam projects. Last month, Thai water-resources chief Somkiat Prajamwong told BenarNews that he had documented complaints from villagers who had suffered economic hardship as a result of the rivers erratic flow, which had lowered soil fertility and hampered yield in agriculture. Somkiat said he would raise the countrys concerns with the river commission. We compiled from and studied those concerns of the people along the Mekong River, he said. Also in January, the Thai Ministry of Foreign Ministry responded to concerns raised about the drought and greatly reduced water levels on the Mekong and reservoirs in the region, saying this was caused by intermittent rainfall and climate change. The prime minister had instructed Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai to visit China on Jan. 23 to discuss ways and means to alleviate the drought situation and mitigate its impact, the ministry said. That day Pramudwinai met with Wang Yi, Chinas state councilor and foreign minister, the ministry said in a statement. Both sides agreed that the severity of the drought situation caused by global warming has been affecting every riparian country, including China. The Thai Foreign Minister sought cooperation from the Chinese Government in alleviating this problem and mitigating the impact faced by the people in the downstream countries, the ministry said. Pra Apichart Ratigo, the abbot at the Sob Kok Temple in Chiang Saen district, said the water level in the Mekong at various times during the past five years had abruptly risen or receded like someone turned a faucet on and off. So Ive noticed that the abrupt tidal changes were due to water-release control, he told BenarNews, as he called on Thai authorities to provide villagers with advance notice to water-level changes, so that people can prepare. Sometimes we would hear the news that China had released more water, but the news came late and the water came already, he said. Somdej Thanatulyakul, a fisherman in Ban Sob Kok village in Chiang Saen, a district of Chiang Rai, said the fluctuating water-level led to unpredictable fishing harvest. We caught more fish five years ago, even during dry season, he told BenarNews. The water tides are unpredictable. They change so fast, fluctuating in rapid manner. Dams have such impacts. Passengers walk out from the cruise ship Diamond Princess at Daikoku Pier Cruise Terminal in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, Japan on Feb. 19, 2020. (Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters) Canadians Onboard Cruise Ship to Head Home Today Healthy Canadians from the Diamond Princess cruise ship will shortly be heading home, according to Canadas foreign affairs minister, after weeks under quarantine for the novel coronavirus, or COVID19. The ship, docked in Yokohama, Japan, has seen the largest outbreak of the virus outside China, with 634 passengers having tested positive at last count. Among the infected are 47 Canadians who will have to remain in Japan for treatment. Passengers look out from the cruise ship Diamond Princess, docked in Yokohama, south of Tokyo, Japan on Feb. 19, 2020. (Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters) Foreign Affairs Minister FrancoisPhilippe Champagne said on Feb. 19 that passengers would be screened Thursday evening, Japan timemidday in North America. The passengers will each be issued a face mask and colored wrist band before they are ushered off the ship to the Haneda Airport, according to a letter from government officials to the evacuees on board the ship. Those who are cleared to travel will be taken to Canadian Forces Base Trenton for further screening before they are placed under another twoweek quarantine at the Nav Centre in Cornwall, Ont. The plane is set to take off from at 3:30 a.m. Japan time and land at CFB Trenton at 1:30 a.m. Eastern time, about 14 hours later. Swab samples at Glasgow Royal Infirmary in Glasgow, Scotland on Feb. 19, 2020. (Jane Barlow WPA Pool/Getty Images) Health Minister Patty Hajdu said there was a chance that those who tested negative for the virus and show no signs of symptoms may be released from quarantine early under the discretion of Canadas top publichealth doctor. The evacuation comes just after Japanese officials broke the news that two passengers from the ship died after contracting the virus. The two fatalities, a man and woman in their 80s who are both Japanese, were believed to have been infected before the quarantine began on the ship, Japanese health ministry official Masami Sakoi said Thursday. Chinese passengers disembarking from the Diamond Princess cruise ship are led by the staff to take a special bus to Haneda International Airport, at the port of Yokohama in Japan, Feb. 19, 2020. The first chartered flight arranged by China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday morning, bringing 106 Hong Kong residents stranded on the novel coronavirus-inflicted Diamond Princess cruise ship back from Japan. (Xinhua) HONG KONG, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- The first chartered flight arranged by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday morning, bringing 106 Hong Kong residents stranded on the novel coronavirus-inflicted Diamond Princess cruise ship back from Japan. The chartered flight landed at the Hong Kong International Airport at around 8:30 a.m. local time. The passengers were taken directly from the airport to a quarantine center in the New Territories by specially-arranged buses to undergo a 14-day quarantine. Another batch of Hong Kong residents are expected to return to Hong Kong on Thursday afternoon on a second chartered flight. Diamond Princess, initially carrying around 3,700 passengers and crew from more than 50 countries and regions, has been quarantined at the Yokohama Port south of Tokyo since Feb. 5 after a passenger who disembarked in Hong Kong on Jan. 25 tested positive for novel coronavirus. Chinese passengers from Diamond Princess cruise ship receive their air tickets at Haneda International Airport in Tokyo, Japan, Feb. 20, 2020. The first chartered flight arranged by China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday morning, bringing 106 Hong Kong residents stranded on the novel coronavirus-inflicted Diamond Princess cruise ship back from Japan. (Xinhua/Du Xiaoyi) According to the Japanese government, 621 people have been confirmed for novel coronavirus infection on the vessel as of Wednesday. Secretary for Security of the HKSAR government John Lee said more than 200 of the altogether 364 Hong Kong residents on board the quarantined ship have expressed willingness to return to Hong Kong by the free chartered flights. Patients of 55 confirmed cases of novel coronavirus infection, their 33 close contacts, and those failing to pass the virus test, have to remain in Japan for treatment or further quarantine, Lee said. The HKSAR government announced earlier this week to arrange at least two chartered flights to bring back the Hong Kong residents on the ship. Two batches of HKSAR government officers have been sent to Japan to join the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in Tokyo and the Chinese Embassy in Japan for the operation. Lee said that the operation has received support from the Office of the Commissioner of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in the HKSAR, the Chinese Embassy in Japan, relevant departments of the HKSAR government and Cathay Pacific. Buses are seen waiting to transfer passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship to the Haneda International Airport, at the port of Yokohama in Japan, Feb. 19, 2020. The first chartered flight arranged by China's Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government arrived in Hong Kong on Thursday morning, bringing 106 Hong Kong residents stranded on the novel coronavirus-inflicted Diamond Princess cruise ship back from Japan. (Xinhua) Director of Immigration of the HKSAR government Erick Tsang, who led an advance team of the HKSAR government officers to Japan on Monday to prepare for the operation, said that thanks to the assistance by the Chinese Embassy in Japan the Hong Kong residents were taken to Tokyo's Haneda Airport by buses at a time when it was difficult to rent buses in Tokyo. Kerala MP backs Sandeep Dikshi, says CWC polls will re-energise Congress. New Delhi: After the partys pathetic performance in the Delhi elections, tremors are being felt within the Congress with several leaders raising questions and demanding a complete overhaul of the leadership. Senior Congress leader and Kerala MP Shashi Tharoor on Thursday urged the Congress Working Committee to hold leadership elections to energise workers and inspire voters. Dr Tharoors appeal came in support of his party colleague and former MP Sandeep Dikshits remarks that the biggest challenge the party faces was the leadership question. Joining hands with Mr Dikshit, Dr Tharoor tweeted: What Sandeep Dikshit said openly is what dozens of party leaders from across the country are saying privately, including many with responsible positions in the party. He further added: Some have asked who should vote and for what. I was referring to my earlier call eight months ago for elections among the 10,000 party workers who constitute the AICC plus PCC delegates list. These should be for the elected seats in the CWC as well as for the party presidency. The utterances of Mr Dikshit did not go down well with some leaders. Reacting sharply, party communications chief Randeep Surjewala said: If (what) Sandeep is putting on Twitter, if he puts even a fraction in his work, he will transform Delhi. Instead of giving gyaan (lecture), concentrate on doing good work. The outburst by senior leaders comes amid the buzz that Rahul Gandhi will once again become Congress president. Several other senior leaders like Manish Tewari and Jairam Ramesh have also mooted various reforms in the party. But as uncertainity over the leadership prevails, several leaders suggested that Mrs Sonia Gandhi continues as the party chief. However, Gandhi loyalist Sanjay Nirupam attacked Mr Tharoor, and said that only Rahul Gandhi can save the party, and that everything else was inane discussion. He added: No one from outside the (Gandhi) family can lead the Congress at this juncture, he tweeted. Other leaders are just group leaders and such leaders at the helm will encourage more groupism. Period! Mr Nirupam had been sulking during the Maharashtra Assembly elections in October last year as his supporters did not get party tickets. Also, he refused to campaign for the party during the polls. After the debacle in the Delhi elections, it is open season in the party. Former Delhi in-charge P.C Chacko had blamed late chief minister Sheila Dikshit for the fall in the partys voteshare, reacting to which Milind Deora had said it was unfortunate to see her being blamed after her death. There is now a wide chasm in the party between those who want Rahul Gandhi to return as party chief and those want the status quo to continue. As the party is not doing well in elections, the gulf is likely to widen in the days to come. Earlier, the plane with the Ukrainians from Wuhan landed in the Boryspil Airport for refueling Open source The plane with the citizens of Ukraine and foreigners evacuated from China landed in Kharkiv, as 112 Ukraine reported. The plane, which evacuated people from Wuhan, headed to Kyiv but changed the destination and went to Kharkiv. The aircraft was circling over the city for about an hour but did not land in the Kharkiv airport. Possibly, due to the heavy fog. Later the plane with the Ukrainians from Wuhan landed in the Boryspil Airport for refueling. The Interior Ministry of Ukraine confirmed that the Ukrainians evacuated from Chinese city Wuhan will be accommodated in the medical facility of the National Guard Novi Sanzhary in the Poltava region. Meanwhile, people started the protest in Novi Sanzhary. They stand against hosting those evacuated from Wuhan in the local facility. People blocked the roads; the clashes with law enforcers took place. The Interior Ministry noted that all illegal attempts of obstruction of accommodation or violation of the regime of their isolation would be stopped by the National Police and the National Guard in accordance with the demands of the Law and the decision of the governmental HQ. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has arrested Muhammed Audu, son of a former governor of Kogi state, over alleg... The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has arrested Muhammed Audu, son of a former governor of Kogi state, over alleged fraud. The anti-graft agency disclosed this in a series of tweets on Thursday, saying investigations revealed that the suspect used two of his companies, Mediterranean Hotels Limited and Mediterranean Sports, to divert the funds, which he could not account for. EFCC said the suspect will soon be charged to court as soon investigations are concluded. Ex-Kogi Gov, Abubakar Audus Son, Muhammed Arrested for Alleged Fraud The operatives of the EFCC have arrested Muhammed Audu, son of the late Prince Abubakar Audu, a former governor of Kogi State, for his alleged involvement in an alleged fraud. pic.twitter.com/JuYlR2s5A9 EFCC Nigeria (@officialEFCC) February 20, 2020 Investigations revealed that the suspect allegedly used two of his companies, Mediterranean Hotels Limited and Mediterranean Sports, to divert the funds, which he could not account for. EFCC Nigeria (@officialEFCC) February 20, 2020 Muhammed Audu sought to replace his late father in the 2015 election but the leadership of the All Progressives Congress (APC) settled for Yahaya Bello, the incumbent governor. PagerDuty Receives Parity.org Gateway Award for Achieving Gender Parity in Leadership Team PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD), a global leader in digital operations management, has received Parity.org's inaugural Gateway (News - Alert) Award. The award recognizes organizations that have made a significant commitment to supporting women in leadership and accomplished gender parity in both their C-suite and Board of Directors, a rare achievement in any industry. "Organizations that have achieved gender parity in leadership-their Board and C-suite-are the exception," said Cathrin Stickney, Parity.org founder and CEO. "Despite the progress women have made in many areas, there has been little progress in the business world. Barely 20% of S&P 500 corporate executive teams and board seats are held by women. PagerDuty's achievement is a very rare one, and we hope it encourages others to follow suit, because it doesn't need to take the predicted 200 years to achieve gender parity. We can do it in our lifetime if we all make a concerted effort. PagerDuty should be proud of this achievement, and we applaud their results." "Fostering a diverse, equitable and inclusive company is a core focus for us," said Joe Militello, Chief People Officer at PagerDuty. "These values not only reflect our belief system, they are critical to helping us drive the business forward. As a company we must reflect our customer base and the broader community, and show leadership on important issues. We are honored to be recognized with this award from Parity.org." This is the latest award for PagerDuty that acknowledges the company's dedication to quality culture and employee representation. Most recently, PagerDuty achieved 2019 certification as one of the "Great Places to Work" in the United States. For two years running, the company has also been listed as one of the Best Places to Work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal. The award is an initiative of Parity.org, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization focused on bringing gender equality to the highest levels of business. To take the ParityPledge or learn more about Parity.org, visit www.Parity.org. To join the PagerDuty team, visit https://www.pagerduty.com/careers/. About PagerDuty, Inc. PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) is a leader in digital operations management. In an always-on world, organizations of all sizes trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time. Teams use PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them in the future. Notable customers include GE, Vodafone, Box and American Eagle Outfitters. To learn more and try PagerDuty for free, visit www.pagerduty.com. Follow our blog and connect with us on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. About Parity.org Parity.org is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to gender equality at the highest ranks of business leadership. You can follow Parity.org on Facebook, LinkedIn (News - Alert) Twitter, and Instagram. Parity.org and the ParityPledge are trademarks of Parity.org. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005296/en/ For three decades, Indias self-branding as the worlds fastest-growing free-market democracy worked. But in a matter of months, it has all begun to fall apart, writes Shashi Tharoor After India launched far-reaching economic reforms in 1991, its stature in the world rose steadily. The country was already recognised as a thriving democracy and an example to the world of how to manage diversity in a free and open society. Its enhanced economic clout and the size of its increasingly prosperous market added to its appeal. Its self-branding as the worlds fastest-growing free-market democracy worked; world leaders queuing up to visit New Delhi became a burden for a generation of diplomatic protocol officers. But in recent months, it has all begun to fall apart. The reason is not hard to find. Indias domestic political environment has turned toxic under prime minister Narendra Modis Hindu nationalist government, owing to a train of divisive, socially discriminatory policies, accompanied by incendiary political rhetoric bordering on Islamophobia. Moreover, a series of disastrous economic decisions notably demonetisation and the botched implementation of a nationwide Goods and Services Tax put many small entrepreneurs out of business and threw millions of people out of work, further convulsing Indian society. And economic failure has only driven Modis Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to double down on its political agenda, animated by the prejudices of its Hindutva ideology. In particular, a series of decisions suggests the depth of the alienation, stoked by BJP policies and attitudes, of Indias 180m strong Muslim population. In recent years, the BJP: Has criminalised an Islamic form of divorce, talaq-e-biddat; Abolished the autonomy enjoyed by Indias only Muslim-majority state, Jammu and Kashmir; Campaigned for and celebrated a Supreme Court judgment awarding the site of a destroyed mosque to Hindus; Amended Indias citizenship laws to give fast-track citizenship only to non-Muslim refugees and migrants from three neighbouring countries These actions sparked weeks of protest across the country and have subverted Indias pluralist secularism. And if that wasnt bad enough, the heavy-handed and brutal response to protests in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh, where 27 Muslim protesters were shot dead, campuses invaded, and students assaulted, has shaken Indias reputation as a democracy to be admired. The Rising India narrative rested on the economys performance and potential, and on Indias success at managing its internal differences democratically and largely peacefully. Rapid economic growth opened up new opportunities for co-operation with foreign countries: Neighbours wanted to take advantage of their proximity, while major powers saw a useful partner worth courting. The contrast with Chinas rise as an authoritarian state was implicit. The Indian system, many felt, was not only more attractive, but also worked just as well. No longer. Thanks to BJPs divisive sectarianism, driven by narrow party-political goals, Indias stature in the world has never been lower. The recent developments have embarrassed Indias friends in the neighbouring Muslim countries of Bangladesh and Afghanistan, shaken the confidence of foreign investors, antagonised influential members of the US Congress, and earned the government a chorus of disapproval. Major foreign newspapers, whether on the right (like the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times) or the left (like the Guardian and Washington Post) have published critical editorials about India in recent months. The drumbeat of daily reporting and commentaries is relentlessly negative. At home, even neutral figures known for their habitual reticence on political matters have expressed alarm. Former foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon recently described the governments amendment to the Citizenship Act as a self-inflicted goal that has isolated India and resulted in the country being routinely mentioned alongside Pakistan as an intolerant state. The divisive policies of the government, he added, has given our adversaries platforms to attack us and left India with no international support apart from a section of the Indian diaspora and some extreme right members of the European Parliament. Several world leaders, including French president Emmanuel Macron, German chancellor Angela Merkel, the visiting Norwegian king, Harald V, and chiefs of UN agencies on human rights and refugees, have criticised the governments recent moves. For the first time in over 40 years, Kashmir was discussed in the UN Security Council. The bipartisan consensus on strong bilateral relations that has existed in the US for 25 years, irrespective of the government in Delhi or Washington, has been broken. What the world thinks matters more than ever before, not least because India is far more dependent on external trade and investment. Foreign investment requires trust and faith in the future, which is fast eroding. The world increasingly sees India as an intolerant, narrow-minded country. Its credit ratings have been downgraded. Seven countries have issued travel warnings. The Indian economys stumbling performance and its domestic political divides have created new foreign-policy challenges in an increasingly difficult external environment, with a transactional president Donald Trump taking a cost-benefit view of the US-India relationship and Chinese president Xi Jinping strengthening his support for Indias hostile neighbour, Pakistan. Amid a period of domestic and global unpredictability, Indias place in the 21st-century world, which once seemed so promising, is again being called into question. The Indian government shows little sign of waking up to the consequences of its domestic policies. It seems to assume that a country of 1.3bn people with the worlds fifth-largest economy, a member of the G20 and the BRICS, cannot be ignored. It consoles itself that its actions still garner popular support in India. But an India that is perceived as bigoted, with a government that, intoxicated by intolerant majoritarianism, is wilfully driving sectarian wedges between its people, can forget about the global embrace on which its future depends. Shashi Tharoor, a former UN under-secretary-general and former Indian minister of state for external affairs and for human resource development, is an MP for the Indian National Congress. The long-awaited result of Afghanistans bitterly disputed presidential election was expected to end months of uncertainty. Instead, President Ashraf Ghanis reelection has triggered a political crisis that has threatened to spill over into violence and derail a historic peace deal between the United States and the Taliban. Though Ghani was finally declared the winner of the September 28 vote, main challenger Abdullah Abdullah, the country's chief executive officer, has rejected the result, declared himself the winner, and vowed to form his own government. He then slammed the result as a coup and vowed to form an all-inclusive government. He also accused election authorities of favoring Ghani. Ghani's vice president, the powerful former warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, called on his supporters on February 19 to take to the streets to celebrate what he described as a victory for Abdullah. The international community has remained unusually silent following the release of the final result on February 18, despite contributing millions of dollars into the election process. It is unclear if the United States is willing to try to mediate a solution to this new standoff. In 2014, when both Ghani and Abdullah alleged massive fraud, Washington brokered a power-sharing deal that produced a deeply unpopular and fractured national unity government. With Ghani and Abdullah representing rival communities, the dispute has exposed the ethnic fault lines in Afghanistan, where Ghani is viewed with suspicion by many members of the countrys ethnic Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara groups. Afghanistan could be headed for a fresh political crisis at a critical moment, when the nation is in need of a united front to chart a path towards peace, said Michael Kugelman, South Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. 'All Bets Off' The political infighting in Kabul has threatened to disrupt a proposed U.S.-Taliban deal on the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan, a major step toward ending the nearly 19-year war. Following 18 months of grueling negotiations, the United States and the Taliban have agreed to a seven-day reduction of violence ahead of signing the deal, expected at the end of the month. The Afghan Interior Ministry said on February 18 that the temporary truce would begin in the next five days. It is unclear to what extent the United States would mediate or intervene, but it is a safe bet that it will be much less publicly and openly involved than in 2014." As part of the deal, the Taliban is obliged to launch direct negotiations with the Western-backed Kabul government and other Afghans over a permanent cease-fire and a power-sharing agreement. The effect of this emerging crisis on the country and the peace crisis will depend on how far Abdullah goes in carrying out his threat of setting up a separate government, said Kugelman. If he decides that its best to back down for the sake of peace and stability, then the damage would be limited. But if he digs in, then all bets would be off, he added. Given that Abdullah believes he has been wronged electorally three times in a row -- he also claimed to have won the 2009 and 2014 votes -- Kugelman said he was unlikely to back down in the immediate term. But Andrew Watkins, a senior analyst for Afghanistan at the International Crisis Group, said he believes the political crisis would not necessarily derail the peace process. It has been widely understood that the pro-government side of intra-Afghan negotiations will include some political opposition figures as well as government officials, he said. Political figures may calculate that limiting their responses to the election results and ensuring that the intra-Afghan negotiations move forward is actually the best route to securing the interests of their supporters and communities, Watkins added. A domestic violence order was broken 84 times a day on average in Queensland in 2019, police statistics show. A total of 30,796 domestic violence protection orders (DVO) were breached last year, an average of four an hour and almost five times as many as the 2001 figure. Slain mother Hannah Baxter with her three children Trey, Laianah and Aaliyah. Brisbane mother Hannah Clarke was driving her three young children to school on Wednesday morning when her estranged husband, Rowan, doused his family in petrol and lit them on fire. Ms Clarke and her three children Laianah, Aaliyah and Trey all died. LAS VEGAS (AP) From the opening bell, Democrats savaged New York billionaire Mike Bloomberg and raised pointed questions about Bernie Sanders' take-no-prisoners politics during a contentious debate Wednesday night that threatened to further muddy the party's urgent quest to defeat President Donald Trump. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who was once a Republican, was forced to defend his record and past comments related to race, gender and his personal wealth in an occasionally rocky debate stage debut. Sanders, meanwhile, tried to beat back pointed questions about his embrace of democratic socialism and his health following a heart attack last year. The ninth debate of this cycle featured the most aggressive sustained period of infighting in the Democrats yearlong search for a presidential nominee. The tension reflected growing anxiety among candidates and party leaders that the nomination fight could yield a candidate who will struggle to build a winning coalition in November to beat Trump. The campaign is about to quickly intensify. Nevada votes on Saturday and South Carolina follows on February 29. More than a dozen states host Super Tuesday contests in less than two weeks with about one-third of the delegates needed to win the nomination at stake. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren was in a fight for survival and stood out with repeated attacks on Bloomberg. She sought to undermine him with core Democratic voters who are uncomfortable with his vast wealth, his offensive remarks about policing of minorities and demeaning comments about women, including those who worked at his company. Warren labeled Bloomberg "a billionaire who calls people fat broads and horse-faced lesbians." She wasnt alone. Sanders lashed out at Bloomberg's policing policies as New York City mayor that Sanders said targeted African-American and Latinos in an outrageous way." And former Vice President Joe Biden charged that Bloombergs stop-and-frisk policy ended up throwing 5 million black men up against the wall. Now Playing: Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders blasted rival Mike Bloomberg at a Monday night rally. Sanders said it's time to tell Bloomberg, he can't buy the 2020 election. (Feb. 18) Video: Associated Press Watching during his Western campaign swing, Trump joined the Bloomberg pile on. Mini Mike Bloombergs debate performance tonight was perhaps the worst in the history of debates, and there have been some really bad ones, Trump tweeted. He was stumbling, bumbling and grossly incompetent. If this doesnt knock him out of the race, nothing will. Not so easy to do what I did! After the debate, Warren told reporters: "I have no doubt that Michael Bloomberg is reaching in his pocket right now, and spending another hundred million dollars to try to erase every American's memory about what happened on the debate stage." On a night that threatened to tarnish the shine of his carefully constructed TV-ad image, Bloomberg faltered when attacked on issues related to race and gender. But he was firm and unapologetic about his wealth and how he has used it to affect change important to Democrats. He took particular aim at Sanders and his self-description as a democratic socialist. I dont think there's any chance of the senator beating Donald Trump," Bloomberg declared before noting Sanders' rising wealth. "The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses!" Sanders defended owning multiple houses, noting he has one in Washington, where he works, and two in Vermont, the state he represents in the Senate. While Bloomberg was the shiny new object Wednesday, the debate also marked a major test for Sanders, who is emerging as the front-runner in the Democrats nomination fight, whether his partys establishment likes it or not. A growing group of donors, elected officials and political operatives fear that Sanders uncompromising progressive politics could be a disaster in the general election against Trump, yet theyve struggled to coalesce behind a single moderate alternative. Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, went after both Bloomberg and Sanders, warning that one threatened to burn down the Democratic Party and the other was trying to buy it. He called them the two most polarizing figures on this stage," with little chance of defeating Trump or helping congressional Democrats in contests with Republicans. Bloomberg and Sanders were prime targets, but the stakes were no less dire for the other four candidates on stage. Longtime establishment favorite Biden, a two-term vice president, desperately needed to breathe new life into his flailing campaign, which entered the night at the bottom of a moderate muddle behind Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. And after a bad finish last week in New Hampshire, Warren was fighting to resurrect her stalled White House bid. Now Playing: As the Democratic presidential candidates hit the debate stage in Nevada Wednesday night, they'll be joined for the first time by billionaire Mike Bloomberg, who has until now managed to avoid face to face conflict with his rivals. (Feb. 18) Video: Associated Press A Warren campaign aide said on Twitter that her fiery first hour of debate was her best hour of fundraising "to date." The other leading progressive in the race, Sanders came under attack from Biden and Bloomberg for his embrace of democratic socialism. Sanders, as he has repeatedly over the last year, defended the cost of his signature Medicare for All healthcare plan, which would eliminate the private insurance industry in favor of a government-backed healthcare system that would cover all Americans. "When you asked Bernie how much it cost last time he said...'We'll find out, Biden quipped. It costs over $35 trillion, let's get real." And ongoing animosity flared between Buttigieg and Klobuchar when the former Indiana mayor slammed the three-term Minnesota senator for failing to answer questions in a recent interview about Mexican policy and forgetting the name of the Mexican president. Buttigieg noted that she's on a committee that oversees trade issues in Mexico and she was not able to speak to literally the first thing about the politics of the country. She shot back: "Are you trying to say I'm dumb? Are you mocking me here?" Later in the night she lashed out at Buttigieg again: I wish everyone else was as perfect as you, Pete. The debate closed with a question about the possibility that Democrats remain divided deep into the primary season with a final resolution coming during a contested national convention in July. Asked if the candidate with the most delegates should be the nominee -- even if he or she is short of a delegate majority, almost every candidate suggested that the convention process should "work its way out," as Biden put it. Sanders, who helped force changes to the nomination process this year and hopes to take a significant delegate lead in the coming weeks, was the only exception. The person who has the most votes should become the nominee, he said. ___ Peoples and Jaffe reported from Washington. Associated Press writer Kathleen Ronayne in Sacramento, California, contributed to this report. ___ Catch up on the 2020 election campaign with AP experts on our weekly politics podcast, Ground Game. Here in the Southland, many cannot afford to pay their tax bills because the system has broken down. The south suburbs are the proverbial canary in the coal mine of an education funding system rife with inequity and inadequacy. In some places, like Harvey, schools collect only about half the revenue from tax levies. No one pays taxes on abandoned and foreclosed properties. New Delhi [India], Feb 20 (ANI): US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump will have an extensive schedule for February 25 when they arrive in the capital of India. According to sources, US President Trump in the morning will reach the Rashtrapati Bhavan on February 25 where he will be inspecting the Guard of Honour. From the Rashtrapati Bhavan, Trump will leave for the Rajghat. According to his tentative schedule, he will lay the wreath and observe a one-minute silence at the Rajghat. After penning down his comments in the visitors' book, he will leave for the Hyderabad House. According to sources, there will be multiple meetings and delegation-level talks apart from the exchange of agreements from 11 am to 1 pm. After official meetings, Trump and his wife will have a lavish lunch hosted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. From there, the US President will reach the ITC Maurya Hotel where External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Vice President of India Venkaiah Naidu are expected to call on him. Trump will also visit the US Embassy in New Delhi. After meeting, S Jaishankar and Vice President of India, Trump will move to the Rashtrapati Bhavan for the lavish dinner hosted by President of India Ram Nath Kovind. According to sources, the itinerary may have some changes as per the approval of the office of the President of United States. According to his tentative itinerary, Trump will leave for the United States by his special flight around 10 pm on February 25. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) The UN-recognised government pulled out of peace talks after a barrage of rockets hit a port in the capital, Tripoli. Libyas warring sides resumed talks in Geneva on Thursday aimed at brokering a lasting ceasefire in the war-torn country. The talks are under way again, said Jean El Alam, spokesman for the United Nations Support Mission in Libya, days after the countrys UN-recognised government announced it was halting its participation. UN Libya envoy Ghassan Salame launched a second round of military talks on Tuesday with five senior officers from Libyas Government of National Accord (GNA) and five negotiators representing renegade eastern military commander Khalifa Haftars forces. The GNA then pulled out of the process after a barrage of rockets hit a port in the capital Tripoli the target of months of bombardment by Haftars forces. Al Jazeeras Diplomatic Editor James Bays, reporting from Geneva, said that since the rocket attack and subsequent GNA pullout, the UN has been trying to pick up the pieces. It is a very ambitious timeline that the UN is pursuing here. These talks are aimed at getting a durable ceasefire thats why the GNA was so upset by the attack while they were taking place, he said, adding that in one week, the UN plans wider talks involving all political factions in Libya. Eventually they hope to have UN-brokered elections in the country. More hope The port strikes were the latest violation of a tenuous truce that came into effect in January and was brokered by Russia, which supports Haftar, and Turkey, which supports the UN-recognised government in Tripoli. The first round of military talks ended with no result earlier this month, but Salame said there was more hope this time, mainly because of the approval of a UN Security Council resolution calling for a lasting ceasefire. Several rounds of talks focused on economic issues, including fairer distribution of Libyas oil wealth, have also taken place in Egypt and Tunisia, while talks aimed at a political solution are scheduled to start in Geneva on February 26. Libya has been in turmoil since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising killed longtime dictator Muammar Gaddafi, with rival armed factions still vying for power. In the latest outbreak of fighting, Haftar launched his offensive on Tripoli last April. But after rapid advances, his forces stalled on the edges of the capital. The fighting has left more than 1,000 people dead and displaced some 140,000, according to the UN. C hilean burglary tourists who raided TV chef Marcus Wareings London home were known criminals wanted at home over a catalogue of serious offences, the Standard reveals today. Danko Carvajal-Donaire, 20, had four outstanding arrest warrants and was detained early last year in Spain for using a false passport. He was arrested again in Italy a few weeks later and deported back to Chile. Jorge Rojas, 22, was deported from the US last March and denied entry to Germany a month later. Despite this, both men were able to enter the UK in October to carry out the 33,000 raid on Wareings 5 million Wimbledon home while the Michelin-starred restaurateur and his wife Jane were away. Last month Carvajal-Donaire and Rojas were jailed for 40 months along with accomplices Nicolas Portilla Astorga, 27, and Claudio Donoso, 20. 33,000 theft: Marcus Wareing and wife Jane / Dave Benett The Kingston crown court convictions were hailed as a victory for Scotland Yards Operation Genie crackdown on burglary tourism, where thieves are flown into the UK by organised gangs specifically to target wealthy homeowners. But our findings, which follow a joint investigation by the Evening Standard and Chilean magazine Revista Capital, raise questions about the apparent ease with which known criminals can enter Britain. Stephen Hammond, the MP for Wimbledon, where a series of other high-value burglaries have taken place in recent months, asked: Why werent these people checked properly? If one of these people was deported from the US, its probably a good reason not to give him a tourist visa to the UK. He called for a review of border controls, adding: The Home Office and the Border Force need to check their systems and we need to strengthen intelligence-sharing between the UK and other authorities, because these are new groups of individuals. At a national level, we need to review why the systems arent working properly. I want my residents to be safe. We ought to have in place the mechanisms that stop these sort of well-known criminals, or acknowledged criminals, in their own countries from coming to the UK to commit crime. Burglars Danko Carvajal-Donaire and Nicolas Portilla Astorga pose for a picture wearing the couples stolen jewellery When Carvajal-Donaire arrived in the UK in October ahead of the Wareing break-in, he had a number of outstanding arrest warrants in his home country for crimes including robbery and gun possession. Four months earlier he had been deported back there from Italy, having previously been arrested in Spain for using identity documents belonging to his brother Jordan, according to statements by Chiles civilian police force, the PDI. When the gang was arrested in Banstead, Surrey, on October 15, four days after the burglary, Carvajal-Donaire was still using the identity of his brother who has been serving a five-year jail term in Chile since 2016. Rojas, who had outstanding arrest warrants in Chile for violent robbery, was deported from the US on March 16 last year. The following month he was denied entry to Germany due to his negative background, the PDI said. But six months later he was able to travel to the UK to take part in the Wareing raid. Donoso and Astorga had police records in Chile for crimes against property, according to the PDI. Donoso had been deported from Spain in 2018. Tony Smith, a former director general of the UK Border Force, said identifying foreign criminals was a constant game of cat and mouse. He added: The UK Border Force is only as good as the information its given by other parties. Unless somebody tells the UK that these people are criminals, how would we know? To think theres some sort of magic bullet out there to stop criminals moving around the world, there isnt. Mr Smith continued: There are things going on, but youre trying to keep up with the criminals all the time. Its a game of cat and mouse. A lot of flaws in our borders are being slowly fixed, but youre never going to completely cure this because the criminals are always looking for a way round and youre just trying to keep up. Last July the Chilean passport was named the most widely accepted in Latin America, allowing visa-free travel to 174 countries including the UK. Hector Espinosa, the director of Chiles civilian police force, said that during last year the countrys Interpol office was informed of 145 Chileans detained abroad, mainly for crimes against property. Seventy-five of those had pending arrest warrants in our country and 85 were detained in Europe for the crime of theft half of them for home burglaries, he said. If the person has completed their sentence [in Chile] they have no impediment to leaving the country. That is the problem that we have, because we know that they are habitual or specialised criminals. A Home Office spokesman said: We are doing everything in our power to prevent foreign criminals entering our country, including carrying out checks on all new arrivals at passport control. Border Force officers can, and do refuse entry to any known foreign national offenders. Closer working between the police and Home Office immigration enforcement in recent years has led to the earlier identification and checking of foreign national offenders. Revista Capital's story can be read here Affluent London suburbs targeted in growing trend by Anthony France Burglary tourism is a growing trend in the UK with thieves flying in to target high-end properties. Hundreds of homes across the country have been targeted over the past decade. Scotland Yard set up Operation Genie in 2017 specifically to target the international thieves. Information gathered is shared with the UK Border Agency and Europol to build a robust intelligence picture. South American gangs, mainly from Chile, bring in criminals to break into homes in London suburbs and the Home Counties. Recruited in their home country, they are put on a flight to the UK to enter as tourists. Here they meet a contact who gives them a car and phones once they hand over their ID papers. Homes in affluent areas such as Wimbledon are pre-selected as targets, with burglars instructed how to beat security alarms, where to enter and which valuables to hunt for. Police have warned the gangs often use one person to scout out an area ahead of time, or stand watch nearby. Burglars are thought to have used such a tactic for the 500,000 raid in December on the gated property which Crystal Palace footballer Mamadou Sakho rents from ex-Chelsea and Arsenal player Nicolas Anelka. There have been no arrests. Listen to today's episode of The Leader podcast: As the Republican primary gets into full swing Montgomery County Precinct 5 Constable candidates Chris Jones and Brian Clack hope their efforts at several forums will draw the votes for the republican party bid March 3. On the eve of early voting, the pair took the time to address several topics including 24-hour patrol, drug and alcohol enforcement and the departments role in school safety. The forum was hosted by The Greater Magnolia Parkway Chamber of Commerce and the Voter Awareness Council. Both men boast years of service in law enforcement. Jones hold a masters in criminal justice and has 23 years with the constables office. Clack, a certified peace officer, has worked with the Magnolia Police Department for 13 years handling investigations. This is his third bid for constable. The winner of the primary will run unopposed in the November general election. Jones, who was appointed by the commissioners court to fill the unexpired term of now retired Constable David Hill, said while the constables office is mandated to handle civil process, today the department must take on a role to address criminal activity in the community. For Jones, he has focused largely on narcotics and drunk driving. These are things that directly affect families, he said. With the growth of our agency and with the growth in the area, there will be more crime out there. I will continue to be the proactive constable that goes out there and takes down narcotics on a daily basis, takes down DWIs on a daily basis and be that force multiplier for other agencies. In fact, according to data provided by Jones, last year his department issues 5,831 traffic citations, netted 183 DWIs and seized over 38 pounds of illegal drugs. Jones said the key to the future is planning for the growth of the community and being prepared. Our roads are going to get congested and as these roads grow, we are going to have to work more traffic enforcement, narcotics are going to move out from Houston a little more, he said. Clack, who said he believe he is the reason the constable works narcotics in the community since it was his platform when he ran for constable in 2012, said the department needs to work narcotics every day in the community as well as in the schools. (Drugs are) what destroys our communities, he said. We have to get the drugs out of our community and I feel I have been pushing for that since day one and I will continue to push for that. 24-hour patrol The Precinct 5 Constables Office is not currently running 24 hours, but Jones has implemented a schedule where officers are patrolling about 20 hours a day. There are only a few hours we arent out in full force, Jones said. I think we are going to go there, just to be that force multiplier for the sheriffs department and other agencies. When the toll road comes through, we are going to have more traffic, we are going to need to be out there. In the future, maybe not this year, we will have to be a 24-hour department. For Clack, the sooner the department is 24 hours, the better for the community. He noted with eight hours, the department could have two hours on, 24 hours a day. That is very easily accomplished because there are already that many employees at the department today, he said. We could easily make that work. According to Jones, the department currently has 42 sworn officers and three office personnel along with 18 school safety officers. Clack said the department has the manpower it needs, but work could be done to better its organization and officers duties. Jones said since 2016, the department has added three officers each year. He added he sees the department growing in the future with the need for more personnel. School safety In 2019, the department hired 10 new deputies as part of its contract with Magnolia Independent School District. In June last year, Magnolia ISD officials allocated $1.3 million to fund the 10 officers. Precinct 5 now has a total of 18 deputies in its school resource program. The structure includes one lieutenant, two sergeants and 15 deputies, according to the MOU. Magnolia ISD has 16 school campuses including its ALPHA Academy. I think (Magnolia ISD) is determined to keep (the contract) going, Jones said. As they build more schools, they will expand (the contract). We have had a great partnership with for over 20 years with Magnolia ISD. We work hard with them every day; we deal with them every day. Clack echoed Jones in the importance of having an outside agency providing safety for schools. However, Clack believes the school safety officers need to expand their scope. That deputy hired to handle that school needs to be able to handle everything, any type of crime that comes before them, he said. One area Clack said that is critical for school safety officers is to report missing children. Currently, Clack explained, those officers do no report children who fail to show up for school. You are missing from that school if you are not there, he said. They call it truancy; I call it missing. We need to be looking for you and making sure you are safe and someone did not snatch you up and take you away. Polling locations will be open 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Feb. 21, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Feb. 22, noon to 5 p.m. Feb. 23 and 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Feb. 24 through Feb. 28. Election day is March 3. cdominguez@hcnonline.com Celeste Barber and the Rural Fire Service will seek guidance from the Supreme Court about how the $52million she raised for bushfire relief can be used. The Australian comedian started a Facebook fundraiser for the NSW Rural Fire Service and encouraged 1.3million people from across the globe to donate. She directed funds to the RFS Brigades Donations Fund, but was unaware money sent to this fund can only be used on training, resources and fire equipment - not the volunteers and their families or fire-affected communities. Celeste Barber (pictured at a bushfire relief concert last weekend) and the Rural Fire Service will seek guidance from the Supreme Court about how the $52million she raised for bushfire relief can be used Barber then told her 6.8million Instagram followers that the money would be donated to a range of different charities in other states. When she found that none of the money could be donated to families or shared with other charities in need, she decided to take legal action. The Rural Fire Service says it wants some of the money to be donated to other charities but cannot find a way to do this within the law. Barber said on Instagram on Thursday that judges from the Supreme Court of New South Wales were offering advice. 'We're on to it so much so I know the f. king Supreme Court might be throwing their backs into it a little bit to find out if we can distribute it,' she said. 'We're not f. king around we're taking it really seriously.' However, one charity law expert told the Daily Telegraph: 'They are just wasting their time'. Charlotte O'Dwyer, the young daughter of Rural Fire Service volunteer Andrew O'Dwyer, with Andrew's wife Melissa at his funeral The $52million has been transferred from GoFundMe to a trust fund run by the RFS - but none of it has been spent. Pictured: RFS firefighters The $52million has been transferred from GoFundMe to a trust fund run by the RFS - but none of it has been spent. On its own annual report, the fund said it operates 'solely for the purpose of supporting the volunteer-based fire and emergency service activities of the brigades'. It says these activities included buying and maintaining firefighting equipment, as well as providing training and resources among other administrative expenses. This means the families of dead or injured firefighters could be left without a cent, as could other volunteer fire brigades. While Ms Barber initially pledged to the NSW RFS and Brigades Donation Fund, she quickly changed the terms of her appeal to take into account other states battling the devastating bushfires. She widened the appeal and wanted to share the money with Victorian and South Australian firefighting agencies, animal welfare group WIRES, the Red Cross and the widows of fallen firefighters. A spokesman for the NSW RFS said: 'What has become clear is that the issue is very complex and the options are limited. This is because there are a number of laws which limit how funds can be distributed. 'At this stage, it's planned to seek the direction of the Supreme Court to seek some clarity on how the funds can be used. This is likely to take some time.' I just was able to have a personal conversation with him about the effect that this mild winter has had and the incredible amount of erosion that has happened in the past six months, she said. You cant do that unless you see it with your own eyes. Seeing it... spurred him to take action. Email Whatsapp Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment One of the most insightful theological comments Ive ever heard came from the movie Men in Black. In one part of the movie, Tommy Lee Jones (who plays the main hero) is talking to Will Smith (the second hero) about the need to keep the fact that aliens live on Earth a secret. Will Smith says that sooner or later people will find out and accept it because people are smart. Tommy Lee Jones corrects him and says, A person can be smart; people are dumb, panicky, and dangerous, and you know that. As unflattering as that statement is, I have to agree with it in many ways. So many times, a seemingly smart person can become a very dumb individual and make poor choices when they form a mob with other people, as happens a lot these days. Let me give you just a couple examples from Scripture that stand out to me. The Fickle at Lystra Paul and Barnabas had been working their way through a number of towns preaching about Christ, when they came to the town of Lystra. Acts 14:8 tells us that there was a man who had been lame from birth that was listening to Paul preach. Paul sees that the man has faith and calls out for him to stand up and he does! For the first time in his life, the man can walk a genuine miracle takes place. Well, this is something that absolutely affects the folks at Lystra in a major way. In fact, theyre so in awe of Paul and Barnabas that they say, The gods have become like men and have come down to us. But it gets better. The people start the process of offering sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas something the missionary pair promptly put a stop to, with the Bible saying, And even saying these things, they with difficulty restrained the crowds from offering sacrifice to them (Acts 14:18). Obviously, Paul and Barnabas had won the people of Lystra over in a forever type of way, right? But wait the very next verse in Acts says this: But Jews came from Antioch and Iconium, and having won over the multitudes, they stoned Paul and dragged him out of the city, supposing him to be dead. Incredible, isnt it? The same city that couldnt wait to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas are won over by a crew of wicked men and stand in agreement as their hero is stoned and dragged away. Amazing. But wait I can trump this example with one thats even better. The Unbelievers at Bethany The resurrection of Lazarus from the grave is a familiar episode chronicled in John, and one witnessed by many people. It doesnt get more miraculous that a guy whos been in the grave for four days being raised from the dead. And it does have an effect John 11:45 says the event caused a number of those there to believe in Jesus. But not everyone experiences a change in heart. The religious leaders get word of what happened and have an amazing reaction. Never is a word recorded about them not believing in what occurred that a genuine miracle from God had indeed taken place. But what is recorded is the following: So from that day on they planned together to kill Him (John 11:53). But it gets better. A celebratory dinner is held in Bethany, and many attend the event. The celebrity attendee besides Jesus is, of course, Lazarus. Everyone wants to see and talk to him (wouldnt you?) But the reaction of the religious leaders is beyond amazing and is recorded in John 12:10-11: But the chief priests took counsel that they might put Lazarus to death also; because on account of him many of the Jews were going away, and were believing in Jesus. So lets get this straight the religious crowd not only wants to do away with Jesus, but theyre planning to kill another innocent man because his being alive is causing people to believe in Christ? Stop for a moment and let this sink in. Rather than acknowledging the accrediting miracle of Jesus and putting their faith in Him, theyre all in agreement to kill Him instead and, while theyre at it, kill Lazarus too. Oy. But wait I can trump this example with one thats even better. The Forgetful at Jerusalem Down the mountain rode the Son of Man toward Jerusalem, fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9 about the King coming to His people mounted on a gentle donkey. For the first time ever in His ministry, Jesus allowed Himself to be publicly proclaimed the Messiah as He entered Jerusalem. And honor Him they did! Matthew 21 records that the people cheered, laid palm branches in the road, and shouted deliverance scriptures (Hosanna literally means save, we pray and is taken from Psalm 118) to herald His arrival into the city. How many of these people Jesus personally touched with His ministry, how many He had healed and ministered to, we arent told, but they certainly know who He is, what He has done, and are honoring Him in a spectacular way. But how quickly people forget. Flash forward just a few days and the same citizens of the city now have a different perspective on Jesus during His trial. Pilate, trying every possible way to release Jesus, drives the crowd to make a seemingly easy choice between releasing the Man they had worshiped only days earlier and a murdering insurrectionist. But Pilates grand-canyon distinction fails to hit the mark. Why? Matthew 27:20 gives us the reason: But the chief priests and the elders persuaded the multitudes to ask for Barabbas, and to put Jesus to death. Pilate tries to reason with them, but its no use. They all said, Let Him be crucified!, Matthew 27:22. But wait I can trump this example with one thats even better. The Liars of the Empty Tomb They had passed out from fear at the sight of the angels who came to roll the stone away from the tomb where Jesus had been laid. When they came to, the guards knew full well that what they had seen was a miraculous event, and they scrambled back to the chief priests who had employed them to relay the whole story. Two incredible testimonies to the fallen human nature occur then. First, the Pharisees maintain the same hardness of heart that kept them from believing in Christ when He raised Lazarus from the dead. Think of it they knew He said Hed come back from the dead in three days and it happens! If anything would cause someone to believe this has to be it. But instead, they deny what their plain senses are telling them, pay off the guards, and concoct a story thats logically ridiculous about how the disciples came and stole the body out from under the guards noses. But perhaps even more incredibly, the guards go along with it. Can you believe it? They saw what happened. Never mind the illogical fabrication of maintaining the disciples stole the body while they were asleep (how could they know that if they were asleep?); they knew the story was false. In the days that followed, they had to have heard the rumblings about Jesus being seen alive. But Matthew 28:15 says, And they took the money and did as they had been instructed; and this story was widely spread among the Jews, as is to this day. As a group, they stuck to the crazy story even though each one of them individually knew the truth a truth that could save their souls if they stopped and thought about it. Conclusion Do you know why these events took place? Why a crowd can worship men one minute and let them be stoned the next? Why a gathering of men can fail to acknowledge a verified miracle, and instead plot to kill the Man (along with the object of His miracle) who performed it? Why a city can exalt a Man as their coming King with one breath, and with the same vocal cords cry for His death in a matter of just days? And why a group of men can lie through their teeth and deny that they had personally witnessed the single greatest event in human history? Because a person can be smart, but people when they form a mob are dumb, panicky, and dangerous. And you know that. The automated pest monitoring system market for agriculture sector is poised to grow by USD 82.72 million during 2020-2024, progressing at a CAGR of over 8% during the forecast period. Request free sample pages This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200219005675/en/ Technavio has announced its latest market research report titled Global Automated Pest Monitoring System Market for Agriculture Sector 2020-2024 (Graphic: Business Wire) Read the 120-page report with TOC on "Automated Pest Monitoring System Market for Agriculture Sector Analysis Report by End-user (Large-scale farms and Small-scale farms), and Geographic segmentation (North America, APAC, Europe, South America and MEA), and the Segment Forecasts, 2020-2024". https://www.technavio.com/report/automated-pest-monitoring-system-market-for-agriculture-sector-industry-analysis The market is driven by the growing focus on reducing manual intervention in fields. In addition, the increasing focus on reducing pesticide use is anticipated to boost the growth of the automated pest monitoring system market for agriculture sector. Manual pest monitoring in farms can lead to pest infestation and significant yield loss because it is effective only with skilled labor and is time-consuming. In addition, it incurs additional costs for farmers and can lead to safety issues for laborers. As a result, the demand for automated solutions in farms is increasing because it ensures fewer field visits and increases the accuracy of pest monitoring at lower costs. Pest monitoring systems such as AgroPestAlert use AI to ensure accurate monitoring of pests in fields. They are equipped with sensors that issue alerts to farmers regarding pest invasions. Thus, the growing focus on reducing manual intervention in fields is expected to drive market growth during the forecast period. Buy 1 Technavio report and get the second for 50% off. Buy 2 Technavio reports and get the third for free. View market snapshot before purchasing Major Five Automated Pest Monitoring System Market for Agriculture Sector Companies: Anticimex Group Anticimex Group operates the business under various segments such as Pest Control, Building Environment, Hygiene, and Other. The company offers SMART automated pest monitoring systems. SMART consists of three parts such as one master, trap, and sensor. DTN DTN offers products through the following business units: Agriculture, Energy, Financial analytics, Weather, and Transportation. The company offers automated pest monitoring system for agriculture sector under its Spensa Technologies division. DUNAVNET DOO NOVI SAD DUNAVNET DOO NOVI SAD operates under various business segments, namely AgroNET, ekoNET, fleetNET, glueNET, parkNET, and urbanNET. The company offers trapNET, which is an automated pest monitoring system for agriculture sector and enables continuous monitoring of the increase in population of harmful pets. EFOS doo EFOS doo offers products through the following business segments: TRAPVIEW automated pest monitoring system, Animal identification and movements systems, Veterinary information systems, and Monitoring of water quality. The company offers TRAPVIEW automated pest monitoring system. FaunaPhotonics AS FaunaPhotonics AS offers products through the Real time monitoring solutions business segments. The company offers automated sensors for farmers that uses a light-based technology that can classify and issue alerts about the presence of pests in the field. Register for a free trial today and gain instant access to 17,000+ market research reports. Technavio's SUBSCRIPTION platform Automated Pest Monitoring System Market for Agriculture Sector End-user Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2024) Large-scale farms Small-scale farms Automated Pest Monitoring System Market for Agriculture Sector Geographic Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2020-2024) North America APAC Europe South America MEA Technavio's sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report, such as the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more. Request a free sample report About Technavio Technavio is a leading global technology research and advisory company. Their research and analysis focus on emerging market trends and provides actionable insights to help businesses identify market opportunities and develop effective strategies to optimize their market positions. With over 500 specialized analysts, Technavio's report library consists of more than 17,000 reports and counting, covering 800 technologies, spanning across 50 countries. Their client base consists of enterprises of all sizes, including more than 100 Fortune 500 companies. This growing client base relies on Technavio's comprehensive coverage, extensive research, and actionable market insights to identify opportunities in existing and potential markets and assess their competitive positions within changing market scenarios. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200219005675/en/ Contacts: Technavio Research Jesse Maida Media Marketing Executive US: +1 844 364 1100 UK: +44 203 893 3200 Email: media@technavio.com Website: https://www.technavio.com NASONGOLA The Chief of Defence Forces (CDF) of the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF), Gen David Muhoozi emphasized the need for Officers and Militants to understand the history of their country as a requisite for being good service personnel. He said one can only defend what he/she understands well. Gen David Muhoozi made the remark at UPDFs Peace Support Operation Training Center (PSO-TC) while officiating at the closure of a one-month ideological orientation course for 2,143 soldiers of Ugandas 30th battle group who are at last stages of their pre-mission training to deploy under African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). The CDF noted that one of the key roles of the army is ensuring territorial integrity and maintenance of the peace but this can only be achieved by a Force that is conscious, nourished by political education and not the sorts of Ugandas past armies. The CDF pointed out that Ugandas past armies worked against the common good of the people of Uganda and rather served the interests of certain groups, such as the colonial masters, monarchs and the interest of their commanders as well as their own, at the expense of the people they were supposed to protect. Gen Muhoozi emphasized that the UPDF is different from the past armies. He said the UPDF works in the interest of Ugandans as stipulated in its core functions in Article 209 of the 1995 Constitution. The UPDF strives to defend Ugandas territorial integrity, help its people in case of emergencies, cooperates with civilian authorities, and participates in the economic development of the country. UPDF is a disciplined Force built on a pro-people ideology, said Gen Muhoozi. Gen Muhoozi said that this pro-people ideology is responsible for UPDFs successes within and outside the country. He urged the troops to maintain the UPDF historical discipline when they deploy to Somalia. Exhibit discipline while in Somalia for the wellbeing of our neighbours, well aware that our biggest foundation is based on political education. Work as a team, respect the culture of the Somali people and lift the flag of our country high, he said. The Deputy Chief Political Commissar of the UPDF, Col Ba-Hoku Barigye thanked the leadership of PSO-TC led by Col Bonny Wolimbwa, the training team and facilitators for a good work done in the training of the Officers and Militants. Related Presidency University Dean of Students Arun Maity left the campus on early Wednesday morning after being gheraoed by a section of students for over six consecutive days Kolkata: Presidency University Dean of Students Arun Maity left the campus on early Wednesday morning after being gheraoed by a section of students for over six consecutive days. A varsity official said Maity, who was gheraoed since 3.30 pm on 13 February, left the campus around 3 am on Wednesday while the 30 agitating students were sleeping on the corridor. He boarded his car parked in the portico and left, the official said. Doctors inspected Maity and declared him fit but he is stressed due to the gherao, he said. The dean did not take calls despite repeated attempts. The agitating students said they will continue the sit-in outside the dean's office till they get a concrete assurance that the issues will be addressed on an urgent basis. Students had gheraoed him demanding immediate handing over of the three under-renovation wards of Hindu Hostel and proper sanitation facilities for girls' hostel in Salt Lake, one of the agitating students, Debnil Paul said. The dean of students was only prevented from leaving the campus during the period but he was not harassed and was free to go outside the chamber whenever he wanted, he said. "We had urged him to stay with us and understand our situation at hostel," Paul said. Another agitating student, Subho Biswas, said, "Dean sir had refused to acknowledge our problems and always maintained that only the vice chancellor is the competent authority to give concrete assurances on the issues, which made us think he is not serious in solving them." The students had on 3 and 4 February gheraoed Lohia due to which she fell ill and was hospitalised. The VC, who was later discharged from hospital, has not come to the campus since then. The superintendent and assistant superintendent of the two hostels had offered to step down citing inability to work in the wake of protests but their resignations have not been accepted yet, a Presidency official said. Oil and gas production may be responsible for a far larger share of the soaring levels of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in the Earths atmosphere than previously thought, new research has found. The findings, published in the journal Nature, add urgency of efforts to rein in methane emissions from the fossil fuel industry, which routinely leaks or intentionally releases the gas into air. Weve identified a gigantic discrepancy that shows the industry needs to, at the very least, improve their monitoring, said Benjamin Hmiel, a researcher at the University of Rochester and the studys lead author. If these emissions are truly coming from oil, gas extraction, production use, the industry isnt even reporting or seeing that right now. Atmospheric concentrations of methane have more than doubled from preindustrial times. A New York Times investigation into super emitter sites last year revealed vast quantities of methane being released from oil wells and other energy facilities instead of being captured. The extent to which fossil fuel emissions, as opposed to natural sources, are responsible for the rising methane levels has long been a matter of scientific debate. Methane seeps from the ocean bed, for instance, and also spews from land formations called mud volcanoes. To shed light on the mystery, researchers at Rochesters department of Earth and environmental studies examined ice cores from Greenland, as well as data from Antarctica stretching back to about 1750, before the industrial revolution. At HoustonChronicle.com: Flaring in Texas reaches levels not seen since 1950s, regulator says They found that methane emissions from natural phenomena were far smaller than estimates used to calculate global emissions. That means fossil-fuel emissions from human activity namely the production and burning of fossil fuels were underestimated by 25% to 40%, the researchers said. The scientists were helped in their analysis by different isotopes found in methane emissions from natural sources, compared to emissions from the production of fossil fuels. Isotopes are versions of an element that have very slight differences, allowing the researchers to differentiate between them. They used a melting chamber with a set of high-power burners to melt more than 2,000 pounds of ice cores to extract and examine air samples from the past. It looked like a little rocket ship, said Vasilii Petrenko, a co-author of the Nature study and an associate professor at Rochester. Think of a rocket engine, but except the flames pointing at the device. Robert Howarth, an Earth system scientist at Cornell University who was not involved with the research, called it a very important study. He said it was consistent with recent research, like a study he published last year that estimated that North American gas production was responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions over the past decade. Emissions from fossil sources are correspondingly larger than many have been estimating, Howarth said. I find it very convincing. Daniel J. Jacob, professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering at Harvard University, also described the findings as significant. Current estimates of methane from geological sources were widely considered too high by atmospheric modelers such as myself, he wrote in an email. But he took issue with the suggestion that emissions from fossil fuel production were larger than previously estimated. Fossil fuel emissions are based on fuel production rates, number of facilities, and direct measurements if available. The natural geological source is irrelevant for these estimates, he said. The disagreement reflects an overall discrepancy between what are called bottom-up measurements of emissions, those from individual oil and gas sites, as opposed to top-down calculations like the ones carried out by the Rochester researchers. Bottom-up measurements can be unreliable because of a lack of data from individual oil and gas sites. With top-down measurements, on the other hand, the exact source of emissions can be hard to pin down. The findings come as oil and gas companies face increased pressure to rein in greenhouse gas emissions from their operations to address rising concerns about climate change. Methane, the main component of natural gas, is of particular concern because it can warm the planet more than 80 times as much as the same amount of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. On top of fossil fuel production, livestock, landfills and other sources linked to human activity also emit methane. TAKING STOCK: Methane emissions to be measured in Permian Basin Last week, British oil giant BP set an ambitious climate change goal, saying it aimed to eliminate or offset by 2050 all planet-warming emissions from its oil and gas production, as well as emissions caused by the burning of the oil and gas it pumps from the ground. The company provided few details on how it would achieve that feat, however. Adding to climate concerns, the Trump administration is moving forward with a plan that effectively eliminates requirements that oil companies install technology to detect and fix methane leaks from oil and gas facilities. By the Environmental Protection Agencys own calculations, the rollback would increase methane emissions by 370,000 tons through 2025, enough to power more than 1 million homes for a year. Petrenko, one of the Rochester studys authors, said that the huge undertaking of studying giant ice cores meant the study relied on a small sampling of data. These measurements are incredibly difficult. So getting more data to help confirm our results would be very valuable, he said. That means theres quite a bit more research to be done. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. Mike Bloomberg, welcome to the big leagues. After spending the first three months of his presidential campaign avoiding contact with his rivals, the former New York mayor stepped out from behind his reported $339 million of advertising and into the middle of political playoff season Wednesday night at a Democratic debate in Las Vegas and got hit hard by every other candidate on the stage. Sen. Bernie Sanders railed on him for his racist support of stop-and-frisk policing policies, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren lit into a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. Im not talking about Donald Trump. Im talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another, Warren said. Warren delivered other blows that are likely to last longer. She pressed Bloomberg about how many former female employees at his media company have signed nondisclosure agreements to resolve sexual harassment and gender discrimination allegations, and she urged him to release them from the agreements. When Bloomberg responded that they were consensual pacts, the Massachusetts senator was scathing. The question is, are the women bound by being muzzled by you and you could release them from that immediately? Warren said. Understand, this is not just a question of the mayors character. This is also a question about electability. Political debates arent usually TV ratings bonanzas, but the voters who are about to cast ballots are watching closely. In New Hampshire, 48% of Democratic voters said the debate held in their state before the Feb. 11 primary helped them decide whom to support. Mario Tama / Getty Images That wont be an issue in Saturdays Nevada caucuses, where Bloomberg isnt on the ballot, but he has pinned his campaign on a strong showing in California and 13 other states that vote on March 3, less than two weeks away. Bloombergs campaign all but acknowledged his subpar performance when it issued a statement after the debate saying he was just warming up and would do better before the next one. Here are some other takeaways from Wednesdays throwdown: Warren unleashed: Warren didnt just lash out at Bloomberg. Unlike past debates, where she stuck to supporting her numerous policy plans, she took a swipe at everyone at one point or another. She derided Buttigiegs health care plan as little more than a slogan that was thought up by his consultants to paper over a thin version of a plan that would leave millions of people unable to afford their health care. Its not a plan, its a PowerPoint. She said Sen. Amy Klobuchars public option proposal is even less its like a Post-it Note. Sanders Medicare for All plan, she said is a good start. But instead of expanding and bringing in more people to help, instead his campaign relentlessly attacks everyone who asks a question or tries to fill in details about how to actually make this work. It will be telling to see if this incarnation of Warren is a more intense version of the self-described fighter who led the polls last fall or the last gasp of a campaign that is deep in the pack in Nevada, according to polling. One encouraging sign for Warren: Her campaign said Wednesday was its best fundraising day ever. It got personal: Standing a few feet from Bloomberg, one of the richest people in America, Sanders didnt back down from his previous comment that billionaires shouldnt exist. We have a grotesque and immoral distribution of wealth and income. Mike Bloomberg owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans. Thats wrong. Thats immoral, Sanders said. What a wonderful country we have, Bloomberg said, referring to Sanders wealth. The best-known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What did I miss here? There was also a sharp edge to the sparring between Klobuchar and former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg over what is more important: her Washington experience or his outside-the-Beltway leadership of a small Midwestern city. I wish everyone was as perfect as you, Pete, Klobuchar said, mocking him for not being in the arena. ... Youve memorized a bunch of talking points. Maybe leading a diverse city that was facing ruin doesnt sound like the arena to you, Buttigieg responded. Im used to senators telling mayors that senators are more important than mayors, but this is the arena, too. Donald Trump was loving this: Republicans loved watching the demolition derby. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway tweeted that she wished it would go on for another hour. After Sanders defended being a democratic socialist, Bloomberg said, I cant think of a way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get re-elected than listening to this conversation. This is ridiculous. Were not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries tried that. It was called communism and it just didnt work. Bloomberg didnt help himself with flippant answers about his wealth. When pressed about why he hasnt released his tax returns yet, an issue Democrats would prefer to turn against Trump, Bloomberg said, I cant go to TurboTax. Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chair, noted that Bloomberg was onstage only because the Democratic Party changed qualifying rules to accommodate a self-funding candidate. Other hopefuls, including all the partys nonwhite candidates, have been pushed from the stage for missing polling or fundraising targets. Democrats saw that their party is willing to change debate rules to benefit a liberal billionaire, McDaniel said, but not minority candidates who ran. Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicles senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli Welcome to historic Harwich home of the Mayflower. The steeple of St. Nicholas Church is seen in the background. The church was first built in 1177, but the original was demolished in 1821. The present church was built on the same location. PHOTO COURTESY OF HARWICH SOCIETY HARWICH There are a lot of connections between Harwich, Mass., and Harwich, Essex, England, including bonding as sister towns with attendant celebrations on both sides of the pond. But the one major connection that remains a mystery is how Cape Cod's Harwich got its name. But the 400th anniversary of the Mayflowers voyage is the perfect opportunity to remember the role that Harwich, England played in that historic event. The vessel that transported 102 Pilgrims from Plymouth to the deep-water harbor of what is now Provincetown was built in Harwich. The master and one-quarter owner of the Mayflower, Christopher Jones, was born in Harwich in 1570 and grew up on Kings Head Street, just off the harbor. The house will be open to visitors as part of the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage (other events are being planned; visit www.mayflower400uk.org/visit/harwich-essex/ for more information). The home of Mayflower Master Christopher Jones on Kings Head Street, just of the harbor in Harwich, Essex, England. The house will be open to visitors under the direction of the Harwich Society for the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage. PHOTO COURTESY OF HARWICH SOCIETY Jones' father, Christopher Jones Sr., was a mariner and a ship owner. The younger Jones built a 240-ton ship, Josain, named after his first wife. The vessel was considered large for that period, and it was used for trading voyages. Records from 1609 show Jones as the master and part owner of the Mayflower; it is thought he traded the Josain for part ownership in the Mayflower. In the following years he moved to London and the Mayflower was used in coastal trade, including the wine trade, returning up the River Thames with wine from France, Spain and Portugal. In the summer of 1620 the Mayflower and Master Jones were chartered to take 65 passengers across the Atlantic. Jones was to meet up with a second ship, the Speedwell, bringing Separatists from Holland, and the two ships embarked from Southampton. But bad weather and structural issues with the Speedwell caused the ships to return to Plymouth where some of the Separatists remained while others climbed aboard the Mayflower. After being battered by gales for 66 days, the Mayflower passengers viewed landCape Codand turned south, hoping to skirt the coast toward the Hudson Valley, but the vessel ran into a heavy chop and shoals off what is now known as Pollock Rip, south and east of Monomoy Island. The decision was made to turn the vessel around and head north. At the turning point, the ship wasn't far from what would later become the town of Harwich. The Massachusetts Bay Colony granted a charter to Harwich on Sept. 14, 1694. The charter was granted for land betwixt the bounds of the town of Yarmouth upon the west and the town of Eastham on the east running from the head of Bound Brook to the head of Namskaket about 10 miles in length and about seven miles in breadth extending from seas to seas. At the time the area was known as Satucket, but the charter established that it would henceforth...called Harwich, and shall have and enjoy all such immunities, privileges and powers as generally other towns within this province have and do by law enjoy. Who proposed Harwich, the name of an old maritime town in Essex County, England, lying about 50 miles northeast of London, as a name for the new town which ought to have been called Sautucket, is not known, wrote Josiah Paine in his book A History of Harwich, Barnstable County, Massachusetts 1620 -1800. The petitioners in their petition to the Provincial Legislature suggested no name for consideration. It is probable, however, that some person of influence in an official position, who, if he had not been a native of the old English seaport, had some high regard for the place, gave the name of the new town, Paine wrote. A pamphlet put out by Harwich's 275th Anniversary Committee in 1969, Harwich, Massachusetts 1694-1969 came to the same conclusion. In 1803, after a very bitter struggle, the north precinct and the south precinct separated. The south precinct retained the name of Harwich, probably named for the seaport of Harwich in England, although no records show why or by whom the name was chosen. The north precinct took the name of Brewster after the early leader, William Brewster, the pamphlet reads. Leonard T. Weaver, a former mayor of Harwich, England and honorary archivist of the North Sea seaport town, writes in his Harwich Papers anthology of material related to the town, contemporary records and the plan of the town clearly show Harwich to have been a medieval new town founded about 1150 AD. Roger Bigod, Lord of the Manor from 1177 to 1220, built a church which is mentioned in his charter to the priory at Earls Colne, dated 1196, This is the first reference to Herewyche, Weaver writes. Selectman J. Norman Gledhill, Harwich, England Mayor Patricia Elleby, Selectman Freeman Allison and Selectman Juliana Peterson participate in the flag swapping ceremony in front of Harwich Town Hall in September 1985. Mayor Elleby was here to initiate the sister town initiate the union between the Harwiches. FILE PHOTO There is speculation the original name of Herewyck meant, army village, named after a Danish encampment located there. Weaver, in the Harwich Papers, displays a chart he describes as Captain John Smiths Map of New England. The chart is said to have been done in 1614 and contained many Indian names for villages along the shorelines. The archivist writes that native names were changed to include Oxford, London, Falmouth, Bristol, Southampton, Hull, Boston, Ipswich, Dartmouth, Sandwich, Shooter Hill, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Norwich, and other English place names. A notation on the map reads, The most remarkable parts thus named by the high and mighty Prince Charles of great Britaine. Weaver says the future Charles I is said to have crossed out the original Indian names and substituted those shown. The south side of Cape Cod is not shown, and thus there are no village names along the shoreline. Could Harwich have been hidden just off the map? What is clear is the strong bond that has developed between the Harwiches over the years. In 1907, Weaver points out, a flagstone that had been located since 1820 and had formed part of the pavement in front of the Guildhall, the seat of government in the historic town, was presented to Charles M. Robbins, a visitor from America. Robbins took it home, and after having it inscribed, placed it at the entrance to the Exchange Building, built in 1884 in Harwich Center. The inscription on the flagstone reads, This flagstone personally obtained from a street in the old borough of Harwich, England was presented as a namesake souvenir to the town of Harwich, Mass in 1907, by Charles M. Robbins of Attleboro, Mass., a native son of this town. The flagstone is now located in the Brooks Academy Museum. Weaver was a guest and grand marshal in the first Cranberry Harvest Festival in 1976. He would not be the last mayor to serve in that capacity. Mayor Patricia Elleby was an honored guest and grand marshal at the festival parade in 1985. A resolution approved in the Harwich annual town meeting that year reads: Therefore, we the town of Harwich in Barnstable County, of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, declare the town of Harwich, Essex, England, shall be known as our Sister Town from this day forward. It was agreed that the council across the pond should reply in the same manner. When Mayor Elleby came that fall to participate in the Cranberry Harvest Festival, she presented a sister town proclamation from her community. Several months later, a contingent from Harwich led by Selectman Juliana Peterson flew to England to reaffirm the sister town relationship. The contingent included Peterson, her husband Russell, Cranberry Harvest Festival President Sheldon Thayer and his wife Carol, school committee member David Tobey and his wife Evelyn, police officers Lee Culver and Walter Ennes, conservation commission member Wayne Coulson and Patricia Smith. Harwich Deputy Mayor Gladys Cooper and her husband, Jack, serve as judges in the Harwich Cranberry Festival Parade in 1985. FILE PHOTO The Cape Cod contingent were honored guests at the annual Mayors Ball at the Cliff Hotel in nearby Divercourt at which gifts were exchanged and sister town commemorations were highlighted. The group was treated to a tour of historic sites, a visit to Master Christopher Jones house on Kings Head Street and a reception in the Guildhall council chambers, the seat of government. At the reception, Peterson said, Your visit to Harwich, Cape Cod, and participation in our Cranberry Harvest Festival added a special event to our history. To preserve that history the board of selectmen chose for the cover of our annual town report a photograph of the exchanging of flags between our sister towns. The sister town ties were renewed in 1998 when chairman of the Board of Selectmen Peter Hughes, Selectman Peter Luddy and Town Administrator Wayne Melville made a visit to the North Sea town. The Harwich contingent was kept busy with events, including dinner with Mayor David McLeod and Mayoress Shirley McLeod and members of the Harwich Society, the extremely active historical group in the community, and former Deputy Mayor Gladys Cooper and her husband Jack. The Cape contingent was greeted upon arrival by Bryans Knights and Anna Rendell-Knights, who were honorary guests in the 1995 Cranberry Harvest Parade. The group also received a tour of the historic sites of Harwich guided by Andy Rutter, secretary of the Harwich Society, who had made several trips to the sister town on Cape Cod over the years. Former assistant town administrator Juell Buckwold in more recent times has made a couple of trips to the the Harwich across the pond, visiting with the Knights and keeping the more than 300-year old Harwich to Harwich bond alive. But the mystery remains as to how the Indian grounds known to the early settlers here as Satucket were given the name Harwich by the General Court of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. What is Australia? We can all agree that it's a desert island that lies just off the southeastern tip of the Eurasian landmass, populated by kangaroos, koalas, and (unfortunately) cockatoos. Start talking about its human inhabitants, and that's where the trouble begins. Who are we, anyway? Something for our elected officials to chew over. Illustration: Matt Golding Credit: In a place where more than a quarter of the people were born overseas, it's amazing that we even speak the same language. Sometimes we don't. But when we do, the language is English, which happens to be the language of a much wetter island that lies just off the northeastern tip of the Eurasian landmass. Go figure. For multiculturalists, the dominance of English institutions in Australia is a problem. For some advocates of Aboriginal sovereignty, it's an invasion. Republicans want to keep the language, but ditch the monarchy. Rugby fans wish the English would just go away, but then cricket fans would miss beating them. What you think of Australia's English heritage probably depends a lot on what you think the Australian community is. For some, Australia is a country, and welcome to it. For others, it's a living patchwork of many peoples, a veritable United Nations of the southern seas. Or if you're old-fashioned, it's a federation of states that trace their origins back to Merrie Olde England, Magna Carta, and maybe (if you squint) the Romans. What have the Romans ever done for us? DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) Of all places, why are 13 people potentially exposed to a viral outbreak being treated and observed in Omaha, Nebraska? Because nearly 20 years ago, a few doctors, public health experts and officials realized that nearly no one was meeting a national need for such specialized care and figured, why not Omaha? We all wanted to build a better mousetrap, said Dr. Phil Smith, an infectious disease expert who led the effort to create the biocontainment unit at Nebraska Medical Center. The biocontainment unit and an adjacent quarantine facility are suddenly a focus of attention because they're housing people evacuated from a cruise ship in Japan. Nearly 60 more people potentially exposed to the virus are also biding their time in quarantine at a Nebraska National Guard base largely because of its proximity to the biocontainment unit, should those under observation develop symptoms needing treatment. When doctors and officials came up with the idea of creating the unit in Omaha in the early 2000s, not everyone was on board. There were a number of skeptics who thought this was overkill," Smith said. Back then, the biggest concern was anthrax attacks and severe acute respiratory syndrome, more commonly known as SARS. Smith said he and others were especially worried about health care workers infected while treating patients with SARS and wanted a place where staff could train more effectively and more safely treat patients during an outbreak. They saw another advantage in being situated near the sprawling Offutt Air Force Base, given that the military typically would be part of the response to large-scale disease outbreaks. The state health department supported the idea and offered some funding, and so did the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nebraska Medical Center ponied up enough space for five double rooms in a building with its own air-handling system. The total cost was roughly $1 million, which Smith said in modern terms is amazingly cheap." Even after the CDC commissioned the center in 2005, some still questioned devoting so much space to the treatment of patients who might never arrive. Such criticism was largely quelled when the unit was used to effectively treat an American doctor infected with the deadly Ebola virus in 2014. Earlier this year, the University of Nebraska Medical Center opened a 20-unit quarantine center within a block of the biocontainment unit, built at a cost of nearly $20 million. It's this center that is now housing a dozen people who were removed from the Diamond Princess cruise ship and flown back to the U.S. Those people are isolated in individual rooms while being monitored for signs of COVID-19. Theyre very nice rooms," said Shelly Schwedhelm, a nurse and executive director of emergency management and biopreparedness at Nebraska Medicine, the health network that includes the Nebraska Medical Center. They have Wi-Fi, they have TV, theyve got a small refrigerator. Just a lot of the amenities youd have if you were going to a hotel with a lot of engineering controls. For now they can't leave the rooms, but Schwedhelm said it's possible they'll be allowed into the halls after more testing. Seeing the focus on a center he and others dreamed up, Smith said he feels a great sense of pride. It vindicates all the work and the lobbying we had to do to keep the idea viable," he said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 14 children, pregnant woman among 32 killed in Cameroon attack as civil war rages on Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A pregnant woman and 14 children were among 32 killed in an attack Friday in Cameroons civil war-ridden English-speaking region. While the military has been blamed, an Army spokesperson has refuted claims that the military blatantly killed civilians. The attack took place in the village of Ntumbo, in Cameroons Northwest region, according to United Nations official James Nunan. Nunan heads the Buea sub-office for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Nunan told the media that several victims were burned to death. Additionally, he said an unknown number of residents were injured and around 600 have fled from the village. While initial reports suggested that 22 were killed in Ntumbo, Cameroonian activist and human rights lawyer Felix Agbor Nkongho told CNN on Monday that the death toll has been raised to 32. "The military officers responsible for these heinous crimes must be brought to justice," Nkongho, who works with the Centre for Human Rights and Democracy in Africa, said. The attack comes as Cameroons Anglophone region has suffered from violence and conflict that emerged after English-speaking communities began protesting in 2016. Many in the English-speaking regions felt their voices were not being fairly represented in the French-speaking central government. The Cameroonian military has been accused in the last few years of attacking farming communities in southern Cameroon supportive of separatist efforts, killing citizens and burning villages. The military has also been accused of encouraging radical Fulani herders to carry out attacks on separatist communities. As both the military and opposition have been accused of violating the rights of civilians, as many as 3,000 people have been killed and over 700,000 displaced as a result of the conflict. A resident of Ntumbo told CNN that security forces came to the village looking for separatists and burned houses in the village. She said that nine of her family members were killed. "My sister and her family were killed in their sleep as the military torched houses because they suspected that separatist fighters were hiding in the village, the resident, Rignyu Solange, told the news outlet. I want the perpetrators of this act to be severely punished. A witness told Al Jazeera that a total of nine houses were burned. According to AFP, the Movement for the Rebirth of Cameroon, one of two main opposition groups in Cameroon, declared in a statement that the dictatorial regime [and] the supreme head of the security and defense forces are chiefly responsible for these crimes. Efi Tembon, a ministry leader who fled Cameroon in 2018 after he spoke to the U.S. Congress about rights violations committed by the Cameroonian military, also called for the military to be held accountable in a Facebook post. Sources told Tembon that a pregnant woman, her husband, and their five children were among those killed in Ntumbo. Meanwhile, sources added that a grandmother and all her grandchildren were among the dead. Some of the victims were burned by soldiers, Tembon wrote. I have seen some of the gruesome pictures. How can the world be silent as women and children face such a terrible horror? Cameroon Army spokesperson Atonfack Guemo disputed the narrative. According to CNN, Guemo said that only one woman and her four children were killed because they got caught in the crossfire between separatists and security forces. Guemo said that a team of six soldiers killed seven separatists. However, Guemo reasoned that houses were set on fire because fuel containers were struck by gunfire as fighting continued into the night. "This caused the death of five persons; a woman and four children, contrary to social media reports," Guemo asserted. As a result of military operations in the Northwest region, the U.N. estimates that as many as 5,500 people were displaced in less than a week during mid-December. Over 670,000 people are internally displaced within Cameroon, while over 60,000 have fled to neighboring Nigeria, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. Cameroon began prosecutions last year against seven soldiers who were seen in a video that drew widespread outrage online. The video showed soldiers murdering two women and two children. Cameroon was added to Open Doors USAs World Watch List of countries where Christian persecution is most severe in 2020. In 2019, two Bible translators were killed in their homes during overnight attacks on separatist-supporting communities. Last November, President Trump stripped Cameroon of its trade benefits over accusations that the military has committed human rights abuses against civilians. Cameroon was removed as a beneficiary of the African Growth and Opportunity Act. The 2000 legislation assists countries in Sub-Saharan Africa by giving them privileged access to the U.S. market. I am taking this step because I have determined that the government of Cameroon currently engages in gross violations of internationally recognized human rights, contravening the eligibility requirements of section 104 of the (African Growth and Opportunity Act), Trump wrote a letter to Congress at the time. First published in The Sydney Morning Herald on February 22, 1990 The lines on the well-worn face of this old man of the sea may be etched a little deeper these days, but he is no less passionate about the world than he ever was. Jacques Cousteau with Senator Richardson and Barry Jones at Jervis Bay. Credit:DAVID BARTHO And, in his opinion, if there is one place left on earth that can and must be saved from man's destructive hands, it is the great southern land mass of Antarctica. Jacques Cousteau, the 79-year-old French explorer and conservationist, arrived in Sydney yesterday after spending the morning at Jervis Bay with the Federal Minister for the Environment, Senator Richardson, and the Minister for Science, Mr Barry Jones. Mobile police teams dealing with such cases have been set up in all regional centers. Some 142,000 cases of domestic violence were reported to the police in Ukraine in 2019. "In 2019, 142,000 reports of cases of domestic violence were received. In 2019, 107,000 protocols were drawn up under the article 'domestic violence,' about 16,000 of urgent prohibiting orders were issued, while 72,834 persons were put on preventive lists," Deputy Interior Minister Kateryna Pavlichenko said, speaking at the international forum "Ukraine on the path to overcoming domestic and gender-based violence," an UNIAN correspondent reports. Read alsoUkraine police investigating 1,500 criminal cases related to domestic violence At the same time, the official says, mobile police teams dealing with cases of domestic violence have been set up in all large cities across Ukraine. "Mobile teams to combat cases of domestic violence are operating in all regional centers, as well as towns such as Bila Tserkva, Kramatorsk and Berdyansk. And today they are already proving their effectiveness. We're now considering increasing the number of such mobile teams. At the same time, the National Police are intensifying work of all units involved in tackling domestic violence," she said. Pavlichenko also stresses due attention being given to measures to prevent cases of domestic violence. As UNIAN reported earlier, in September 2019, the police created mobile groups to combat domestic violence. In 2020, it is planned to create such mobile patrols in all cities with populations over 50,000. In addition, a hotline will be launched in Ukraine for victims of human trafficking, domestic violence, gender-based violence, violence against children, or those facing a threat of such violence. LOS ANGELES, Feb. 20, 2020 -- Treating stroke patients in specialized ambulances speeds treatment and reduces patients' disability, according to late breaking science presented today at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2020. The conference, Feb. 19-21 in Los Angeles, is a world premier meeting for researchers and clinicians dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health. The Berlin Prehospital Or Usual Delivery (B_PROUD) trial investigated if prehospital treatment in a mobile stroke unit could improve patient outcomes compared to usual care, which was emergency transportation in a conventional ambulance and in-hospital treatment. Patients (total 749, average age 73, 46% females) were assigned to treatment based on the availability of three mobile stroke units in the metropolitan area of Berlin, Germany, and compared with patients (total 794, average age 74, 48% females) who received conventional care. Mobile stroke units are ambulances staffed with emergency medicine neurologists and equipped with a CT scanner and a lab designed to enable specific stroke treatment at the scene. Prehospital treatment consisted of administering medications to dissolve the clot blocking blood flow in or to the brain (ischemic stroke). Timing is key because the clot-busting medication alteplase should be administered within 4.5 hours of stroke symptoms. Researchers found that: 60% of patients assigned to the mobile stroke unit received clot-busting treatment with alteplase if a mobile stroke unit was available, compared to 48% of patients who received conventional treatment in the hospital; the time to treatment was shortened by an average of 20 minutes when a mobile stroke unit was dispatched; and the use of a mobile stroke unit reduced the likelihood and severity of disability and death at three months by 26%. "While we had anticipated better outcomes in the patients treated in the mobile stroke units, we are amazed by the magnitude of the effects," said lead study author Heinrich Audebert, M.D., professor in the department of neurology and Center for Stroke Research at Charite Universitatsmedizin in Berlin. "It is obvious that clot-busting treatment is most effective if it is applied in the ultra-early phase of stroke - ideally within the first or 'golden hour' of symptom onset." Since treatment within the first hour of symptom onset happens rarely in conventional care, Audebert said health care providers should consider ways to optimize treatment so it can begin while in route to the hospital. "Stroke treatment is more effective the earlier it starts," he said. "Just waiting until the patient arrives at the hospital is not enough anymore." ### The list of study authors and disclosures are available in the abstract. The study was funded by the German Research Foundation and the Ministry of Education and Research. Additional Resources: VIDEO Perspective from Mitchell S. V. Elkind, M.D., M.S., FAHA, FAAN, president elect of the American Heart Association, may be downloaded on the right column of the release link along with any additional, available multimedia. https://newsroom.heart.org/news/fast-treatment-via-mobile-stroke-unit-reduced-survivor-disability?preview=80dd6234601eb04674f1363dc2d1f94c AHA News Release: Mobile stroke units could expedite treatment and improve patient outcomes in urban areas Stroke Treatment For more news at ASA International Stroke Conference 2020, follow us on Twitter @HeartNews #ISC20. Statements and conclusions of study authors that are presented at American Stroke Association scientific meetings are solely those of the study authors and do not necessarily reflect Association policy or position. The Association makes no representation or warranty as to their accuracy or reliability. The Association receives funding primarily from individuals; foundations and corporations (including pharmaceutical, device manufacturers and other companies) also make donations and fund specific Association programs and events. The Association has strict policies to prevent these relationships from influencing the science content. Revenues from pharmaceutical and device corporations are available at https://www.heart.org/en/about-us/aha-financial-information. The American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference (ISC) is the world's premier meeting dedicated to the science of stroke and brain health. ISC 2020 will be held February 19-21 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in California. The 2 -day conference features more than 1,600 compelling scientific presentations in 21 categories that emphasize basic, clinical and translational science for health care professionals and researchers. These science and other clinical presentations will provide attendees with a better understanding of stroke and brain health to help improve prevention, treatment and outcomes for the more than 800,000 Americans who have a stroke each year. Stroke is the fifth leading cause of death and a leading cause of serious, long-term disability in the U.S. Worldwide, cerebrovascular accidents (stroke) are the second leading cause of death and the third leading cause of disability, according to the World Health Organization. Engage in the International Stroke Conference on social media via #ISC20. About the American Stroke Association The American Stroke Association is a relentless force for a world with fewer strokes and longer, healthier lives. We team with millions of volunteers and donors to ensure equitable health and stroke care in all communities. We work to prevent, treat and beat stroke by funding innovative research, fighting for the public's health, and providing lifesaving resources. The Dallas-based association was created in 1998 as a division of the American Heart Association. To learn more or to get involved, call 1-888-4STROKE or visit strokeassociation.org. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. An exchange of prisoners offers a glimmer of hope on the Stockholm track, while tensions rise in the Yemeni south against the Saudi military presence Local Yemeni and UN sources confirm the largest prisoner exchange deal is imminent in Yemen, including 1,400 prisoners of war between the two sides. However, the details and prisoner names are still unknown. A Yemeni human rights source told Al-Ahram Weekly there is a possibility that prominent figures such as former defence minister General Mahmoud Al-Sebehi, or the presidents brother, General Nasser Mansour Hadi, or renowned leading figure in the Yemeni Reform Party Mohamed Qahtan, will be released. Before the two sides exchanged prisoner lists, sources asserted Brigadier General Khaled Abdullah, operations commander in the governments Fifth Military Zone, will be released based on mediation by a Houthi leader five years after Abdullahs detention in Sanaa. The source added that other predictions include the release of the crew of the Tornado fighter jet that Houthis shot down in Al-Jawf province on Friday, but there is no confirmation. What is certain is that among the prisoners are Saudi and Sudanese nationals, and the exchange will include one or two of four leading figures. Riyadhs efforts with the UN mission and Red Cross for the release of the Tornado crew accelerated the prisoner exchange deal that had been on the backburner for a long time, due to obstacles over the past 14 months since the signing of the Stockholm agreement which regulates prisoner exchanges between the two sides. The Chairman of the Prisoner Exchange Committee on the Houthi side, Abul-Qaderah Al-Mortada, said the prisoner exchange will be facilitated by the UN and Red Cross, and will include some 900 Houthi members and 520 supporters of the internationally-recognised government. Al-Mortada said the next round of talks will begin in the Jordanian capital Amman in the last week of March, will include the exchange of the remains of those killed in battle, and the next phase of prisoner exchanges. Meanwhile, UN Envoy Martin Griffiths arrived in Cairo for talks with Arab League Secretary General Ahmed Abul-Gheit. A statement after the meeting focused on the prisoner exchange deal and expressed the Arab Leagues optimism that this exchange will be a step on the path to de-escalation in Yemen and contribute to increasing the possibility of a peaceful settlement of the Yemeni conflict. However, it is likely the two issues will remain separate. Abdel-Aziz Al-Majidi, a Yemeni political analyst, told Al-Ahram Weekly: All parties are dealing with the prisoner exchange as a political issue, not a humanitarian one. We should not assume the step, especially by Houthi militias, is a retreat in escalation even if the exchange takes place. They want to uphold the Stockholm agreement especially since the global community is pushing for this, but in actuality they do not want to implement it and thus are dealing with it as piecemeal and not as a comprehensive political accord. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan told the Munich Security Conference last week there are relations and contacts with Houthis through backdoors or mediators, and dialogue continues despite Houthis claiming responsibility for the attack on Saudi oil refineries ordered by Iran. This showed Saudi Arabias flexibility, but later tensions escalated on both sides when the coalition bombed the site of the downing of the fighter jet in Jawf, killing and injuring dozens of residents. Local reports in Yemen revealed fears that the Riyadh agreement signed by the government and the Transitional Council will collapse, amid reports there are undisclosed tensions between the Transitional Council in the south and Saudi Arabia. Tensions surfaced this week as activists went on protests against Saudi Arabia in Aden. Although this is not the first time Riyadh is publicly criticised in Yemen, it is the first time since the withdrawal of the UAE from Aden and handing the city over to Saudi military command. The Transitional Council has also escalated rhetoric against President Hadi. Hani Bin Breik, vice chairman of the council, said history will remember Hadi as Yemens worst president, and demanded that he stops the meddling of the Brothers (meaning the Reform Party, or Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood) which the Transitional Council views as its arch nemesis. Tensions also escalated due to the ongoing rash of assassinations of security personnel, especially in the military, without any party claiming responsibility for the killing spree which has swept across Aden. Most recently, the assassination of Abu Ragheb Al-Yahri, the commander of security positions in the east of the Security Belt Forces. Meanwhile, there was escalation in the southern province of Al-Mahrah, along the border with Oman, against the Saudi military presence there. A quarrel erupted between forces active in Al-Mahrah and Saudi troops as they crossed a military location, triggering a battle that eventually involved Apache planes. Al-Mahrah residents believe Saudi Arabia is increasing its security positions and locations along the provinces coast, which some politicians and activists view as another attempt by Riyadh to take control of the area against their will. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia protests there is direct incitement by regional powers against it in the south. *A version of this article appears in print in the 20 February, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly. Search Keywords: Short link: Ancient India had globally reputed universities whereas the institutions started here during British rule were limited to the needs of the colonial requirements and had no concern for the welfare and skill development of the masses, opined, Tamil Nadu Governor, Banwarilal Purohit. He was speaking at the inauguration session of Gyanotsav 2020, an education conclave organized by the RSS affiliated Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas (SSUN) at the National College in Tiruchy. Banwarilal Purohit said, "In ancient times, India had global institutions like the Takshashila and Nalanda University. They attracted scholars from all over the world. However, with the passage of time these world-renowned institutions declined and the British started institutions after them modeled on what was happening in Europe were limited to their needs." In the conclave, more than 65 institutions from all over the state participated. Over the next two days, representatives of these institutions would conduct discussions and presentations on various ways they could use to impart value-added education to their students. Further speaking at the event, the Governor emphasized on the need to be religious minded. He said, " Irrespective of any religion you follow, Hindu, Christianity or Islam it is important to be religious minded and make sure you always thank god. If you are religious minded, you will avoid committing sin, as you know that the god is watching." The Governor also appreciated the efforts made by India after independence in higher education. He quoted the statistics that India had 993 Universities and 39,931 colleges and also appreciated the Tamil Nadu reputation of enjoying a high gross enrollment ratio. Tamil Nadu has a gross enrollment ratio of 49.3 per cent compared to a national average of 25.8 per cent. Atul Kothari, National Secretary of Shiksha Sanskriti Utthan Nyas also participated in the event. In the event, calls were also made for the public and government to work together to implement the Draft National Education Policy, as it would help in reviving the lost glory of the Indian higher education. Dubai, Feb 20 : A UAE-based Indian cleaner has gone on trial in Dubai after he allegedly stole as many as 86 expensive watches worth over 8.3 million dirhams ($2 million), a media report said on Thursday. The 26-year-old cleaner, who is currently detained, is accused of stealing the valuables from a watch and jewellery shop where he worked, the Khaleej Times said in the reported. Two Pakistani men (cousins), aged 44 and 25, both fugitives, were also on trial in absentia for possession of the stolen watches. A complaint was filed by the shop's owner on January 6. "On December 25 last year, I was in one of my shops when an Indian salesman brought to my attention that a watch, worth 30,000 dirhams, was found in its box in the trash bin," the owner said in the complaint. According to the owner, they then checked the shop's CCTV cameras which captured the cleaner taking the watch, putting it in a box and dropping it in the trash bin so he could smuggle it outside the shop later. When the owner asked the defendant about the theft in the presence of the latter's brother who was asked to come to Dubai from India, the cleaner confessed he had stolen two watches worth 250,000 and 270,000 dirhams. He sold each of them to a Pakistani man for Dh10,000 and claimed he was not yet paid for the second one. During the public prosecution investigation, the defendant admitted to stealing the watches and then selling them to his two accomplices. The opposition Shiromani Aklai Dal on Thursday held a protest outside the Punjab Assembly over the issue of rising power tariff. The protest came ahead of the start of the Budget session of the Punjab Assembly. Leading the protest, senior Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia accused the Congress government of putting additional burden on power consumers. "Power is costliest in Punjab at this moment," claimed Majithia and added that when the SAD-BJP left the government, the power rate was much cheaper than what was now under the Congress-led regime. The opposition party also brought some families, who had received steep power bills, to the protest site. "The Congress had promised to provide electricity at Rs 5 per unit. But now, people are being charged Rs 9-10 per unit which was exorbitant, " said Akali leader Parambans Singh Romana. The Akalis also accused the Congress ofstriking "underhand deals" with the management of private thermal plants which resulted in a loss or Rs 4,100 crore to the state exchequer. Power rates in Punjab were hiked by 36 paise a unit from January 1 for domestic consumers. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) By William Schwartz | Published on 2020/02/19 One major factor behind the success of "Crash Landing on You" is the unusual authenticity the drama manages to exert in regards to its North Korean characters. This fidelity to such minor factors as dialect has also been praised by actual North Korean defectors. On February 19th, a segment on the YouTube channel of YouTuber Dave invited defectors on to share which actors in "Crash Landing on You" they felt did the best job. Advertisement Yang Kyung-won, Yoo Su-bin, and Lee Sin-young, in that order, were ranked as the three best. That these specific actors would be selected is of little surprise, as they had also enjoyed the most popular praise for their performances while "Crash Landing on You" was still airing. The omission of leading star Hyun Bin was notable, though easily explained. The defectors explained that Hyun Bin's character, though heroic, was inherently unrealistic, and that no people like him existed in the North Korean military. This comment likely was less a political statement and more a reference to his character's inherently bombastic actions. Kim Soo-hyun of "Secretly and Greatly" fame, who reprised that role in a cameo on "Crash Landing on You", was similarly deemed unrealistic. The defectors also had praiseful remarks for the depiction of department stores in "Crash Landing on You", as well as the drama's accurate depiction of North Korean fashion. Their impression of the drama's depiction of living quarters was more negative, however, as they described real North Korean homes as being more about practical function, rather than aesthetic form. Written by William Schwartz ___________ "Crash Landing on You" is directed by Lee Jeong-hyo, written by Park Ji-eun, and features Hyun Bin, Son Ye-jin, Seo Ji-hye, Kim Jung-hyun, Kim Sun-young, Kim Jung-nan. Broadcasting information in Korea: 2019/12/14~2020/02/16, Sat, Sun 21:00 on tvN. New Delhi: Protesters agitating against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and National Population Register (NPR) being addressed by the Supreme Court appointed interlocutors, senior lawyers Sanjay Hegde and Sa Image Source: IANS News New Delhi: To find a solution for the ongoing Shaheen Bagh protest, the Supreme Court appointed interlocutors, senior lawyers Sanjay Hegde and Sadhna Ramachandran reach Delhi's Shaheen Bagh to talk to the protesters agitating against the Citizenship Image Source: IANS News New Delhi, Feb 20 : Senior Advocate Sanjay Hegde and lawyer Sadhana Ramachandran on Thursday met the Shaheen Bagh protesters for the second consecutive day on Thursday, though no headway seemed in sight to break the deadlock over reopening of the blocked stretch in south Delhi. Both lawyers -- who along with former top bureaucrat Wajahat Habibullah were appointed by the Supreme Court to talk to the protesters -- told the women protesters in clear terms that a peaceful solution would have to be arrived at through talks or else the government could take steps. Hegde said the protesters fear that if they moved out from the spot, nobody would hear them out on the CAA. However, he assured them that nobody will be able to suppress their voice till the Supreme Court was there. The protesters reiterated their stand that they would disperse if the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act was withdrawn by the Modi government. They said they would appeal to Prime Minister Narendra Modi to either include all religions in the ambit of the new law or scrap it altogether. They insisted that the Shaheen Bagh protest should not be viewed in isolation, but symbolic of all the protests occurring across the country on the CAA, National Register of Citizens and National Population Register. The protesters said they had been forced to come out on the streets to protect the rights of the people. Accusing the government of trying to remove them from the protest site through legal and illegal methods, the women protesters pointed out to the police action against those who had raised their voice against the controversial law. Asserting that both sides have to come up with a solution to the road blockade through cooperation, Ramachandran told the protesters that the dialogue had to be taken forward sincerely and that the apex court was already seized of the CAA issue. She pointed out that the panel had already been blessed by the grandmothers or 'dadis' leading the protest on the spot since December 15, 2019. She cautioned that if the talks did not lead to any solution, they will report back to the Supreme Court, and the buck will then pass on to the government thereafter. However, she insisted, there was not issue which could not be resolved. Sanjay Hegde, on his part, tried to reason that the court was of the view that the protest should be held at such a place which does not inconvenience the public. Ramachandran told the protesters that given the noise levels at the protest site, talks with them could not be held in a proper manner. She asked the protesters to make small groups so that both interlocutors could talk to them. Both mediators later told the protesters that they would proceed to inspect the area, asking two-three protesters to accompany them to tell them which roads were currently closed to traffic and which all could be reopened. The interlocutors had met the protesters for over two hours on Wednesday also, but the meeting remained inconclusive. The mediators had then said that they would return for more talks on Thursday. The scene at the newly opened Maison Danel in San Francisco seems almost ripped out of a European travel guide: a gleaming, showstopping chandelier hangs over pastry cases packed with madeleines, pain aux raisins and croissants of all kinds, as three-tiered stands of pastries and finger sandwiches adorn the tables that draw diners in for afternoon tea. Its not Europe, but its close. This is Danel and David de Betelus own version of the patisseries and salon de thes they frequented in their travels, as the couple (and co-owners) behind Maison Danel explained. "We wanted to create an elegant and chic interior that's reminiscent of all the beautiful tea salons that we visited not just in Paris, but throughout Europe, including Vienna and Danel's hometown, Biarritz [France], in the Basque country," David said. "[There are] lots of beautiful tea rooms and we also want it to be a reflection of our own tastes and personal style, as well." Unique touches from Danel's personal collection of vases and antiques permeate the space "If you look at our house right now, it's pretty empty," David said, laughing as well as bits and pieces from their 2015 wedding. The blues and silvers throughout are meant to reflect the colors of the sea and were initially part of David and Danels wedding color palette. The couple also included the monogram from their wedding as part of the logo for the restaurant. Maison Danels food offerings stretch from breakfast to lunch, along with a weekend brunch. Expect classic French dishes such as the croque monsieur (and madame), seasonal tarts and quiches, duck confit, and even a non-traditional eggs benedict on the brunch menu, among other things. READ ALSO: Brown Sugar Kitchen's Tanya Holland is opening new cafe The owners also brought on pastry chef Adrien Chabot, a personal friend who moved to San Francisco from Paris. He'll be in charge of the Viennoiserie pastry program, from savory ham and cheese croissants to oreillete abricot, a folded, flaky pastry with an apricot filling. Also expect a rotating list of the always-popular macaron; the current flavor is a gluten-free chocolate macaron with a bright dash of yuzu, made with house-ground almond flour and no artificial colors. (See a selection of the pastries offered at Maison Danel in the gallery above.) Afternoon tea service offers patrons a taste of a variety of pastries and finger sandwiches, alongside the requisite pot of tea (with an extensive selection of choices). The tea service can quickly become extravagant, with upgrade options including a half bottle of cremant champagne and 1 oz. of caviar. Despite the grandeur of the tea and that chandelier centerpiece when you walk in David still wants the place to feel accessible to all. "We also want [Maison Danel] to not be stuffy either," David said. "It's not like Versailles where you have to watch what you're wearing and what you're doing. It's not like you drink your tea with your pinkie up in the air. It's much more French countryside, if you will: more relaxed, but still chic and not so formal." Maison Danel is the couples followup to their first restaurant, Baker Street Bistro, which they took over in 2009. And while the Tenderloin isn't the part of town one would imagine as a destination for afternoon tea, David said hes felt welcomed to the neighborhood, even as they worked to transform three former storefronts into the sprawling 3,000-square-foot space where Maison Danel now lives on Polk Street. "It's been a big dream of ours and we've gotten so many people stopping by on the street, popping in, saying, 'Hey, when are you opening?' David said. And so I just feel really part of a community, and people are welcoming us with open arms to be part of this story of revitalizing the lower Polk corridor." SF BURGER INSPECTOR: Violet's stands up to a surly chef's challenge Still, if youre wondering if theres a market for afternoon tea and picture-perfect croissants, judging by the afternoon crowd on Maison Danels opening day, there are people who want to experience that refined and relaxed feeling of sipping tea with a friend. "Whenever we travel to France, we'll always go to different patisseries because that's the kind of experience that I love, David said. And [I] also love tea, love desserts it's a combination of all those things that just make me really miss [the tea salon] kind of experience and not being able to have that here in San Francisco ... it's just been a dream of ours to bring that here." Maison Danel, located at 1030 Polk St. in San Francisco, is open starting Tuesday, Feb. 18. Their hours of operation are Tuesday through Sunday, from 7am to 7pm and closed on Monday. Dianne de Guzman is a Digital Editor at SFGATE. Email: dianne.deguzman@sfgate.com. Twitter: @diannedeguzman The Indian market is more in sync with mobile markets of advanced countries like the UK, Japan, and South Korea, where there are fewer players - three to four. As India stares at the possibility of becoming a three-player mobile telecom market in case Vodafone-Idea shuts operations, questions have been raised on whether this will lead to concentration of pricing power and if this will be detrimental for consumers in the long run. Bharti Airtel chief executive officer (CEO) Gopal Vittal just last week said publicly that India should have three private mobile service providers (excluding BSNL-MTNL) as it was good from all perspectives - investments, jobs and reputation of the industry. He is not off the mark if global trends are anything to go by. Emerging markets across the world have more than four mobile players in their countries, even though they handle a much smaller number of customers than Indian operators. However, the Indian market is more in sync with mobile markets of advanced countries like the UK, Japan, and South Korea, where there are fewer players - three to four. Brazil boasts of seven players jostling for 205 million customers - an average of 30 million customers each. In India four firms handle 1.1 billion subscribers - an average of 275 million. In Indonesia, seven operators support just a third of the number of users handled by Indian operators. And Thailand has six players for 93.8 million customers, or an average of 15 million per player. However, emerging markets have some commonalties - a large chunk of their subscribers are on prepaid, unlike advanced markets where postpaid subscribers are the norm. Consolidation, especially after Reliance Jios entry and the subsequent price war, has shrunk the number of players from a peak of 16 to just four, which could reduce to three. Experts say, though the Indian market looks more akin to advanced markets in terms of number of players, those firms handle a fraction of subscribers, who pay far more than in India. So, for instance, the three mobile players in Japan support a mere 191.5 million customers. In fact, the customer base of each of the top three players individually - Bharti Airtel, Vodafone-Idea and Reliance Jio - is far higher than the total mobile customer base of all the players in Japan. Japan, though, is nearly a 100 per cent postpaid market with a SIM penetration of 99 per cent. India is exactly the opposite - a predominantly pre-paid market (87 per cent) where customers are not sticky and have lower average revenue per user (ARPU) than postpaid customers. And SIM penetration at 67 per cent (large rural markets are untapped), means that there is still a large upside to bring in net customer additions. The trend is also reflected in other advanced markets. For instance, in Germany, there are only three players for 111 million customers. In the UK, four telcos fight it out for 73 million customers. And South Korea has four players for 60.4 million mobile subscribers. Even in the US, the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint was stuck for many years over fears that it would stifle competition, but it got court clearance on Tuesday. However, even after it has been cleared US will continue to have a three big players Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile and a new player in Dish apart from TracFone amongst others supporting 351 million customers. Many analysts, however, said the Chinese model of keeping the number of players limited - it has only three players for 1.6 billion customers - made each of them a behemoth. Says a top telecom company executive in India: In China, all these companies are owned by the government and supported by them for strategic interests of the country. "For instance, the government in order to push 5G has decided to give 5G spectrum to a fourth player, China Broadcasting Network, so that they win the race of 5G against US. "In India, three out of four are private players. Its a different ball game. Rudy Junior Eugene Fritch, Jr., 87, formerly of Table Rock, passed away Feb. 17, 2020. He was born on November 20, 1932, rural Table Rock, to Rudy Sr. and Esther (Boehmer) Fritch. He was raised on the family farm near Table Rock and attended District #32 (The Rock School) country school. Junior graduated from Humboldt High School in 1950. He served in the U.S Marine Corps during the Korean Conflict. On October 23, 1954, he was united in marriage to Dorothy Hunzeker. He was a farmer and rural mail carrier in the Table Rock area from 1980-2000. He served on the Pawnee County Rural Water District for 31 years, Table Rock School Board from 1970-1974, ASCS Soil Mapper in the 60's and 70's and sexton of the Bohemian Cemetery for many years. Junior was a member of the Table Rock American Legion Post #289, Pawnee VFW and the ZCBJ Lodge. On February 16, in Rajasthans Nagaur, two Dalit men were assaulted, stripped, and tortured on suspicion of theft in a vehicle service centre. Videos of the incident depict the brutal, almost unspeakable, nature of the violence, even as the men are seen begging for mercy. The police registered a first information report three days later once the video went viral. Seven men have been booked under a range of provisions of the Indian Penal Code, and the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, and five of them have been arrested. The episode highlights two disturbing issues. For one, it reflects the continued threats faced by Dalits 70 years after the Constitution promised right to equality and non-discrimination on the basis of caste. While the crime may have had its roots in suspicion of theft, the element of caste prejudice in the violence is unmistakable. Indeed, reported atrocities against Dalits have only grown across the country. This is happening at a time when Dalits have begun finding a voice, and are more assertive in public spaces. This, in itself, has provoked a backlash by those who continue to hold on to hierarchical and discriminatory practices. A strong message that the State will not tolerate this violence and come down with all its might on such acts is essential to deter caste atrocities. The Rajasthan governments commitment to take the case to a logical conclusion is welcome. The second issue is the trend of individuals taking the law into their own hands. This has been witnessed in personal disputes, for political and ideological reasons, and in inter-community tensions. Rajasthan, in particular, has been the site of brutal lynchings in recent years, where the accused have often got away. This shows that the State is unable to maintain its monopoly over force; it is either weak or unwilling to act against crimes and establish a strong culture of deterrence; and justice has been elusive. This must change; Nagaur must not happen again. Best Places to Work Award The Business Intelligence Group announced today the winners of its 2020 Best Places to Work award program, which identifies the organizations doing all they can to improve performance by challenging their employees in fun and engaging work environments. The Business Intelligence Group is honoring these companies for helping their employees accelerate their careers, knowledge and performance. First, nominations for the Best Places to Work award were submitted and then employees of the nominated organizations were asked to complete an online survey to rate their overall satisfaction and company performance. This years overall winner is Netskope. The Netskope security cloud provides unrivaled visibility and real-time data and threat protection when accessing cloud services, websites, and private apps from anywhere, on any device. Netskope understands the cloud, and delivers data-centric security from one of the world's largest and fastest security networks, empowering the largest organizations in the world with the right balance of protection and speed they need to enable business velocity and secure their digital transformation journey. The company is based in Santa Clara, Calif., with offices in San Francisco, Seattle, New York, St. Louis, Sao Paulo, London, Paris, Tokyo, Singapore, Sydney and India. As Netskope has grown since we launched the company in 2012, we have always instilled the idea company-wide that our team is our competitive advantage, and true differentiator, said Sanjay Beri, CEO and Founder of Netskope. Our culture is positioned around empowering employees on an everyday basis, encouraging entrepreneurship and allowing freedom to unlock capabilities. Our amazing culture and team are what allows us to be successful, and the entire Netskope family is honored to be recognized as overall winner in the prestigious Business Intelligence Groups Best Places to Work award for 2020. It is clear that employee performance and engagement are keys to the success of all of our winners and finalists, said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer of Business Intelligence Group. The Best Places to Work awards program puts the power of determining winners into the hands of employees, and they have spoken. Congratulations to all of the winners. 2020 Best Places to Work Award Winners Global Enterprise Synechron Multinational Enterprise Jumio Large Business Tupelo Honey Hospitality Corp. Medium-Size Business Acceleration Partners Astute Best Doctors Insurance Federal Competitiveness & Statistics Authority Gebruder Weiss Hyperscience Lastline, Inc. SADA Sage Inacct Service Express Sisense Sitetracker Thycotic Wesley Financial Group, LLC Small Business 3 Media Web Arch Insurance - RoamRight Arkadium Boardable Brandfolder Donde Search Dynamic Systems Ekos Juice Technology AG Makers Nutrition Nanoramic Laboratories Peak Enterprises Corp. ReversingLabs Trust Point Very YouDecide A small group of companies were also named finalists in the 2020 Best Places to Work awards, and they are 3Play Media, Inc., AllyO, Aryballe, Botkeeper, Eight Sleep, Lola.com, MENTIS INC, OneLogin, PebblePost, SoClean, Inc. and TimeXtender. 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 and business award programs, business executivesthose with experience and knowledgejudge the programs. 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. Ty Marceaux took a puff from his electronic cigarette and pointed to a small corner of his Heights vape shop once teeming with vape cartridges offering sweet flavors such as mango, grape and pineapple. Earlier this month, the manager of the shop, Rock N Roll It, was forced to stop selling fruit- and candy-flavored nicotine cartridges under new Food and Drug Administration regulations aimed at curbing the rise of underaged vaping. The federal crackdown, however, hasnt stopped business. The vape shop was stocked with refillable vaping devices, bottles of fruit-flavored vape juice and single-use, disposable e-cigarettes with candy flavors products not included in the FDA ban. Im surprised how little it affected us, Marceaux said. A total ban would have screwed us. Vape shops and vape juice manufacturers across the Houston area breathed a sigh of relief after federal authorities announced regulations earlier this year that narrowly targeted some e-cigarettes while leaving others alone. The limited ban was hailed as a fair compromise by the vaping industry, while some health officials argued it will do little to stop the so-called epidemic of teenage vaping. Steven Kelder, a professor at the UTHealth School of Public Health, called the FDA ban a major step forward. The epidemiologist has developed a vaping prevention called Catch My Breath, which is taught to some 500,000 schoolchildren nationwide. Some people in the public health community say it doesnt go far enough, he said. But Ill take a win when I see one. Growing share Vaping products are projected to constitute about 30 percent of nicotine sales by 2025, up from less than 10 percent in 2019. Sales of e-cigarettes battery-powered devices that heat and vaporize liquid nicotine into an aerosol mist that can be inhaled, or vaped are expected to top $10 billion this year, according to Wells Fargo Securities. Meanwhile, e-cigarette use is soaring among teenagers, threatening decades of anti-smoking campaigns that have changed social norms and perceptions around smoking tobacco. On HoustonChronicle.com: Vaping epidemic to get more scrutiny in the Texas Senate More than 5 million U.S. youth, including 1 in 4 high school students and 1 in 10 middle school students, reported using e-cigarettes last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The U.S. Surgeon General in 2018 called underage vaping an epidemic. Cartridge-based e-cigarettes, such as Juul, have become popular with teenagers in large part because of their cheaper price and smaller, more concealable size. Juul e-cigarettes, which look like an USB flash drive, start from around $35 for a device and $15 for a pack of four replacement cartridges. Juul devices, however, contain a high level of nicotine, a highly addictive substance that can disrupt sleep patterns, affect moods and cause birth defects among pregnant smokers. A single Juul pod contains as much nicotine as a pack of 20 regular cigarettes, according to the CDC. Over the last 40 years, teen smoking has been reduced to a fairly low level, Kelder said. With e-cigarettes, its rebounded. Were re-normalizing the idea of putting something in your mouth and breathing it in. Regulation increases Federal, state and local governments in recent years have considered various measures to curb underage vaping. The FDA required childproof caps on vape liquid bottles and mandated a prominent nicotine warning on vape products. Last year, it prohibited the sale of e-cigarettes to teenagers, raising the age limit to 21 from 18, and required strict age verification for online sales. A spate of lung injuries and deaths associated with vaping last year raised the specter of more regulation. . On HoustonChronicle.com: Juul mulls Houston e-cig store, raising public health concerns States, such as Massachusetts and New Jersey, as well as cites such as New York and San Francisco, outlawed flavored vaping products. President Donald Trump in September proposed a ban on all flavored vaping products. The industry responded by warning that a total ban would shutter vape shops and cost thousands of jobs. Mom-and-pop vape shops were the fastest-growing segment of the struggling retail industry over the past decade, according to Labor Department data. About 85 percent of vape shops have fewer than 10 employees, according to the American Vaping Association. After the pushback from the industry, the Trump administration walked back its original plan, rolling out a limited ban on flavored e-cigarette cartridges that took effect Feb. 6. The compromise targets e-cigarettes popular among teenagers, but still gives adult vapers access to flavors they want to enjoy. Under the new regulations, menthol and tobacco-flavored vape cartridges are still allowed. We were worried it was going to be a big overreaction, Andrew Gray, a sales associate at The Vapor Lair in Houston. I hope with this compromise we can move past the bad news. Dodging a bullet Similar to vape shop owners, vape juice manufacturers were worried about the prospect of a full vaping ban. Vapewell Supply in northwest Houston manufactures an average of 5,000 bottles of vape juice each month with flavors such as Camarosa, a strawberry with a hint of coconut, and Double Barrel Oak, a tobacco with caramel, vanilla and hazelnut. A 60 milliliter bottle costs $19.99 and can last a couple of weeks, depending on usage. Co-owners Arman Espinosa, Clair McPherson and Alejandro Almeida have invested $100,000 into their business since launching it in 2015. The manufacturer has annual revenue of between $200,000 and $400,000 per year. A full vaping ban would have been another hit to Vapewells U.S. sales, which declined by 60 percent last year amid the vaping-related illnesses and deaths. The company survived by selling its products overseas, primarily in Japan and the Middle East. Breaking News: Get email alerts from Chron.com sent directly to your inbox Every new headline about a flavor ban was terrifying and made us feel like each month could be our last month in business, McPherson said. Vapewells owners said they welcome regulation that ensures their products dont get into the hands of teenagers. The company eschews bright colors and candy flavors favored by teenagers The average Vapewell customer is a 40-year-old looking to switch from smoking regular cigarettes. We want to make vaping safe and keep it around, Espinosa said. Were not drug dealers. Were just trying to help people quit smoking. Expanded offerings Back at Rock N Roll It, Marceaux was busy helping customers choose vaping devices. The Houston vape chain, which has more than 30 locations in Texas and Florida, began preparing for the regulations well before this month. The retailer stopped carrying Juul products a year ago, stocked up on vaping products that use refilliable tanks, and slowed and eventually halted its orders of pre-filled cartridges. The vape shop does not allow minors in the store, carding customers to ensure they are 21 or older. The company also began diversifying its merchandise to sell glass pipes, hookahs and CBD products. If ones regulated, we have other options, Marceaux said. Texas Inc.: Get the best of business news sent directly to your inbox Since the flavor ban was announced earlier this year, Marceaux said most e-cigarette users have shifted to mint-flavored cartridges or disposable e-cigarettes, such as Puff Bars, which are single-use and do not take cartridges. Ruben Salazar, 32, recently stopped by Rock N Roll It to pick up some vape device parts. The Houston truck driver said he smoked two cigarette packs a day until he switched to vaping 8 years ago. Its a habit, he said. It keeps my cravings away. Salazar said he found the flavored cartridge ban strange, but said it doesnt affect him because he uses tank-style e-cigarettes. Ultimately, consumers must do their own research into the products they consume, he said. Theres a whole wall of stuff over there, Salazar said, pointing to a vending machine with soft drinks, That can kill you, too. paul.takahashi@chron.com twitter.com/paultakahashi Mike Bloomberg said he will release his tax returns - it's just taking a long time thanks to his tremendous wealth, which he also told a crowd of Democratic voters that he deserves. 'I make a lot of money and we do business all around the world and we are preparing - the number of pages will probably be thousands of pages, I can't go to TurboTax,' Bloomberg said. When asked if he, as someone who is worth approximately $61 billion, should exist, the former New York City mayor answered in the affirmative. 'Yes,' he answered point-blank. 'I worked very hard for it.' With Bernie Sanders leading the charge, the Democratic presidential hopefuls took on Bloomberg during his debate debut, especially over his enormous wealth, with the Vermont senator charging that American tax policy pushed by rich political donors allowed billionaires like the ex-mayor to balloon their coffers while others are living on the streets. 'I can't speak for all billionaires, all I know is I've been very lucky, made a lot of money and I'm giving it all away to make this country better,' Bloomberg said. 'A good chunk of it goes to the Democratic Party as well,' the debate stage newcomer added. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he deserves his tens of billions in wealth and will be putting out his tax returns Michael Bloomberg (left) was the new candidate on the stage at Wednesday night's Democratic debate - and got hammered by the other hopefuls Bloomberg was asked about his tax returns during a portion of the Las Vegas Democratic debates where the candidates were calling each other out for lacking transparency in various ways. 'It just takes a long time,' Bloomberg said when the subject veered from Bernie Sanders' health records to the billionaire candidate's taxes. Bloomberg pointed out that he had a history of releasing his returns, having served three terms as the mayor of New York City. 'I put out my tax return every year for 12 years in City Hall, we will put out this one,' Bloomberg said. 'It will tell everybody everything they need to know about every investment that I make and where the money goes.' He then made the point that the bulk of his wealth goes to charity. 'The biggest item is all the money I give away,' Bloomberg said. 'We list that, every single donation I make. You can get that from our foundation any time you want.' Bloomberg's debut on the debate stage played out like a game of whack-a-mole, with Bloomberg, the former Republican billionaire mayor, as the sole mole. 'I'd like to talk about who we're running against, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. And no I'm not talking about Donald Trump, I'm talking about Mayor Bloomberg,' said Elizabeth Warren in her opening salvo. It was Amy Klobuchar who hammered him over tax returns. 'I'm just looking at my husband in the front row that has to do our taxes all the time,' she said. 'We probably could go to TurboTax.' 'The point of this is I believe in transparency,' the Minnesota senator went on. She pointed out that all the other Democratic candidates had already released their returns. Bloomberg was the last of the major candidates to enter the race, making his announcement in late November 2019. 'It is a major issue because the president of the United States has been hiding behind his tax returns even when courts order him to come forward with those tax returns,' she said. She then turned from President Trump back to Bloomberg. 'I don't care how much money anyone has,' Klobuchar said. 'I think it's great you've got a lot of money, but I think you've got to come forward with your tax returns.' New York Bahrains Ambassador to the US, Shaikh Abdullah bin Rashed bin Abdullah Al Khalifa, stressed that His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa carried out a series of reforms that made the Kingdom more free, open and representative, reflecting the aspirations of the people of Bahrain which HM has recognised more than two decades ago. The ambassador was speaking at the round table held by the Rotary Club of New York, to which the ambassador was invited to mark the 19th anniversary of the National Action Charter (NAC). Shaikh Abdullah said that Bahrain not only has a direct representation through a bicameral parliament, but like the US, it also enjoys an inclusive culture that welcomes everyone and values them for their differences and similarities. Bahrain is a country to which people have a feeling of belonging, regardless of religion, gender or social background, he stressed. The ambassador pointed out that the Kingdom today supports the establishment of hundreds of different religious institutions, including churches, synagogues and temples next to mosques. He noted the launch of Kingdom of Bahrain Declaration, which calls for religious tolerance and peaceful coexistence for all people of the world. The declaration was launched formally in Los Angeles in September 2017 and has since embarked on a journey around the world and presented to world leaders for their support. The ambassador stressed that tolerant Bahrain in addition to welcoming people of all religions, is committed to the welfare of men and women and to elevating the status of women. Women in Bahrain hold senior leadership positions and for instance the Speaker of the Council of Representatives is a woman and more than 54 per cent of the advanced positions in the public sector are held by women, he said, adding that Bahrain welcomes talented people from around the world. The Ambassador touched on the Bahrain-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA), stating that more than 400 financial institutions are based in Bahrain, availing of the skilled workforce and the proficiency in English as the language of business. Another major advantage, he noted, is Bahrains strategic location that allows easy access to Arab and GCC countries and to new markets and to the forming of sustainable partnerships and promoting lasting friendships. The ambassador highlighted Bahrains pride in being a stable country and its confidence in its capabilities to communicate with the world. Like you here in the US... we are proud of our identity. We are open and honest and we work hard, he said. The ambassador said that the time is particularly appropriate to join the American Bahrain Friendship Society (ABFSDC) that will turn 30 this year, appreciating the great efforts made during the past three decades. "We will celebrate this throughout 2020 with remarkable events," he said. Shaikh Abdullah said that Bahrain is one of the first countries to host F1 races in the region, adding that on March 22, ABFSDC will host a ceremony at the embassy to watch the 2020 race hosted by Bahrain. The Rotary Club of New York granted Shaikh Abdullah their honorary membership. Rotary International is a voluntary international service organisation, founded in Chicago more than 100 years ago, and Rotary Clubs are open to all races and cultures and without discrimination or prejudice. A Japanese infection control expert removed YouTube videos Thursday in which he criticized the handling of the coronavirus outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship quarantined in Yokohama, saying the situation had improved. In a Twitter post, Kentaro Iwata, a professor at Kobe University Hospital, said, "I removed my YouTube clip myself since there is no need for further discussing this." The videos in Japanese and English had garnered over 1.5 million and 300,000 views, respectively. Iwata told a video press conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan the same day, "The post became so viral and viewed by many people, and yesterday I was informed that significant improvement was done inside the cruise ship," denying he had been pressured to delete the videos. In the videos, Iwata described the situation on the cruise ship as "chaotic" with bureaucrats in charge and no clear distinction between infected and infection-free zones. Iwata was allowed aboard on Tuesday as a member of the government's disaster medical assistance team but was soon asked to leave the vessel for not doing what he was supposed to, according to the government. During the event, held on the sidelines of the 2020 ASEAN Defence Ministers Meeting (ADMM) Retreat, both sides spoke highly of the achievements recorded in bilateral defence ties over the past years, notably the exchange of delegations and information, personnel training, and joint work between naval and air forces, and coast guards. They pledged to continue facilitating all-level visits, improve the efficiency of existing dialogue mechanisms, enhance coordination between the forces, as well as offer mutual support at multilateral forums, especially during military-defence conferences and activities chaired by the Vietnamese Defence Ministry during the ASEAN Year 2020. Setiadji, for his part, hailed Vietnams proposal to issue a joint statement of ASEAN defence ministers on defence cooperation against disease outbreaks. He said Indonesia will strive to fully realise contents in the statement, thereby effectively coping with the COVID-19 epidemic. 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 No one can explain how a class ring lost in Maine 47 years ago was just found in Finland, but it now means even more to owner Debra McKenna. The ring originally belonged to McKenna's high school sweetheart, Shawn. They met at Morse High School, and on Valentine's Day 1973, he asked McKenna out on a date. They soon became a couple, and when he went away to college in the fall, he gave her his class ring. Not long after, McKenna lost it while shopping at a department store. She forgot about the ring, but never forgot about Shawn the pair wed in 1977, and remained married until 2017, when Shawn died of cancer. Last month, thousands of miles away from McKenna's home, a man named Marko Saarinen was using his metal detector in Kaarina, Finland. While in a park, his detector started making noise, and under about eight inches of dirt, he found a ring with a blue stone. It belonged to someone who attended Morse High School, and was inscribed with "1973" and "S.M." He notified the school's alumni association, and they soon determined that Shawn McKenna was the only person in the Class of 1973 with the initials "S.M." When his widow learned that the long-lost ring had been found, "there was a lot of weeping," she told the Bangor Daily News. She doesn't have the slightest idea how the ring got from Maine to Finland, but did find it remarkable that on the side of the ring, it says "Shipbuilders," which is the mascot of Morse High School it's also Saarinen's profession. "Shawn used to say there's no such thing as coincidences," McKenna said. More stories from theweek.com Former CIA Director John Brennan says 'we are now in a full-blown national security crisis' Trump's push to install people loyal to him in law enforcement, intelligence appears to be well underway Trump's intelligence shakeup is reportedly tied to his loathing for Adam Schiff, bond with Devin Nunes Cortez is now suing the postal service for undisclosed damages, claiming his employer wanted to get rid of him because of his severe disabilities When he returned to work in March 2019 he was fired, with human resources telling him it was over the pears he ate 15 months previously Cortez's health declined in January 2018 and he was out of work for over a year He and five colleagues ate a box of pears in December 2017, the suit states Cortez was told that staff could eat perishable food delivered via the service on site, the lawsuit claims William Cortez worked at UPS's Battery Park site in New York from 2004 to 2019 A former employee is suing UPS claiming they fired him for eating a pear because they wanted to get rid of him due to his disabilities. William Cortez, who worked at UPS's Battery Park location in Manhattan, New York, between 2004 and 2019, claims the firm's human resources department told him they were letting him go because of the incident involving the fruit back in 2017. Cortez says he was told by supervisors when he started working for the firm that staff were allowed to eat expiring food shipped via the parcel service rather than throw it out, as long as the food was consumed on site, the lawsuit states. In December 2017, a box of pears that would have been thrown away were offered to Cortez and other employees, it states. William Cortez, who worked at UPS's Battery Park location in Manhattan, New York, between 2004 and 2019, claims the firm's human resources department told him they were letting him go because of the incident involving the fruit back in 2017 In line with the policy, Cortez says he and at least five colleagues tucked into the fruit in the office, the NY Post reports. Cortez says that later that month, loss prevention staff questioned him about the missing fruit and he told them that the group had eaten them 'in accordance with established policy.' He claims that UPS was satisfied with his response at the time. However, 15 months later, Cortez was fired for the incident, the suit states. In January 2018, Cortez's health deteriorated when his congestive heart failure took a turn for the worse and he ended up out of work on disability for over a year. His doctor cleared him to return to work with on-the-job accommodations in March 2019, the lawsuit states. UPS Human Resources set up a meeting for March 4 2019 to discuss the accommodations he needed, including avoiding driving, non-desk work and lifting more than 25 pounds, the suit states. Cortez claims he went to the meeting, where UPS fired him, saying it was over the pear incident. They told him that eating the fruit was considered theft, the lawsuit alleges. The other employees who ate the pears have not lost their jobs, it states. Cortez is now suing the postal service for undisclosed damages, claiming his employer wanted to get rid of him because of his severe disabilities. A UPS spokesman said the firm will 'review the scenario, look into the predicament, and answer appropriately.' Black workers at Kansas City hospital were called 'boy' and 'Aunt Jemima': lawsuit Trevor Baston says he watched a white employee at St. Luke's Hospital call a black co-worker "Aunt Jemima." The same person repeatedly called Baston, who is black, "boy." A nurse practitioner told him she was afraid of "big black men." Then, after a bias training, his supervisor's manager told staff to "get over it." Bold claims in this complaint dutifully carried behind the paywall of the newspaper but with a headline tease to inspire further "investigation" of alleged workplace hateration that might or might not impact locals . . . Read more: Mature, responsible countries understand that a free press reports facts and expresses opinions. SECRETARY OF STATE MIKE POMPEO, condemning Chinas decision to expel three Wall Street Journal reporters in retaliation for a headline on an essay in the publications editorial pages. A version of the article ran in the current issue of AVN Men. To see the digital edition, click here. Photo by Keith Ryan. After nearly four years with the Falcon Studios Group, Austin Wolf entered 2019 deciding it was time for a move. He didnt have to think long. [Jake Jaxson and RJ Sebastian] had been friends of mine for a number of years anyway, even before we all started in this interesting industry that were all in, and it was just time to make a changeand its been a really great change, he says of his signing with CockyBoys. Im in one scene a month, which is all I really wanted, and of course the fan pages have grown a lot, which is nice. The switch opened up a whole new world of models to the popular performer, and he was eager to capitalize. Oh God, all of them literally all of them, laughs Wolf about his wish list. That was the easiest thing about making my transition. They were like, Does it matter who ? And I said No! All of them are so perfect. Well, maybe he was a little excited to finally perform with one in particular The one I was most eager for was definitely Levi Karter. The funny thing about Levi and I is, we tried to make our own little meetup at one point or another, but the timing just never worked out, so its funny. That was actually the first time we ever had sex, was on set. I do think we made out a couple times before, but thats as far as it got. He also shot with Carter Dane (amazing), Nico Leon (he is definitely going to make an impression on our community, to say the least) and is looking forward to Mateo Vice. I met him at the Grabbys last year and totally fell in love. He was totally just a doll. Were probably on our way, little by little. His new scene partners also included Austin Averyan exclusive to Wolfs own 4my.fans platform. He is somebody that I met like three years ago in a parking lot in Florida, which is where we made our first video, laughs Wolf. And from that day, I told this young man that I thoughtand I dont say this to a lot of peoplebut I said, You could do this for a living. And of course, he laughed it off; he thought that was funny. Then last January, Avery just happened to be on Wolfs Atlantis Cruise, and the two ended up making more videos. I just told him, Look, if you ever think you want to do thiseven just for a little extra cash if thats all it ispeople are gonna love you. Hes got that watchable quality. And then of course [Jake and RJ] were always taking suggestions. I told them, This kids an ace in the hole. The scene has been doing very well, and of course hes killing it with his own content. Wolf sadly wont be able to make a scene with another CockyBoys crushunless a miracle happens. Liam Riley doesnt make videos any more, at least at the moment. So my dream has been crushed. And I really dont feel like I fall into his wheelhouse in terms of what he would chase after. Everybody I talk to is like, Oh, everybody would want to film with you! And thats really not the case. Im very big, Im very tall, and Im getting a little older. Theres a lot of people that dont like big guys, and if you dont, Im definitely not your guy. Wolf had to adjust to the CockyBoys way of filming, which differed from most of the work he was accustomed to. Theres only one person in the room besides you and the other model. Thats a huge difference. Theres no lighting, theres no assistants, theres none of that silliness going on. Its one guy. Things are very fast, generally done in a couple of hoursand thats not due to laziness, thats due to we know what we want, we know how we want it to look, and we know how to do it. Its a lot of knowledge versus a lot of people. You know, when youre on these five- to seven-hour shoots, theres often too many peopletoo many cooks in the kitchen. Half the people there dont really know whats going on, so that ends up eating up a lot of time. Photo by Keith Ryan Outside of his studio work, Wolf looks to grow 4my.fansand his business savvyeven more this year. 4myFans was in an infancy stage for a long period of time, and we recently implemented a new interface, functionality and brandingpretty much everything you could imagine was altered, and the level of quality and sophistication is really through the roof. Im very happy with it. He started chasing after models a little bit more the last few months, helping the stable grow from about 60 models to 250. Its doing extremely well; its a site that has the highest performance, and thats actually graded through a third partyperformance and just overall website functionality is the best out of all fan sites that exist, which we were super happy to have happen. Wolf attributes that to thoughtful development and patience. This wasnt slapped together in a couple weeks. This wasnt a website that wasnt necessarily meant for what its for. As much as I love OnlyFansand I am very appreciative of them and I still have 6,000 fans on that platform, so Im happy with itbut it wasnt meant for whats its being used for. So what happens is that sometimes things dont play, sometimes credit card processes dont happen, they get a little bogged down. But [4my.fans] bypasses all of those issues. And Wolf has lofty goals for it, including a goal of 1,000 performers and 100,000 subscribers (right now were at more like 20K). I dont think thats unfeasible. I also have other projects that are on their way, and I think its going to affect 4myFans heavily, he says. What makes me even happier is all these guys are running their own little businesses and making money. 4myfans pays out 80 percent, OnlyFans pays out 80 percentthose are the only two websites out there that do this. Everyone else takes 30 percent, 40 percent, 50 percent its a lot harder to make money with any other website out there. In addition to Avery, Wolf notes that Porfi Maximus is also kicking ass on the platform. These are two of the more beautiful young men that Ive got to work with, and they have a great work ethic. They post the way theyve been instructed to post, they listen to some of my teachings and then of course theyve also evolved into doing their own thing. You dont see that often. A lot of times, models want something for nothing, and fans dont stand for that. Im posting two to three videos a week, and theres a constant level of attention and a constant level of content being thrown at them. Yeah, its only $10, but we live in a world of endless amounts of content. If you dont keep up, why would they stay? Wolf notes that two other huge projects are taking up a ton of his time, with a handful of other partners involved. Were looking for first-round funding of 3 million. Its a bigger deal, not related to 4myfans, and is taking up a lot of my time. And then Ive been doing a lot of traveling. I feel like theres award show after award show, and then back and forth to the West Coast. That travel included a trip to the PinkX Gay Video Awards in Paris last October, which enabled Wolf to shoot with fellow gay porn legend Francois Sagat for the CockyBoys series A for Alpha. That was a real treat. Whenever youve never met somebody and you just see them via social media for six, seven, eight yearsand then all of a sudden you have to meet them, its very nerve-racking, because they could disappoint you. And let me tell you, he does not disappoint. He is charming, he is sweet, and he was an absolute pleasure to work with. Our scene flew by very quickly. I think they were very happy with it, to say the least. But sadly for fans, it may signal the beginning of Wolfs final stretch in front of the camera. Its my exit, just so were clear. I wont be doing this past 40. Im 38 now, so we got another year and a half or so, maybe another year. Thats the goal. You know, life happens. It could happen earlier, it could happen later. But I dont want to be the guy that people look at and go, Ugh, he should have quit four years ago. I think we have our time in this kind of spotlight, and at one point or another, we should take a bow and step off stage. I just decided that I didnt really want to keep making videos too much longer, Wolf says, citing his growing businesses and impending company launches as the perfect opportunity to transition out. Theyll be making enough money where I really dont have to make this my career anymore. I just wanted my exit to be elegant. I wanted it to be sophisticated and classy, and thats the definition of CockyBoys, Wolf shares. And Ive always given hope to my boyfriend that we should always be looking for the end. This world has enabled me to do everything I want to do, but I just feel like someone has been supporting me for the past five-plus years, and I want to repay that as much as I can. And I think having sex with this many peopleespecially so publicly visualisnt his favorite thing in the world. Again, hes very supportive and hes very happy about the industry and everything its brought us, but I think a little taste of the white picket fence is something that he would enjoy a little more. Advertisement Hundreds of young Russian cadets put on a display of glitz and glamour as they arrived for the annual cadet ball at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. Staged by the Russian Federal Protection Service, St Andrew Hall was transformed into a sea of gold at the military soiree on Wednesday evening. Dressed to impress in their best finery, girls swapped the parade ground for the ballroom as they turned out in a rainbow of sweeping pastel-coloured ballgowns, which they teamed with white gloves and diamonds aplenty. Meanwhile, their smartly-dressed dance partners stuck to tradition in full military uniform in a bid to impress at the prestigious event. Donning their finest gowns, Russia's young soldiers of the future line up as they take part in the annual cadet ball in St Andrew Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace (pictured) While girls donned billowing pastel-coloured gowns, the boys stuck to tradition in full military uniform. Pictured, taking to the dancefloor Drummers of the secondary school No 1770 orchestra put on a grand performance, while the young cadets sported beaming smiles as they danced with one another. Russia's soldiers of tomorrow, dressed in their glittering ball gowns, were taken by the hand by their male counterparts in the event which takes the country's hopefuls for a step back in time. For many at the ball, it was a fairytale chance to experience the grandeur of Russia's czarist traditions. With its string quartets, traditional dance routines and patriotic speeches, the event harks back to a bygone era. The annual ball is a lavish display of discipline, pomp and splendour as girls in billowing dresses twirl across the dance floor, immaculately dressed young men line the hall in orderly rows, and teachers bark out orders, trying to get their students to keep time. While the girls could be seen wearing a sea of pastel-coloured dresses teamed with white gloves, their smartly-dressed dance partners stuck to tradition in full military uniform (pictured) Russian military school students wore their hair pinned back in chic up-do styles, revealing their glamorous diamond earrings. Pictured, with their dance partners A young woman took a look in the mirror before making her grand entrance in the annual cadet ball staged by the Russian Federal Protection Service in St Andrew Hall In their stylish white gloves, students held up their glitzy ball gowns before making their grand entrance in the prestigious St Andrew Hall Holding on to the hands of their male counterparts, girls showcased their glittering pastel-coloured ballgowns during the annual ball With its string quartets, traditional dance routines and patriotic speeches, the event harks back to a bygone era. Pictured, young people take part in the annual cadet ball Dressed in traditional military uniform, the boys can be seen taking the hand of their dates as the take to the prestigious dancefloor The annual ball is a lavish display of discipline, pomp and splendour as girls in billowing dresses twirl across the dance floor, immaculately dressed young men line the hall in orderly rows Behind the scenes, the girls hurry to get their hair pinned for their grand entrance and are forbidden from wearing red lipstick. Pictured, students from the military school partake in a dance The girls sit perfectly poised as their dates lined up in military perform behind them -= shortly before partaking in traditional Russian dance Meanwhile backstage, lipstick is applied and hair frantically braided, girls jostle for position in front of floor-length mirrors, trying to capture the perfect selfie. Last year's ball was held in the fitting location of the Victory Museum which is dedicated to the Great Patriotic War. Girls twirled in vibrant satin dresses among the historic artefacts while the male military students pulled them in at the waist as they performed classical Russian dance. They paid tribute to the lavish dances of the Tsar Nicholas II's Russia in the Debutante-style event while wearing pastel-coloured gowns similar to the Romanov family's Empress dresses. But behind the scenes, the girls hurry to get their hair pinned for their grand entrance and are forbidden from wearing red lipstick as the group's teachers have been known to tell the cadets that they 'should be girly, not womanly'. More than 1,800 cadets attended the impressive event the year before - and it was held for two consecutive years at the Manezh Central Exhibition Hall in Moscow. Children were all smiles as they raised their arms in the air during the annual cadet ball in St Andrew Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace One child, donned in her best finery, looked delighted to be taking part as she took to the dancefloor to showcase a traditional Russian dance The children look delighted as they take to the dancefloor, and can be seen throwing their hands in the air during their routine The event takes the country's hopefuls for a step back in time - giving them a taste of Tsarist Russia's grandeur and prestige. Pictured, the young women preparing to dance Young Russian girls line up and take the hand of the country's soldiers of tomorrow - who appear to be looking pleased with themselves Cadets with their partners in St Andrew's Hall, designed to give a taste of Tsarist Russia to the new recruits Rows of young cadets and their dates form lines during traditional dances at the annual cadet ball at the Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow The elegant young women take the hand of their dates, as they twirl around the ballroom in a bid to impress The event offers attendees a fairytale chance to experience the grandeur of Russia's czarist traditions. Pictured, left and right, drummers of the secondary school No 1770 orchestra Drummers of the secondary school No 1770 orchestra performed at the annual cadet ball while the young cadets twirled around the dancefloor The young women donned their best finery - including the most intricate of gowns edged in lace, and with corset-style back-tie detail Four young cadets can be seen peering over the gold balcony before they get ready to make their grand appearance and step into St Andrew Hall Ahead of the ball, young cadets can be seen leading over the balcony as one is greeted by their smartly-dressed date Prosecutors had been looking into whether Ghosn knowingly used company resources to throw a party that was for private purposes-his wife's birthday in 2016. Paris: French prosecutors have stepped up their investigation into alleged misappropriation of funds at Renault by former boss Carlos Ghosn, saying a judge had now been assigned to the case to launch a formal investigation. The prosecutor's office in Nanterre, on the outskirts of Paris, had since last year been looking into a party Ghosn had thrown for his wife at the sumptuous Versailles palace among other financial dealings. It said in a statement on Wednesday a judge would now examine several charges linked to Renault and levelled at an unnamed person or people. A judicial source confirmed that Ghosn was among them. A lawyer for Ghosn said he welcomed the opportunity to give his version of the events."We will provide our explanations to the designated magistrate after we can finally have access to the case file," lawyer Jean-Yves Le Borgne told Reuters. Ghosn-now in Lebanon after he last month fled prosecution in Japan on financial misconduct charges-has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. Reuters reported in January that judges, who have wider powers than investigators to pursue a criminal case, were set to get involved, potentially bringing prosecution a step closer. The prosecutor's office said the case involved suspect financial flows between Renault and a car dealership in Oman, as well as spending on trips and events. Prosecutors had been looking into whether Ghosn knowingly used company resources to throw a party that was for private purposes-his wife's birthday in 2016. Ghosn's lawyers have said he did nothing wrong, but there may have been a misunderstanding between Versailles and party planners over who was to foot the bill for renting the venue. Another event at Versailles in 2014, when Ghosn held a corporate party to celebrate the 15-year anniversary of Renault's alliance with Japan's Nissan, will now also fall under the scope of the investigation, the judicial source said. At a news conference in January, Ghosn rejected allegations that most of the guests at the party-paid for by RNBV, a Dutch-based holding company for Renault and Nissan-were his own friends and family, saying the companies had invited business contacts from dealerships and other partners. Renault conducted its own internal inquiry into Ghosn's time at the carmaker and handed over information to prosecutors last year. This included its probe into millions of euros described as dealer incentives to an Omani distributor. JACKSON COUNTY, Mississippi -- Six down, two to go. With six of Jackson Countys eight Mardi Gras parades in the books for 2020, the Ocean Springs night parade and Saturdays Jackson County Carnival Association parade in Pascagoula will take center stage this weekend, bringing the 2020 parade season in Jackson County to a close. First up, the Ocean Springs Carnival Association night parade, now in its 12th year. Parade Co-Captain Heather Eason said they are expecting the largest parade in the events history, with 70 units -- including 50 floats -- already registered as of Wednesday afternoon. This years parade carries the theme Hola Havana -- Dont Stop the Party. Longtime Ocean Springs alderman and City special events coordinator Fred Chic Cody will serve as Grand Marshal. King Ocean VI will be Chad Cashin, with his wife, Jennifer Cashin, alongside in her role as Quen Springs VI. Eason explained that when the OSCA was formed, it was strictly organized to put on a parade. In 2015, they added an annual ball and began taking memberships. Each years king and queen are elected during the ball. Some readers may recall that in last years report on the parade, Eason indicated she would be stepping down from her longtime role as parade captain. I was going to step down because so much was going on, she explained, but we had a bunch of people who really stepped up to the plate to help, so weve been able to spread the duties out among about six of us. Billy Nix is serving as co-captain, so with all that help I decided to stay on. The OSCA parade will follow the traditional route: Front Beach Drive to Porter Avenue, north on Washington Avenue, then east on Government Street until it reaches Ocean Springs Upper Elementary, where it disbands. Saturday afternoon, the JCCA parade will take center stage, rolling through the streets of Pascagoula for the 44th time, with roughly 60 units expected to participate. The JCCAs Alma Huyett explained the JCCA is an umbrella organization with eight different Mardi Gras krewes under that umbrella. Each year, a king and queen is selected from one of those krewes, on a rotating basis. This years king and queen come from the Krewe of Ulysses, with Matt Cook reigning as King Ulysses, while his wife, Medea Cook, will portray Queen Penelope. Pascagoula fire chief Hyler Krebs is the Grand Marshal, while Danny Fallo is this years Parade Marshal. The JCCA parade is set to roll at 1 p.m. BETHEL Fire and utility crews are responding to a two car accident on the eastside of town with wires trapping an occupant in one of the cars, dispatch reports said Wednesday afternoon. Bethel fire crews called an Eversource truck to the scene near the intersection of Dodgington Road (Route 302) and Linda Lane around 4 p.m. Pig producers are being reminded to complete a survey looking at the sector's views on any potential future farrowing crate ban. The government has expressed desires to phase out the use of farrowing crates on pig farms despite farmer opposition. The National Pig Association's survey, which closes tonight, aims to inform thinking on the appetite for alternative farrowing systems, as well as explore the challenges and costs involved. NPA chief executive Zoe Davies has stressed the importance of collecting as many responses as possible before the survey closes later this month. Former Defra Secretary Theresa Villiers confirmed in January that she and fellow Defra Minister Zac Goldsmith want to see farrowing crates phased out. This ambition is also clearly stated in the new Pig Welfare Code. The primary purpose of the farrowing crate is to prevent the sow from rolling on and crushing her piglets. The crate also enables stockpersons to work easily and safely around the sow and her piglets, during a time when sows can be particularly aggressive. This debate is clearly not going away, said NPA chief executive Zoe Davies, Whilst we are supportive of producers using and wishing to move to alternative systems, the NPA will fight any attempts to ban farrowing crates and force people to move to systems that impact the welfare of both piglets and staff, without financial support from the government or the supply chain. To argue our case better, we need facts and figures to demonstrate the impact a ban would have which is where we need your help. Ms Davies added: A number of members have expressed concerns over a potential ban. However, we can only provide evidence of such concerns if we have a strong response to the survey. The campaign to ban farrowing crates is clearly going to be ramped up under this government, so, please, spend a few minutes to fill in the survey. An elderly woman was killed after crashing into a tree on the North Side early Thursday morning. Police said 75-year-old Norma Jackson Baird was driving near the 14200 block of Huebner Road when she failed to negotiate a curve in the road. Baird drifted across the lanes of traffic and jumped the curb into a tree, San Antonio police said. The complete liberation of Aleppo by the Syrian Arab Army has been hailed by the General Conference of the Arab Parties writes SANA. The General Secretariat of the General Conference of the Arab Parties affirmed that the strategic victories achieved by the Syrian Arab Army in Aleppo and Idleb have foiled a difficult chapter of the conspiracy hatched against Syria. In a statement, Secretary General of Arab Parties Conference Qassem Saleh, expressed his appreciation of the sacrifices of the Syrian people and their brave army in liberating the entirety of Aleppo city and its suburbs after years of steadfastness and standing in the face of terrorism and destruction at the hands of armed terrorist organizations, which have received direct support from several states, most prominently the Turkish regime and the US occupation. Saleh added that this triumph completed the previous achievements of the brave Syrian Arab Army and its allies. He indicated that this liberation and the message that it conveys and its strategic and political achievements have dealt a strong blow to most of the projects that have targeted Syria. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. Background Blackbeard the Pirate Fredrick Allen is the sole photographer and videographer of the Queen Anne's Revenge shipwreck; the ship was captained by pirate, Blackbeard, and sunk off the coast of North Carolina in 1718. Allen found infringement on websites hosted and operated by the State of North Carolina in 2013; the state settled, promising to pay royalties and provide attribution on all future uses. The infringement continued however, leading to the current litigation. In 2015, the state further pressed the issue by enacting Blackbeard's Law; this law made all photographs, video records, or other documentary materials of a derelict vessel or shipwreck, [and] relics, artifacts or historic materials in state custody" public records, exempted from copyright protection. The Eastern District of North Carolina ruled that Allen was entitled to sue the state for money damages, but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that decision. Now, the case is before the Supreme Court to determine the validity of Congress' abrogation of state sovereign immunity under the CRCA. Fredrick Allen is the sole photographer and videographer of the Queen Anne's Revenge shipwreck; the ship was captained by pirate, Blackbeard, and sunk off the coast of North Carolina in 1718. Allen found infringement on websites hosted and operated by the State of North Carolina in 2013; the state settled, promising to pay royalties and provide attribution on all future uses. The infringement continued however, leading to the current litigation.In 2015, the state further pressed the issue by enacting Blackbeard's Law; this law made all photographs, video records, or other documentary materials of a derelict vessel or shipwreck, [and] relics, artifacts or historic materials in state custody" public records, exempted from copyright protection.The Eastern District of North Carolina ruled that Allen was entitled to sue the state for money damages, but the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals overruled that decision. Now, the case is before the Supreme Court to determine the validity of Congress' abrogation of state sovereign immunity under the CRCA. State Sovereign Immunity Sovereign immunity with respect to states in the US is of a two-fold nature; states have immunity concerning state laws through their sovereign status, while states hold sovereign immunity with respect to the federal system through the 11th Amendment. That provision of the constitution reads, "The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State." Rise of the 11th Amendment Seminole Tribe of Florida v. Florida (1996) - a case concerning abrogation of state sovereign immunity through a federal law regulating commerce with "the Indian Tribes" - a 5-4 majority of the Court held that Congress lacked the authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity under the Commerce Clause with regard to "the Indian Tribes"; the majority further stated that no Article 1 power could serve alone as the basis for the abrogation of state sovereign immunity. In(1996) - a case concerning abrogation of state sovereign immunity through a federal law regulating commerce with "the Indian Tribes" - a 5-4 majority of the Court held that Congress lacked the authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity under the Commerce Clause with regard to "the Indian Tribes"; the majority further stated that no Article 1 power could serve alone as the basis for the abrogation of state sovereign immunity. The next year, the Court tightened the requirements for such abrogations under the only valid basis, Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. In City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), the Court ruled that this broad power grant to secure the constitutional rights of the citizens against state violation could only serve as a basis for abrogation if three elements were shown: Constitutional violation by a state A pattern of such violations That the remedial action enacted by Congress was congruent and proportional to the wrong The Court has since applied this standard retroactively toward legislation passed before the Boerne ruling. Florida Prepaid (1999); the Court pointed to the broad statement against Article 1 abrogation as the sole basis to turn to a Section 5 of the 14th Amendment analysis, which also failed to persuade the Court. Holding the legislature to a standard that had not emerged at the time of legislation, the Court ruled that Congress lacked the power to abrogate state sovereign immunity in the patent context. Considering abrogation in the patent context, the Court did not explore the potential of an Article 1 basis in(1999); the Court pointed to the broad statement against Article 1 abrogation as the sole basis to turn to a Section 5 of the 14th Amendment analysis, which also failed to persuade the Court. Holding the legislature to a standard that had not emerged at the time of legislation, the Court ruled that Congress lacked the power to abrogate state sovereign immunity in the patent context. Katz: The Pendulum Swings Central Virginia Community College v. Katz (2006), finding valid abrogation of state sovereign immunity in the bankruptcy context under Article 1 congressional authority. The sweeping statement against Article 1 abrogation of Seminole Tribes was labeled "erroneous" and "dicta" which the Court was not bound to follow. In finding valid Article 1 abrogation, the Court relied upon the concept of a "plan of the convention waiver" whereby state governments intended to waive state sovereign immunity in certain aspects through ratifying the constitution. The Court changed course in(2006), finding valid abrogation of state sovereign immunity in the bankruptcy context under Article 1 congressional authority. The sweeping statement against Article 1 abrogation of Seminole Tribes was labeled "erroneous" and "dicta" which the Court was not bound to follow. In finding valid Article 1 abrogation, the Court relied upon the concept of a "plan of the convention waiver" whereby state governments intended to waive state sovereign immunity in certain aspects through ratifying the constitution. This Kat certainly seems sovereign The plan of convention concept stems from the Federalist papers; in Federalist 81, Alexander Hamilton notes the intention of the federal system is to allow for abrogation of state sovereign immunity where state sovereignty is alienated by the constitution. The grounds for alienation - and, by extension abrogation - are enumerated in Federalist 32: 1. where the Constitution in express terms granted an exclusive authority to the Union; 2. where it granted in one instance an authority to the Union, and in another prohibited the States from exercising the like authority; and 3. where it granted an authority to the Union, to which a similar authority in the States would be absolutely and totally contradictory and repugnant. Hamilton explains "contradictory and repugnant" in Federalist 32, drawing a distinction between those Article 1 powers requiring uniformity (such as naturalization) and those where concurrent sovereignty is germane (such as taxation). The Court in Katz explored the historical context of bankruptcy as an in rem jurisdictional matter, as well as the intent for uniformity, exclusivity in federal jurisdiction, and state participation. Finding an intent for uniformity in the constitutional text and the historical context, as well as noting exclusive federal court jurisdiction and state participation in bankruptcy matters, the Court ruled that Article 1 served as a valid basis for Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity in bankruptcy. The plan of convention concept stems from the Federalist papers; in, Alexander Hamilton notes the intention of the federal system is to allow for abrogation of state sovereign immunity where state sovereignty is alienated by the constitution. The grounds for alienation - and, by extension abrogation - are enumerated inHamilton explains "contradictory and repugnant" in Federalist 32, drawing a distinction between those Article 1 powers requiring uniformity (such as naturalization) and those where concurrent sovereignty is germane (such as taxation).The Court in Katz explored the historical context of bankruptcy as anjurisdictional matter, as well as the intent for uniformity, exclusivity in federal jurisdiction, and state participation. Finding an intent for uniformity in the constitutional text and the historical context, as well as noting exclusive federal court jurisdiction and state participation in bankruptcy matters, the Court ruled that Article 1 served as a valid basis for Congress to abrogate state sovereign immunity in bankruptcy. Grounds for Abrogation The holding of Katz teaches that Article 1 may be the basis of valid abrogation of state sovereign immunity by Congress if it was in the plan of the convention for states to waive their immunity. Additionally, there is a strong case for valid abrogation under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, in three different respects. Article 1 - Plan of Convention Waiver Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution provides Congress the power to regulate copyrights: "The Congress shall have Power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" While this power grant does not fit within the first or second category of alienation of state sovereignty, there is some support for the notion that uniform rule in copyright was in the plan of the convention. Prior to the constitution, Noah Webster urged the states to pass copyright laws, inspired by the model of the Statute of Anne (1710). The federal government lacked the authority to regulate copyrights under the Articles of Confederation (1781-89), leaving the power to the states. Atticus is fully abrogating! These state laws were ineffective, however, as an author would need to register in each state individually; further, several states' laws included provisions whereby the law would not go into effect until each state provided the same protections. Such laws never came into effect, as Delaware never passed a copyright law under the Articles of Confederation. As a result, James Madison wrote in Federalist 43 that "[t]he States cannot separately make effectual provisions" for copyright, noting that the Federal government will provide uniformity by anticipating the laws of the states in this regard. This extrinsic record provides a reasonable basis for assuming an intention for uniformity, and thus, valid abrogation of state sovereign immunity in copyright. There is little intrinsic record to establish intent either way, as the copyright clause was passed unanimously without recorded debate at the constitutional convention. , Clause 8 of the Constitution provides Congress the power to regulate copyrights:While this power grant does not fit within the first or second category of alienation of state sovereignty, there is some support for the notion that uniform rule in copyright was in the plan of the convention. Prior to the constitution, Noah Webster urged the states to pass copyright laws, inspired by the model of the Statute of Anne (1710). The federal government lacked the authority to regulate copyrights under the Articles of Confederation (1781-89), leaving the power to the states.These state laws were ineffective, however, as an author would need to register in each state individually; further, several states' laws included provisions whereby the law would not go into effect until each state provided the same protections. Such laws never came into effect, as Delaware never passed a copyright law under the Articles of Confederation.As a result, James Madison wrote inthat "[t]he States cannot separately make effectual provisions" for copyright, noting that the Federal government will provide uniformity by anticipating the laws of the states in this regard. This extrinsic record provides a reasonable basis for assuming an intention for uniformity, and thus, valid abrogation of state sovereign immunity in copyright. There is little intrinsic record to establish intent either way, as the copyright clause was passed unanimously without recorded debate at the constitutional convention. 14th Amendment, Section 5 Privileges or Immunities Clause Section 5 of the 14th amendment states that "[n]o state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." As copyright protection hinges on compliance with formalities (registration and deposit) resulting in a federally-granted copyright registration, copyright may rightly be construed as a federal privilege; this is underscored by the historical context of the copyright clause. Slaughter-House cases construed federal privilege to be limited to those powers granted specifically to "the citizens of the United States" (in contrast with those granted to citizens of the individual states, or non-citizens). Copyright was generally restricted to citizens and residents until 1891 in the United States, presenting a federal privilege. Copyright can be construed to fall even within the narrow construction of federal privileges; the Court in theconstrued federal privilege to be limited to those powers granted specifically to "the citizens of the United States" (in contrast with those granted to citizens of the individual states, or non-citizens). Copyright was generally restricted to citizens and residents until 1891 in the United States, presenting a federal privilege. Under a City of Boerne analysis, any violation of privilege is unconstitutional. Thus, the first factor is satisfied. The second factor, a pattern is evident in the hundreds of infringements presented in the Amicii offered to the Court. Should the Court, however, elect to restrict the analysis to the evidence presented, a sufficient number of infringements can be seen in the cases discussed in the legislative record. The third factor, congruence and proportionality is satisfied by the simple way that states may avoid liability - seeking a license as a market participant. Noting that state entities receive copyright registrations for works they author, they already participate in the market of copyright; there is no reason to construe participation on equal grounds with the rest of the market to be incongruent or disproportionate. Due Process of Law Copyright being a form of property, state sovereign immunity may be abrogated to remedy unconstitutional deprivations of copyrights without due process of law, in the form of copyright infringement. In order to qualify as unconstitutional deprivations of property without due process of law, the deprivations must be without "adequate remedy". In order to satisfy this criteria, the injunctive remedies available to copyright owners for infringement of copyright by states must be considered "inadequate." Copyright Alternative Small-claims Enforcement (CASE) Act, and the 1783 Continental Congress report which states that "no property is more a man's own than the fruit of his study," it is clear that mere injunctive remedies are insufficient to effect the aims of the copyright clause. Looking to the(CASE) Act, and the 1783 Continental Congress report which states that "no property is more a man's own than the fruit of his study," it is clear that mere injunctive remedies are insufficient to effect the aims of the copyright clause. The same Boerne analysis would apply under due process analysis, although infringements and the pattern thereof would be restricted to those instances where no adequate remedy is available. Takings Clause Atticus only takes for his personal use The 14th Amendment incorporates the Takings clause of the 5th Amendment, whereby the taking of property for public use without just compensation is prohibited; through the 14th Amendment, this prohibition is extended to the states. Noting that only takings for "public use" would violate this provision, Congress' authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity may be limited to those cases where the state infringes a public use of the copyright. A reasonable construction of "public use" in copyright would limit abrogation to infringements of the rights of public display, public performance, and distribution to the public. This presents a similar Boerne analysis as the other two cases, although internal uses where only the right of reproduction is implicated would not serve as constitutional violations necessary to abrogate immunity under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. Blackbeard's Law, however, would be a clear violation of the Takings clause. Section 5 of the 14th Amendment provides Congress the authority to enforce the provisions of the 14th Amendment by appropriate legislation; this power may be used to abrogate state sovereign immunity regardless of the 11th Amendment if the legislation is enacted pursuant to the City of Boerne test. Among the several provisions of the 14th Amendment, three may serve as the basis for abrogation in the copyright context: the Privileges or Immunities clause, the Deprivation of Property Without the Due Process of Law, or the Takings clause.The 14th Amendment incorporates the Takings clause of the 5th Amendment, whereby the taking of property for public use without just compensation is prohibited; through the 14th Amendment, this prohibition is extended to the states.Noting that only takings for "public use" would violate this provision, Congress' authority to abrogate state sovereign immunity may be limited to those cases where the state infringes a public use of the copyright. A reasonable construction of "public use" in copyright would limit abrogation to infringements of the rights of public display, public performance, and distribution to the public.This presents a similar Boerne analysis as the other two cases, although internal uses where only the right of reproduction is implicated would not serve as constitutional violations necessary to abrogate immunity under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. Blackbeard's Law, however, would be a clear violation of the Takings clause. Prediction When looking at the historical record, this Kat believes that there is a strong case for valid abrogation under Congressional Article 1 power. Whether or not the Court would further disturb the holding of Seminole Tribes is another question. The Court did, however, express substantial concern about Blackbeard's Law in oral argument; the concern came from several Justices. Should the Court choose to leave Seminole Tribes and the 11th Amendment jurisprudence undisturbed, this Kat is hopeful, but not entirely confident that the Court will uphold the CRCA on Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. This could turn on whether or not the Court decides to consider only the evidence presented in the legislative record, or that which has emerged since. However, I predict that a ruling from the Supreme Court that states may infringe copyright at will with no chance of money damages being awarded to the copyright holders will lead to rampant infringement. The infringement will be wide, including software, literature, textbooks, films, music, and more across many government venues (state hospitals, universities, school districts, prisons, administrative functions, etc.). This infringement will serve as the basis for a new legislative initiative to abrogate state sovereign immunity - validly - under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. This Kat will keep you posted as the process unfolds! Of all the matters before the U.S. Supreme Court this term, this Kat is anxiously awaiting an opinion in one pirating case:. The case concerns the validity of the(CRCA) (1990), a bill that abrogates state sovereign immunity with respects to copyright infringement. The question before the Court is whether or not Congress has the power - as the federal legislature - to abrogate state sovereign immunity. Here are several of the potential grounds that the Court may consider for valid abrogation:In the(1890) decision, the Court determined that the 11th Amendment maintained state sovereign immunity in federal courts where state laws were at issue, but abrogation with respect to federal laws would not be addressed for nearly 100 years. In(1989), the Court held that Congress could abrogate state sovereign immunity under its Article 1 Commerce Clause Power. Following that case, Congress passed several statutes abrogating state sovereign immunity; these laws concerned a variety of powers granted to Congress under Article 1 of the Constitution, including patents, copyrights (through the CRCA), and the regulation of commerce with "the Indian Tribes." SPRINGFIELD One man was seriously injured and three people were arrested in two shootings that occurred within a block of each other and at almost the same time Wednesday afternoon. The male was shot at about 4:15 p.m. near the intersection of Wilbraham Road and Northampton Avenue. He suffered serious injuries and was brought to Baystate Medical Center by ambulance for treatment, said Ryan Walsh, police spokesman. While police were at the scene, there was a Shotspotter activation nearby at Andrew Street. No one was injured in the second shooting, he said. Responding police recovered a gun on Andrew Street, Walsh said. The shootings are believed to be related at this early point in the investigation, Walsh said. This is a fluid investigation and information is subject to change as more information is gathered. Officers made a total of three arrests in different locations related to the two shootings, but the initial shooter who injured the victim is believed to be at large. Walsh did not immediately release the names of the people arrested or the charges they face. Police remained at the scene on Northampton Avenue and have blocked the intersection with Wilbraham Road. A brown Nissan Acura was parked in the intersection and at least three evidence markers were placed in the road a distance from the car. The Springfield Detective Bureau is continuing to investigate the crimes, Walsh said. This is the second shooting that occurred in Western Massachusetts in about two hours and the second that occurred in Springfield on Wednesday. A man suffered injuries that are believed to be non-life-threatening when he was shot at about 2 a.m. on Fort Pleasant Avenue in Springfield. The Detective Bureau is investigating the crime, Walsh said. In Holyoke, a man was shot at the intersection of Elm and Essex streets at about 2:15 p.m. He was taken to Baystate Medical Center in Springfield for treatment of wounds that are not believed to be life-threatening. The Holyoke Police Detective Bureau is investigating the shooting. Nouakchott, Mauritania (PANA) - The sixth ordinary summit of G5 Sahel heads of state will be held on 25 February, the organization, whose permanent secretariat is seated here, announced Wednesday LANE COUNTY, Ore. -- In Oregon, a shortage of psychiatrists often leads to many individuals being left on waiting lists for extensive periods of time. Meanwhile, groups in Lane County are working daily to serve those with mental health issues. The waiting list issue, however, is still a concern for Lane County residents. Jennifer MacLean is the executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness Lane County. NAMI provides resources for adults struggling with mental health conditions through advocacy and support. Currently NAMI has no waiting list for our program, so all of our programs are peer support groups and family support groups are drop in, MacLean said. The nonprofit has served Lane County for 30 years. While the center does not provide counseling or legal advice, there are various education courses one can take to help those around you who suffer from a mental health issue. Our community is struggling for qualified mental health professionals, therapists and counselors, MacLean said. Mark Beach is the Director of Parent Education at The Child Center, a nonprofit in Springfield aimed at helping children who are struggling with a mental or behavioral problem. He recognizes that there is a need for more professionals to fill the gap that currently exists. "I would really like to see access being smoother for families because I know there are a lot of people out there who are hurting and stuck and not getting what they need," Beach said. Beach said that there are great therapists and counselors who work at the center, but more are needed to fully support the community. He said that the pool to select from is just not there. We can't hire therapists fast enough to be able to keep up with the pace of the need, Beach said. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline can be found at 1-800-273-8255 if you or someone you know is in need of help. Click here for more information. Pete Buttigieg went after Amy Klobuchar during Wednesdays Democratic presidential debate over the Minnesota senators record on immigration and her votes to approve judges and officials nominated by President Trump. If youre going to run on your record in Washington, then youre going to have to own those votes, especially when it comes to immigration. You voted to confirm the head of Customs and Border Protections under President Trump, who is one of the architects of the family separation policy, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor said in reference to Klobuchars vote to confirm Kevin McAleenan to head the CBP. McAleenan later became the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security. You voted to make English the national language, Buttigieg continued in a sustained attack against Klobuchar, who is also seeking support from moderate and Hispanic voters in Saturdays Nevada caucuses. Do you know the message that sends in as multilingual a state as Nevada to immigrants? Youve been unusual among Democrats, I think the Democrat among all of the senators running for president, most likely to vote for Donald Trumps judges, who we know are especially hostile to Dreamers and to the rights of immigrants. Now, in South Bend, it was not always easy to stand up in a conservative place like Indiana on immigration, but we delivered. We created a municipal ID program so that Dreamers [people who immigrated to the U.S. as children] and others who were undocumented were able to navigate everyday life. We stood up for those rights and stood with members of our community with the message that they were as American as we are. Buttigieg then finished his comments in Spanish before Klobuchar returned fire. I wish everyone were as perfect as you, Pete, but let me tell you what its like to be in the arena. Number one, do the math, as my friend Andrew Yang, if he was up here, thats what hed say. In fact, I have opposed, not supported, two-thirds of the Trump judges, so get your numbers right, and I am in the top 10 to 15 [in the Senate] of opposing them, the senator responded. Story continues Number two, when it comes to immigration reform, the things that you are referring to, that official that you are referring to, was supported by about half of the Democrats, including someone in this room, and I will say this, he was highly recommended by the Obama officials, you know why, because Trump had so few career people. I did not one bit agree with these draconian policies to separate kids from their parents, and in my first 100 days I would immediately change that. And I would add one more thing: I have been in the arena. After the moderator cut her off, Klobuchar continued, He made a pretty big allegation against me again, and I think I should have a right to respond. But Buttigieg then pressed his case. Im stating a fact because these are the votes that you took and these votes set you alone among the Democrats running for president. Is it true or is it false? he asked. Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg. (John Locher/AP) Visibly irritated by the exchange, which was one of several tense moments between the two more moderate candidates, Klobuchar responded, First of all, what youve said about the judges are false. You are comparing me to two colleagues up here on this stage and youre forgetting Buttigieg then interrupted. I would say anybody who ran for president this cycle. Senator Harris and Senator Booker saw through this It was then Klobuchars turn to interrupt, and she pivoted back to her support for previous pieces of immigration legislation, including a 2007 bill that would have provided a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. You know what, Pete, if you could let me finish, since Ive been in the arena. Senator [Edward] Kennedy asked me to work on the first immigration bill. We were able with President Bush to at least get that bill to a vote. Klobuchar also knocked Bernie Sanders for his opposition to that bill before turning her attention back to Buttigieg. Im sorry, but Senator Sanders actually opposed that bill and I worked on it and if we had gotten that bill done, there would have been a path to citizenship for so many people, and you know what, then I worked on the 2013 bill. Im actually so proud of the work Ive done on immigration and you have not been in the arena doing that work. Youve memorized a bunch of talking points and a bunch of things, but I can tell you one thing, what the people of this country want, they want a leader that has the heart for the immigrants of this country, and that is me. Buttigieg, however, got the last word of the back-and-forth. You know maybe leading a diverse city that was facing ruin doesnt sound like the arena to you, he said. Im used to senators telling mayors that senators are more important than mayors, but this is the arena too. You dont have to be in Washington to matter. _____ Read more from Yahoo News: When the bomb dropped on us, what are you going to do? We never loaded them, he said. He said a number of area businesses would be affected, particularly shipping lines that focus on car exports. Mr. Spano said he did not think the entreaties of small business owners could influence the stalemate between New York and Washington. Its bigger than us, honey, he said. Its bigger than us. Tim ODay, the president of U.S. operations for Insurance Auto Auctions, a large company that is based near Chicago and processes more than 100,000 vehicles a year in New York, said the company has just recently started to assess the impact. We have learned that the policy change is limiting and halting our buyers ability to promptly export vehicles with New York ownership documents, he said. If the standoff continues, shipping lines specializing in exporting vehicles will probably reduce the number of calls to New York, focusing instead on ports in other states to meet demand for used cars overseas. Mr. Cuomo, who had assailed the ban on Global Entry applications as extortion, met last week with Mr. Trump without reaching any deal. The New York attorney general has sued the federal government for what the office says is retaliatory action against the state. A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection said in a statement that the agency checks vehicle identification numbers against state D.M.V. records to verify ownership and check for fraud. There has been a long history of theft rings exporting stolen cars from area ports. Because C.B.P. will no longer be able to carry out these checks against New York Department of Motor Vehicles records, the export of used vehicles titled and registered in New York may be significantly delayed, the spokesman said. Ten seconds in paradise led to a whole night of hell for Mikey, who triggered a premature evacuation when his lightning fast finish became the joke of the night. Married At First Sight proved it's willing to go to any lengths to deliver a legendary dinner party on Wednesday, even with a cast that's about as exciting as a Wayne Bennett press conference. So will Ivan let his troll flag fly? Will Amanda drop her soy beef with the vegan? And can stone-faced $tacey keep her eyes on the prize? Sprint, not a marathon: Ten seconds in paradise led to a whole night of hell for Mikey, who triggered a premature evacuation when his lightening fast finish became the joke of the night The 10-Second Man Here for a good time, not a long time: Before the dinner party, we checked in with typically camera-shy Mikey, who was all of a sudden acting like the first man on the moon Before the dinner party, we checked in with typically camera-shy Mikey, who was all of a sudden acting like the first man on the moon. 'Yeah, we went all the way last night,' he said, before flicking his cigarette butt in the principal's face and driving off. 'Best 10 seconds of my life!' Natasha added, as Mikey's confidence rocket came crashing down to earth. Danny Zuko over here: 'Yeah, we went all the way last night,' he said, before flicking his cigarette butt in the principal's face and driving off How was Sex Week for youse guys? Sex week: As always, the first topic of conversation at the dinner party was, 'How was sex week for youse guys?' After hearing about Cathy's wild romp, Mishel started 'getting all these ideas' Nice try: 'No you're not!' Steve yelled from the distance 'So, who's banged?' Cathy & Josh - 'Moaning At First Sight' The payoff: These guys did it when Cathy was still halfway down the aisle Stacey & Michael - 'Makeup miracle' Wild makeup sex after Michael went full Charlie Sheen through the streets of Fiji Hayley & David - 'You scratch my back' These two needed the Hirudoid cream after a feisty Fetish Week fling Natasha & Mikey - 'Fast & the Furious' Mikey was fast, Natasha was furious Advertisement As always, the first topic of conversation at the dinner party was, 'How was sex week for youse guys?' So Cathy spent the next hour detailing her kinky cowboy romp in explicit detail. Mishel's eyes looked like they were about to fall out of their sockets. 'I was listening to Cathy talk about her sex life and I'm getting all these ideas...' she said. 'No, she's not!' her husband, Steve, yelled from the distance. A few seconds of awkward silence ensued, and then... 'Mikey lasted 10 seconds!' screamed Natasha, who would have burst if she didn't let it out. Michael looked gutted, but more of that later. The Born Again Vegan Good girl gone bad: Amanda rocked up alone dressed like she'd just come from a funeral, which isn't far off based on the week she'd had Amanda rocked up alone dressed like she'd just come from a funeral, which isn't far off based on the week she'd had. Tash came bounding in a few minutes later and introduced herself to the new girl. 'Hey, how's it going? I'm Tash. Have we met?' she said, shaking her bride's hand. 'I'M YOUR WIFE, YOU VEGAN FLOP!' Amanda replied, instantly jogging Tash's memory with her trademark aggression. The new girl: Tash came bounding in later and introduced herself to the new girl: 'Hey, how's it going? I'm Tash. Have we met?' Amanda replied, 'I'M YOUR WIFE, YOU VEGAN FLOP!' The Good Wife Married At Fight Night: Ice cube baron Michael was trying to start as many fights as possible At dinner, ice cube baron Michael was trying to start as many fights as possible. His probing questions brought out the worst in Steve, who momentarily forgot that the whole idea of the show is to act like you don't hate your wife. 'Be quiet!' he barked at Mishel, who was simply trying to add her two cents to a situation she knew nothing about. Think happy thoughts: After ruining yet another marriage, Michael leaned over to Stacey for a celebratory kiss. She was clearly hating it After ruining yet another marriage, Michael leaned over to wife Stacey for a celebratory kiss. She was clearly hating it, smiling through the pain of being married to an eight-year-old trapped in a millionaire's body. I wonder what she $ees in him? What's their secret? Stacey smiled through the pain of being married to an eight-year-old trapped in a millionaire's body. I wonder what she $ees in him? Premature Evacuation Backfire: In the explosive main event, Mikey's 10-second performance blew up in his face In the explosive main event, Mikey's 10-second performance blew up in his face. It was a completely staged moment that saw pot-stirrer Michael act like he was SHOCKED Natasha had outed her husband's fast finish. This is the same Michael who yelled 'See you in 10 seconds, champ!' whenever Mikey went to the bathroom. 'Don't sex shame your lad!' It was a completely staged moment that saw pot-stirrer Michael act like he was SHOCKED Natasha had outed her husband's fast finish 'Don't sex-shame your lad!' he screamed at Natasha out of nowhere. He got in Mikey's ear next, telling him how Natasha's acid tongue had turned him into the laughing stock of the experiment. Mikey, who had been joking about his performance all night, suddenly (as if being directed by a producer?) decided he was too embarrassed and needed to leave. Job done! He got in Mikey's ear next, telling him how Natasha's acid tongue had turned him into the laughing stock of the experiment. Mikey walked off after deciding he was offended Ivan to the rescue? Ivan chased after him to try and talk him off the ledge. Seriously... Ivan? That's like asking for James Bond and getting Austin Powers Ivan chased after him to try and talk him off the ledge. Seriously... Ivan? That's like asking for James Bond and getting Austin Powers. So why send Ivan out? Because a) he's a producers' pet and b) he's easily the best actor out of the entire cast - he is a real estate agent, after all. After speaking to Mikey, Ivan came back to deal with Natasha. 'You've really embarrassed Mikey, he feels betrayed' he said, dutifully reading from the teleprompter. So why send Ivan out? Because a) he's a producers' pet and b) he's easily the best actor out of the entire cast - he is a real estate agent, after all Natasha stormed off in tears, delivering a Logie-winning performance of her own. But wait, why was Natasha walking off? Isn't Mikey the one who was humiliated? Well, if you're a MAFS producer, there's really just one option: You go with the only person capable of delivering a satisfying performance that climaxes at exactly the right moment. And sorry Mikey, that's not you. SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Datrium , pioneer of the secure multicloud data platform for the resilient enterprise, today announced that Bishop Lynch High School in Dallas, TX, has selected Datrium to secure its IT infrastructure from disasters and ransomware using Datrium DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) and built-in cloud backup. By replacing its legacy backup solution with Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS, which delivers significantly reduced Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and ransomware recovery, Bishop Lynch High School reached new thresholds for performance, improving both Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and RTO. Datrium's easy-to-use and highly reliable DR solution reduced IT costs providing exceptional quality to a pricepoint, improved service and increased the IT team's productivity while effectively combating disasters. Bishop Lynch High School is known for its rigorous college preparatory environment and ability to drive academic excellence; its IT department mirrors this same rigor from a service perspective in its approach to protect its infrastructure and data. The IT team sought a simpler, smarter DR and backup solution to protect its systems from future disasters and be able to recover rapidly. Bishop Lynch High School selected Datrium after being impressed with the ingenuity of Datrium's disaggregated HCI (DHCI) solution and the platform's ability to achieve DR with built-in backup and encryption in the cloud. "The way Datrium integrated their new technology into our old data center and moved the server load to the new ESXi host and storage was so clever. It turned into a VMware VM migration effort where both the previous system and the Datrium system were visible," said Gray Huggins, Director of Technology at Bishop Lynch High School. "The VMs were migrated through the standard approach of VM migration for server and CPU migration. We were able to bring over all of the VMs from our previous environment to the Datrium environment, from the old servers to the new servers, and we didn't have any downtime. We were absolutely stunned and it was almost embarrassingly simple." Before deploying Datrium, Bishop Lynch's IT team would spend several hours troubleshooting problems with backup and replication and quickly had to cut down its long RTO period of one week to four hours and RPO period of 24 hours to 60 minutes. With Datrium DRaaS instant RTO and built-in cloud backup capabilities, Bishop Lynch eliminated nightly backup debugging which reduced costs and now runs cleaner and faster backups, significantly improved IOPS performance and has exceeded its RTO and RPO goals. "The overall service level that we get with Datrium DRaaS makes this a very worthwhile investment. It's going to bring us a lot more of something that's always in short supply in IT: peace of mind," said Huggins. "Cost pressures are especially of major concern for educational institutions and IT shouldn't be a burden on the bottom line," said Tim Page, Chief Executive Officer at Datrium. "Datrium DRaaS with VMware Cloud on AWS has simplified disaster recovery for Bishop Lynch High School and its cloud-based, pay on-demand model has dramatically reduced the financial burden. The IT team can now be confident in combating ransomware and other disasters knowing it can recover instantly." Join Datrium and Bishop Lynch High School for a webinar on Thursday, February 27, at 10 a.m. PST to learn more and read the complete case study . About Datrium Datrium, the multicloud data platform company, provides the leading software platform for disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (DHCI) and disaster recovery (DR) done right. Datrium natively converges primary, backup, disaster recovery, mobility and encryption into a single platform called Automatrix. Central to the Datrium Automatrix platform is Datrium DVX, the industry's fastest and most resilient DHCI system. It combines the durability of SANs with the simplicity of HCI, delivers 10x the performance of traditional systems and integrates seamlessly with Datrium Disaster Recovery as a Service for VMware Cloud on AWS (DRaaS). DRaaS delivers the industry's first instant RTO cloud DR from backups on Amazon S3 and protects all VMware workloads in the cloud and on-premises. Secure by design with always-on encryption and architected for the cloud, Datrium maintains fast performance at any scale while protecting against ransomware and other technological or natural disasters and enables frictionless, no-cost software and data portability between public clouds and on-premises data centers. Automatrix technology provides consistent data services across clouds and automates resource orchestration so applications run at peak performance while liberating IT from managing data infrastructure. Datrium is trusted by global enterprises including eMeter A Siemens Business, vPay and Stearns. Resilient enterprises run fast on Datrium. Learn More Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Blog Media Contact Diana Brodskiy Bhava Communications for Datrium [email protected] 415-306-6199 SOURCE Datrium Related Links https://www.datrium.com PORTAGE A driver was airlifted to a Chicago hospital after an unknown object penetrated his windshield shattering the glass while he drove Wednesday morning on Interstate 80/94. Indiana State Trooper Nathan Wolfe was dispatched at 9:50 a.m. to the 17.4 mile marker about two miles east of the Ripley Street exit. A preliminary investigation by Wolfe found that a 2011 freightliner truck was traveling eastbound in the center lane when an object struck the windshield. The object appeared to have penetrated the windshield which resulted in the glass shattering, according to Indiana State Police. The driver, Kahlil A. Blasingame, 23, from Phoenix, Illinois, suffered serious injuries that resulted in him having to be flown to Chicago from the scene for treatment, police said. The truck is owned by CDS Transport Inc., of Cincinnati, Ohio. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Idea on Thursday paid Rs 1,000 crore to the Department of Telecommunications towards its (AGR) dues, official sources said. Earlier this week, the telecom company had paid Rs 2,500 crore and said it would pay Rs 1,000 crore more by the end of the week. But Friday is a holiday, so the company made the payment on Thursday. Idea, however, did not comment on this. The DoT has been seeking Rs 53,000 crore in AGR payments from Idea, which has been the worst hit by demand for AGR dues. On Wednesday, chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla and his Airtel counterpart Sunil Mittal individually met They are learnt to have sought relief from the government. While the government has so far not taken any decision on a bailout, Birla and Mittal also met Telecom Secretary Anshu Prakash to press for supporting the industry for sustainability. has gone public saying unless government gives relief, it may not remain as a going concern which means it may either shut shop or go for bankruptcy. For the second consecutive year, ESS is hosting an art contest for K-12 public and charter school students in the continental United States. From now until March 20th at 8:00 pm EST, students are invited to submit an original drawing or painting representing this years topic, What would it be like if animals could be teachers, principals, or school staff?. Winning students from four grade groups will receive a $500 gift card, plus a $500 gift card for their school. Encouraging student achievement is a cornerstone of the ESS philosophy, said ESS CEO Buddy Helton. This contest is a great way for students to explore their talent. We were absolutely blown away by the clever and creative submissions to last years contest, so were excited to see what students come up with in this year. To enter the contest, parents or teachers with parental consent can submit student artwork to ArtContest.ESS.com. Artwork will be categorized into four grade groups (K-2, 3-5, 6-8, 9-12). A panel of ESS judges will score each submission on a scale of 1-43, based on the following criteria: Artistic skills Creativity and originality Relation to contest theme A unique and novel approach to the artwork Technical skill by grade level Adherence to the contest rules and requirements During the week of March 30th, the top five finalists from each grade group will be featured on the ESS Facebook and Instagram pages, where the public will vote on their favorites. Artwork that receives the highest total score from the ESS judges and social media likes will be announced as the art contest winners on ESS social media pages on April 20th. For more information and full contest rules, visit ArtContest.ESS.com. About ESS: ESS is the largest education-exclusive personnel and management company in the country, providing full-service programs to K-12 school districts. It recruits, trains, develops, and manages highly qualified substitute and permanent educational talent. ESS solutions place educators in classrooms, improve the quality of education for students, and provide resources to district administration and staff so they can devote more time to raising student achievement. The company fills more than 15,500 absences for more than 700 school district partners each day. For more information, call (877) 983-2244 or visit ESS.com. A deaf boy was caught on camera sharing a 'magical experience' with a Disney World performer through sign language. Five-year-old Caleb, who was adopted three years ago, visited Disney World in Orlando, Florida, with his family on Valentine's Day. Footage shows the performer, dressed as Joy from the 2015 film Inside Out, kneel down to Caleb. Five-year-old Caleb (left) approaches the performer at Disney World, Florida. The performer, dressed as Joy from film Inside Out, reaches out for a hug (right) The video shows Joy signing to Caleb who is fascinated by the character before he reaches out to hug her. Mother Clarissa Bradford is heard cooing over the sweet embrace as the performer Joy blows a kiss to Caleb. She adds: 'Oh my God - this is the first character that has signed! Speaking after the touching moment Ms Bradford said: 'We were given an amazing trip to Disney World and this was the most magical experience for him! The pair embrace as mother Clarissa Bradford films the moment (left). Caleb's mother is amazed that the performer can do sign language to her son She added: 'When she started signing they bonded instantly. 'There was so much more I didn't catch because I was in awe and in the moment. 'This Joy completely blessed our family.' The film is set in the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley where five personified emotions attempt to support her in new surroundings with the character Joy played by American actress Amy Poehler. NEWTON, Mass., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Examity, which works with hundreds of universities, employers, and certification providers worldwide to ensure integrity in online learning, today announced the latest release of its online proctoring solution, known as Winter 2020. Available this month, the updated platform is designed to create greater transparency at all stages of the proctoring process. "As online programs grow in sophistication and courses become more complex, it becomes increasingly important to ensure a smooth, secure testing experience for both students and faculty," said Dr. Andrew Feldstein, Assistant Provost for Teaching Innovation and Learning Technologies at Fort Hays State University, which participated in a pilot of the new interface. "Winter 2020 reflects Examity's understanding of the importance of scalability, and commitment to a seamless and intuitive test taking experience for students at FHSU as our programs continue to grow." Examity's experience improvements are rooted in a simple, intuitive, and flexible design that brings both increased security and clarity to the testing process. The platform provides more efficient onboarding for faculty and administrators, as well as more robust and streamlined reporting functionality. For test-takers, this results in easier profile creation, seamless navigation, and greater scheduling flexibility. The approach reflects best practices in security infrastructure established by IMS Global's pioneering LTI 1.3 interoperability standard, which Examity is the first proctoring provider to adopt. "Recent technological advancements are making it possible to create a testing experience that is not just secure -- but also intuitive and easy to use for test-takers, faculty, and administrators alike," said Todd Irvin, Senior Instructional Technology Consultant at Wiley. "This latest update reinforces Examity's long-standing position as the leader in online proctoring and learning validation technology." Recent data from the U.S. Department of Education indicates that more than one-third of all college students now take at least one course online. Designed to meet the growing need for security in online education, Examity's learning validation platform offers a variety of proctoring styles, from automated through to live. The company was recently named to Deloitte's 2019 Fast 500 list for the second straight year and has also been honored for two consecutive years as one of the top ten fastest-growing businesses in Massachusetts by the Boston Business Journal. "As online learning reshapes the global landscape of education and training, providers must stay ahead of the curve to maintain quality and integrity," said Jim Holm, CEO of Examity. "Winter 2020 will enable us to continue providing the best -- and most secure -- experience possible for test-takers and administrators alike." About Examity Examity was founded to meet the needs of colleges, employers, and certification providers looking to ensure integrity. Since 2013, Examity has partnered with hundreds of organizations worldwide to provide a cost-effective and flexible online proctoring and learning validation solution. For more information, visit Examity.com or follow the company on Twitter @examity. SOURCE Examity The Opposition in Goa on Thursday lashed out at the BJP-led coalition government for playing into the hands of Karnataka, even as the Supreme Court earlier today allowed the latters plea for the Centre to notify the final award of the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal. While the Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat called it a Black Day for Goa, state advocate general Devidas Pangam claimed, that the apex courts okay to the Karnataka governments request was only on technical grounds. It is a Black Day because the Goa government remains silent o the Supreme Courts decision to notify the award of the Mahadei Water Dispute Tribunal diverting water from our lifeline Mother Mahadayi to Karnataka. We will now intensify peoples agitation against the insensitive government, Leader of Opposition Digambar Kamat said soon after the apex courts decision. President of the Goa Forward Party and former Deputy Chief Minister Vijai Sardesai also slammed the Pramod Sawant-led coalition government over the issue. It clearly indicates that we have been sold out and Karnataka has actually played a good game. Goa has either had an under the table understanding or clearly played into their hands which is suicidal for the state of Goa, Sardesai told DH. All three states Goa, Maharashtra and Karnataka have challenged the provisions of the Mahadayi Water Disputes Tribunal award delivered in 2018, in the apex court. Goa Advocate General Devidas Pangam explained, that in order to challenge the provisions of the award, the award Itself needed to be notified by the central government first. Allowing Karnataka to formally challenge the Tribunals award, was only a technical hurdle which needed to be overcome, he said. So for this limited reason, it will be notified. In any case the tribunal's verdict will be subject to the outcome of the petition, Pangam said. Alexander Regan, a University of Nebraska Medical Center emergency room technician, said bills introduced by Lincoln Sen. Kate Bolz and Omaha Sen. Justin Wayne to cap the out-of-pocket costs of insulin could literally save lives. At his job, he sees patients who come in as a last resort, unable to afford the high price of insulin. Insulin is a hormone that regulates glucose in the blood. For those with some forms of diabetes and unstable blood glucose, they need to inject or inhale insulin to keep blood sugar from going too high, which can result in serious complications. The cost of insulin has increased in recent years, and the life-saving hormone has become unaffordable for some patients. Bolz introduced a bill (LB949) this session that would require any individual or group sickness and accident insurance policy that provides reimbursement for prescription insulin to limit the amount that a covered person is required to pay to no more that $100 per 30-day supply, regardless of the amount or type needed. Wayne's bill (LB970) would do essentially the same thing, and both had hearings before the Banking, Commerce and Insurance Committee on Tuesday. Those testifying in support of the bill said people dependent on insulin deserve to live, to have good health, happiness and access to insulin, which are human rights. Ben Feiten, an occupational therapy student at Creighton University, said he and two of his brothers have had Type I diabetes, two of them for 23 years and one for 30 years. Diabetes affects every aspect of their lives and daily decisions for school, work and recreation. It's still a constant stressor, Feiten said, "one that I cannot take a vacation from." But it's the cost of diabetes management that has caused the most life-altering changes, he said. It dictated the vocation he would choose in order to have the salary and insurance to pay the costs of treatment for a lifetime. In 2012, the average per person spending each year for insulin was about $2,864, according to the Healthcare Cost Institute. By 2016, the spending was $5,705 per year, without a change in the insulin itself. "I find that sickening, since the creators of insulin sold the patent for $1, believing it should be affordable and accessible for everyone," Feiten said. This bill would give him peace of mind to know what to expect from future insurance plans. If it's not passed, young professionals would have to leave Nebraska for states like Colorado and Illinois, where insulin costs are more closely regulated and guaranteed, Feiten said. Julie Hopp's husband of 40 years has diabetes and is insulin dependent. They fight annually to justify the brand of insulin that works for him, she said. In-network insulin with most insurance providers causes frequent insulin reactions and dangerously low blood sugar. His doctor has to write a letter annually about his need for another brand of insulin that causes fewer hospitalizations, Hopp said. Ashley Ryan Wolfe needs two kinds of insulin and multiple vials a month. She also easily spends more than $300 a month on supplies, she said. "The numbers just didn't add up for me," she told the committee. "Rent, food, diabetes supplies, something had to give. I started eating less and skipping my long-acting insulin and only checking my blood sugar occasionally." Wolfe avoided her doctor, because of the cost and because she didn't want to know the effect on her diabetes management. With the help of a primary care doctor, a series of job changes and better health insurance, she was able to become self sufficient again, but it took a long time, she told the committee. Robert Bell, lobbyist for the Nebraska Insurance Federation, opposed the bills. With the continuing rise in health care costs, he said, both premiums and cost-sharing amounts have also risen. So it's not unusual that advocates for consumers would seek government mandates to lower consumers' share of those costs. "Unfortunately," Bell said, "this does not actually get to the root of the problem, which is the high cost of these pharmaceuticals. Instead, it merely shifts these costs to the insurance company, who must increase its premiums and cost-sharing limits to stay solvent." Insurance companies are not making large profits off high-priced drugs, he said. Both stock companies and mutual health insurers are subject to limitations from the Affordable Care Act. For every dollar of premium received, Bell said, at least 80 cents must be used to pay medical claims. The remaining 20 cents can be used to pay for marketing, salaries, administrative costs and overhead. Any bill that caps a cost-sharing measure will not apply to federally regulated self-insured large group plans governed by the Employee Retirement Income and Security Act, he said, which include at least half of privately insured Nebraskans. The bills will have a more limited impact than most realize, he said. And when that occurs, people in need of insulin may switch to state-regulated plans, which could lead to higher risks and costs within the state self-regulated pool, with accompanying higher premiums. Colleen Nielson, lobbyist for the American Health Insurance Plans, blamed the problem on drug makers. The companies understand the rising costs of insulin has presented an affordability crisis that threatens health and well being of patients, she said. But capping co-pays only masks the problem of drug makers seeking advantage of a broken market for their own financial gain at the expense of patients, she said. "The lack of competition, transparency and accountability in the prescription drug market has created extended price-dictating monopolies with economic power that exists nowhere else in the U.S. economy," Neilson said. The committee has not yet acted on the bill. Reach the writer at 402-473-7228 or jyoung@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSLegislature Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 On Friday, the U.S. government announced a two-step peace deal with the insurgent Afghan Taliban. In the first step, the United States and the Taliban will substantially "reduce violence" against each other across Afghanistan for seven days. If satisfied with the reduction, the two sides will sign a broader agreement on withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, measures for verifying that Afghan territory isn't being used for international terrorism, and starting intra-Afghan talks for political power-sharing between the Kabul government and the Taliban. This landmark agreement is intended to end the United States' longest war. In September, President Donald Trump came close to signing a deal with the Taliban at Camp David. But the Taliban killed an American soldier and Trump called off the summit. This time around, while there are serious risks of failure, the agreed framework provides an important opening to bring U.S. troops home and ease the suffering of Afghan civilians. Here's what you need to know. - - - How did we get here? Reaching this agreement took three years, in part because of formidable hurdles. For much of the negotiating period, influential members of the Afghan Taliban felt they had a superior position on the battlefield and could wear out the U.S. into unilaterally withdrawing. This was not surprising. Research on civil war suggests that rebels prefer fighting to negotiating when they feel confident about their military prospects because they have battlefield momentum, external state support and illicit economies that fund it. The Taliban had all of the above, including a resilient insurgency, patrons such as Pakistan and vast income from drug sales. The Trump White House's internal politics also caused some difficulties. In 2017, then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and national security adviser H.R. McMaster argued against withdrawal. Trump's next national security adviser, John Bolton, also opposed a deal. But top U.S. negotiator Zalmay Khalilzad moved the start-stop peace process relentlessly. Three factors enabled his diplomatic push. First, he decoupled the intra-Afghan power-sharing agreement from a first-order agreement between the United States and the Taliban. Initially, the United States wanted the Taliban to negotiate with the Afghan government. By late 2018, however, Khalilzad lost confidence in Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's ability to forge a united front among his allies and rivals to compel the Afghan Taliban to negotiate, and left him out. Second, in the words of a Pentagon official, Pakistan played an "indispensable role" in persuading the Afghan Taliban to negotiate - despite Pakistan's deep support for the Afghan Taliban for most of the war. Pakistan's calculus appears to have been shaped by a combination of the threat of international sanctions and assurances on some of its concerns, such as India's future role as an influential power in Afghanistan. Finally, Trump wanted to end the war to fulfill a key campaign promise, providing important political momentum. He leveraged his capital as a hawk to sidestep objections on concessions to the Afghan Taliban. This signaled American seriousness to the Afghan Taliban. It also reduced friction among U.S. agencies on Afghan policy, which pulled in different directions for much of the war. - - - The harder part comes next If both sides reduce violence and sign the broader agreement, the United States and the Taliban will have to fulfill some commitments. The United States will need to withdraw a large number of U.S. forces over the next few months and release Taliban prisoners. The United States wants the Taliban to demonstrate a commitment to stop international terrorism and to negotiate a power-sharing agreement with the Afghan political elite. Each side will worry about the other side cheating. The United States will closely watch whether the Taliban fulfills its commitment to break ties with al-Qaida and will expect timely implementation of verification mechanisms for monitoring international terrorist activity. The Taliban will closely watch the U.S. withdrawal and will synchronize its demobilization with the departure of U.S. soldiers. Finally, with the intra-Afghan power-sharing discussion, Afghan domestic politics will enter choppy waters. On one hand, Afghan elites are genuinely concerned about whether the Afghan Taliban will engage in good-faith discussions toward a power-sharing settlement, and whether the Afghan Taliban will try to reverse human rights gains since 2001, especially on the rights of women. On the other hand, Ghani's domestic standing is in a state of crisis. His recent reelection, announced Tuesday, was marred by a dispute over the vote count, which his political rivals have rejected. Looking ahead, major centers of Afghan power have vastly varied priorities. Afghan domestic political disputes can derail the peace process at any stage. - - - How the United States can prevent a civil war and international terrorism The U.S. government may have to do a lot more to prevent a renewed Afghan civil war, including managing Afghan political elites, shaping the intra-Afghan talks and leaning on Pakistan to keep the Taliban from waging war. It may wish to watch out lest critical parties such as Iran and India inflame Afghan groups to oppose a settlement. The United States will need to calibrate economic aid to Taliban and Afghan elites to reward good negotiating behavior - and to use the threat of delaying troop withdrawals if the deal begins to collapse. According to the United Nations, the Taliban and al-Qaida continue to collaborate on the battlefield. More recently, al-Qaida has sought to influence terms of the peace through "shuttle diplomacy" with the Afghan Taliban. This suggests that despite Afghan Taliban's assurances, al-Qaida can get a boost in Afghanistan. To keep al-Qaida's threat low, the U.S. government may want to consider maintaining counterterrorism options in Afghanistan that don't involve troops on the ground. U.S. military and intelligence are experienced - and sometimes effective - in such counterterrorism operations. That may be necessary to prevent al-Qaida from once again threatening the United States at home. - - - Mir is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. For other commentary and analysis from The Monkey Cage, an independent blog anchored by political scientists from universities across the country, see www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage The December election of a regime insider to replace longtime president Abdelaziz Bouteflika has triggered questions about the future of Algeria's year-long "Hirak" protest movement. The spontaneous and leaderless youth-dominated anti-government movement has been motivated by the slogan "let them all go" -- a reference to a political system deemed corrupt and inefficient. But analysts say that key demand appears to have been buried since the election of Abdelmadjid Tebboune -- a former prime minister and member of Bouteflika's National Liberation Front. So what next for the Hirak movement? Should it negotiate with a president who is far from being the fresh face protesters demanded, even if he has himself repeatedly said he was ready to "extend a hand" to cooperate with them? Should the Hirak build a solid structure for itself and designate representatives? Experts say the movement is divided on all those questions and faces important decisions. The protest movement is young "and everything it has done has been spontaneous", said Karima Direche, a historian and expert on contemporary issues facing North African countries. They "have to learn to listen to each other, accept that opinions could be different and learn to negotiate in order to reach a consensus. "We're not there yet," said Direche. She said the Hirak has been "experimenting" since the movement first emerged on the scene in February 2019 to oppose a fifth presidential bid by an ailing Bouteflika. Pressure from the street forced Bouteflika to resign in April but that has not satisfied the demonstrators who demand the departure of the entire political system in place in Algeria since independence in 1962. Despite Tebboune's election, the protest movement is still seeking "political transition" in the oil-rich country and how to achieve it. "We're stuck in something quite bizarre: there is still a mobilisation on the streets," said Direche, referring to the weekly Friday protests that continue to grip Algeria a year on. "But there is a real difficulty to move on to something else," she said. Time for decisions Other analysts agreed. "The movement has important decisions to take," said Dalia Ghanem, a researcher at the Carnegie Middle East Center based in Beirut. For her, Hirak members agree only on two things: the need for a complete overhaul of the political system and to keep the protest movement peaceful. But they disagree on how to achieve that end and on who should lead the movement, Ghanem said. The absence of leaders is undermining the ability of the protest movement to negotiate with authorities, she added. Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune at his swearing-in ceremony on December 19. By RYAD KRAMDI (AFP) And, said Direche, there are no other "opposition forces who can take over" that task because unions, independent media and opposition parties do not really exist in Algeria. The absence of leaders had been a positive for the protest movement because it prevented authorities from "coopting" the campaign, said Ghanem. Pierre Vermeren, professor of contemporary history at the Paris 1 university, still sees a "peaceful" way out for the Hirak. He proposes the formation of "political or civil associations to pave the way for local and national elections" and for candidates to "relay the message of the Hirak inside state institutions". However, according to Ghanem, the political class appears to have regained the upper hand since Bouteflika's resignation on April 2. Analysts says Algerians are reluctant to organise strikes or a civil disobedience campaign. "They think twice" before embarking on such a path, said Direche, because of the dark history of political violence in Algeria, especially the decade of civil war in the 1990s. Journalist Akram Belkaid predicts the process will be long but eventually prevail. "Sooner or later the regime will have to take notice," he said. Ukraine exports almost 39 mln tonnes of grain since July 1 15:40, 20.02.20 736 Ukrainian farmers have already shipped abroad some 16.26 million tonnes of wheat. A shattered mother has fought back tears recalling a series of heartbreaking mistreatments she says doctors inflicted on her disabled son leading up to his death. Rachel Browne told the the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability in Sydney that hospital staff wrote off her son Finlay as 'just a grizzly child with Down syndrome'. The 16-year-old from Bathurst in New South Wales died following an agonising 71-day fight in hospital in 2016 which included 12 abdominal surgeries and 65 days spent in the paediatric intensive care unit. During an earlier occasion at Bathurst Hospital, Ms Browne said doctors appeared offended that she had come prepared for her child to be committed. Rachel Browne (pictured) told the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability in Sydney that doctors wrote 'trisomy 21,' or Down syndrome as the cause of her son Finlay's death 'He felt that Finlay... was just a whingey child and suggested I go home and give him more Panadol and let the antibiotics take effect and in essence just let him get over it,' she said, the ABC reports. The mother said she was then given a distressing discharge summary letter for her GP. 'It referred to Finlay as a grizzly child with Down syndrome who had poor dental hygiene and I felt that comment was completely irrelevant as to why we were there,' she said. Finlay, who also lived with autism, fell rapidly ill in September 2016, suffering terrible pain, vomiting and had blood in his faeces and was rushed to Bathurst Hospital. When they arrived, Ms Browne said Finlay, who was so weak he had to be held, collapsed on the floor. 'The triage nurse, when I looked up rolled her eyes, and I thought "that's it, we're not going to get the help we need",' she said. Ms Browne said once they saw a doctor 45 minutes later, the health professional stood with his back Finlay and did not speak to him directly until he was asked to. Finley Browne, died in 2016, aged 16, after a harrowing 71-day fight in hospital undergoing numerous surgeries She said she was told a special paediatric helicopter would take her son to Sydney Westmead Children's Hospital for emergency surgery but it never arrived. Instead, her son was operated on later that night then flown down the following morning, where he underwent further surgery. Ms Browne said the experience made her feel like her son had been written off as there appeared to be a distinct lack of urgency to provide him with care. Following his 12 operations, the majority of Finlay's small bowel was removed, and the family was told he would never eat or drink again. As a result of his injuries, Finlay's liver and kidneys started shutting down. 'He kept saying, Mum, I want to go home ... I wanted to get him home but it became evident that if he did recover he would have no quality of life,' Ms Browne said. After a final surgery, the decision was made to withdraw treatment, and he died in December 2016 with his family around him. On Finlay's death certificate, which was shown to the commission, 'trisomy 21,' or Down syndrome, is listed among the causes of death. Earlier this week, Ms Browne told the commission about the final time her son left the family home as they went to the hospital. 'He put an arm around each of us and he looked up and said, I love you mum, I love you dad,' she said. Ms Browne she did not want to discourage people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities from seeking medical attention but better education was urgently needed within health care systems. Ms Browne approached Bathurst Hospital (pictured) staff after Finlay's death and lodged complaints with them and the NSW Healthcare Complaints Commission She had received questionable comments from medical professionals throughout Finlay's life, including from a doctor in hospital the day he was born. 'The doctor said that he felt there was something wrong with Finlay and I had commented that I knew, I'd felt that he had Down syndrome, he said to me that it was okay because I was young and I could have more children,' Ms Browne said. Six months after Finlay's death, Ms Browne addressed Bathurst Hospital staff. 'I wanted clinicians to know what the ramifications of their inaction were to not only Fin, but to his family, to his friends,' she said. 'That this young man had a life, a life well lived - he was just not a person with a disability, he was a human being.' The commission continues. BJP president J P Nadda on Thursday called on Akali Dal patriarch Parkash Singh Badal at his home in Punjab's Badal village and deliberated on strengthening the NDA in the state, sources in the parties said. The visit to Badal's native village came days after the former Punjab chief minister said minorities "should be taken along" to run a government. The closed-door meeting, which lasted about an hour, assumes significance following the brief strain between the BJP and its oldest ally Shiromani Akali Dal that had announced it would not contest the Delhi assembly elections following differences with the saffron party on the Citizenship Amendment Act. It later backed BJP candidates in the assembly elections. Coming out of the meeting, Nadda told reporters he had gone to the village to meet the veteran leader to extend a personal invitation for his son's wedding. "We have good relations with the Badals," Nadda said. The BJP president added on Twitter that he had paid a courtesy visit to Parkash Singh Badal Sahab, one of India's most "respected statesmen". "Meeting with Badal Sahab always inspires us," he said. Nadda was accompanied by BJP vice president Prabhat Jha, also the party's in-charge for Punjab. Nadda got a grand welcome with flowers and the traditional bhangra when he reached Badal village. Addressing a rally in Amritsar on February 13, Badal said all religions should be respected. The SAD wanted Muslims to be included in the CAA, a legislation which seeks to give citizenship to members of persecuted minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan but leaves out the community. This was Nadda's first visit to Punjab after becoming BJP president and also his first meeting with Badal senior. From Badal village, Nadda went to Amritsar and paid obeisance at the Golden Temple in the evening. Asked about the relations between the BJP and the SAD, he said, "BJP and SAD have old, important and strong alliance, we remained together in good and odd circumstances....Further strengthening and making stronger the NDA, we both are committed for this cause." "A few days ago, I had a meeting with SAD president Sukhbir Singh Badal...Alliance is very much strong and will remain intact in future too," he said. Later, he had a closed-door meeting with Punjab BJP leaders at a hotel. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A bus believed to be carrying passengers from the cruise ship Diamond Princess leaves Yokohama port. Photo: Getty Images An Irish couple returning from the coronavirus-hit Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan may face another two weeks of quarantine in the UK if they are airlifted on a British repatriation flight. The Department of Foreign Affairs said it is assisting with travel for uninfected Irish passengers who are free to leave the vessel in Yokohama. It is unclear what kind of transport is involved but it could be an evacuation flight planned by the British foreign office from Tokyo to England later this week. The plan is to quarantine the passengers for 14 days in the NHS facility near Liverpool which also housed people flown back to the UK from the Chinese city of Wuhan. Inadequate Two Irish citizens who normally live in Germany remain in hospital in Tokyo where they are being treated for the coronavirus. The other four Irish include the couple from Co Meath and two crew members. The two crew will continue to work on the ship until everyone is discharged. Hundreds of passengers are now in the process of disembarking from the cruise but another 79 new coronavirus cases were detected yesterday. A Japanese disease expert, Kentaro Iwata, described the ship's quarantine as a "major failure", "completely inadequate" and a "mistake". He had to put himself in a 14-day quarantine for fear of infecting his family after a brief visit on board the vessel, which was placed in quarantine until yesterday but has seen cases of infection mount during that time. Prof Iwata, an infectious diseases expert at Kobe University, said the ship was completely inadequate in terms of infection control. He said there was "no distinction between the green zone, which is free of infection, and the red zone, which is potentially contaminated by the virus". "I was in Africa dealing with the Ebola outbreak," Prof Iwata said. "I was in other countries dealing with the cholera outbreak. I was in China in 2003 to deal with Sars... I never had fear of getting infection myself." However, Japanese official Shigeru Omi, a former World Health Organisation regional head advising the government, said the quarantine had "a very positive effect" on reducing infections. "The majority of the infections, we believe, occurred before the date when the quarantine measures started," he said. Relief Meanwhile, there was relief for another seven Irish citizens, two of whom live in Ireland, who were another cruise ship. That ship, the Westerdam, which is moored off Cambodia, has given the all-clear to passengers. Holland America, which runs the Westerdam, said test results "provide the required clearance for remaining guests to begin their onward journey home". The ship was quarantined after one of hundreds of passengers who disembarked last Friday tested positive for the virus. Two of the passengers were Irish and they returned to Ireland at the weekend. They were not exit screened before leaving Cambodia but have been in contact with the HSE since and are in self-isolation, following precautionary protocols. In an appearance Monday on ABCs The View program, the prominent black Democrat Stacey Abrams brushed aside the right-wing, racist record of Democratic presidential candidate Mike Bloomberg, telling the shows hosts that the billionaire oligarchs entry into the race was positive since for once we actually know where the money is coming from. Stacey Abrams and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi [Credit: Office of U.S. House Speaker] The former New York City mayor, who served two terms as a Republican and one as an independent, and who backed George W. Bush in 2004, has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars from his $60 billion fortune into his campaign to win the Democratic Partys nomination for president, or at least secure enough delegates to block Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders at the partys nominating convention in July. Asked whether she thought it was an issue that Bloomberg was spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a frontrunner spot in the primary elections, Abrams replied that this was no different than a candidate using his or her pet on the campaign trail to attract voters. Every person is allowed to run and should run the race that they think they should run, and Mike Bloomberg has chosen to use his finances. Other people are using their dog, their charisma, their whatever, she said. I think its an appropriate question to raise. But I dont think its disqualifying for anyone to invest in fixing America. She was also asked about the fact that her political action committee, Fair Fight Action, had received $5 million from Bloomberg, the largest donation the group has received since it was founded in 2018. Queried as to whether the donation had any influence on her political views, she replied, I am grateful to any person who contributes to Fair Fight. We have more than one hundred thousand contributors. His check just had a few more zeros on it. Bloomberg met with Abrams in Atlanta in January and gave a closed-door speech to a voting rights summit that she hosted. The minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives from 2011 to 2017 and defeated 2018 gubernatorial candidate, Abrams is widely seen as a leading pick for vice president by whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination. She has been courted by former Vice President Joe Biden, who raised her name as a possible running mate in November. Responding to a question from co-host Joy Behar as to whether Abrams wanted to be vice president, she replied, Of course I want it. Of course I want to serve America, of course I want to be a patriot. Abrams has previously made it clear that she has her sights set on the presidency in the coming years. Thats my plan, and Im very pragmatic, she told the political website FiveThirtyEight last month. Abrams is a proponent of identity politics, asserting in Foreign Affairs magazine last year that blacks and whites have intrinsic racial differences. She is seen by party strategists as a good pick to check the diversity boxes for the running mate of a presidential candidate who will likely be a white male. In the same Foreign Affairs article, Abrams denounced politics based on the catchall category known as the working class. Abrams own brand of right-wing racialist politics would not be out of sync with Bloombergs racist approach to governing when he was the mayor of New York City, the most unequal city in the United States. Under Bloomberg, millions of mostly African American and Hispanic working class men were stopped and searched by the police without any suspicion of having committed a crime under the notorious police tactic of stop-and-frisk. Last week, audio emerged of Bloomberg addressing an audience at the elite Aspen Institute in 2015 in which he said: Ninety-five percent of your murders and murderers and murder victims fit one M.O. You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male minorities, 15 to 25. He went on to add, The way you get the guns out of the kids hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them. The response of the Democratic-aligned media, which relentlessly promotes racial politics, and prominent black Democrats and other leading members of the party has been to downplay his remarks. While another candidate would have been forced out of the campaign for making openly racist remarks in defense of a policy of mass terror directed primarily against minority youth, Bloomberg has been given a free pass, gaining endorsements from members of the Congressional Black Caucus and a long line of current and former African American mayors. This only shows that the obsession with race of the Democratic Party and the privileged upper-middle class layersblack as well as whitefor which it speaks has nothing to do with the defense of working class blacks. Rather, the politics of race, gender and sexual orientation are utilized by well-off academics, professionals, politicians, union officials and corporate executives to secure a bigger slice of the wealth of the top 10 percent. These layers look on the working class with fear and contempt and are in awe of oligarchs like Bloomberg, from whom they are ready and eager to accept bribes and handouts. They and their identity politics are part and parcel of the politics of the American oligarchy that controls both major parties. One of the key strategies of Bloombergs campaign has been to use his unlimited financial resources to win the backing of current and former black Democratic officials, ministers and donors. He gave millions in campaign funds to help Democrats get elected to Congress is 2018 and has engaged in strategic philanthropic grant-giving to cities, non-profits and churches. On Tuesdays episode of The View, co-host Whoopi Goldberg (net worth $45 million) dismissed Bloombergs racist record as mayor, quipping that everybody has stepped in it but that he had issued a sincere mea culpa, unlike Trump, who has never apologized for his racist remarks. Ariel Investments co-CEO and former DreamWorks Animation CEO Mellody Hobson, a prominent fundraiser for former President Barack Obama and the wife of billionaire film director George Lucas, co-hosted a Bloomberg election event in Chicago Tuesday night. Others at the invite-only event included Steve Benjamin, the first black mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, and Kimberly Peeler-Allen, the director of the Committee for Mike and co-founder of Higher Heights, a group that works to elevate African American women into positions of corporate and political power. The response of Abrams and this wealthy layer of black politicians and businesspeople to Bloombergs campaign makes absolutely clear the class character of identity politics. They know that, if elected, Bloomberg will carry out policies that benefit their bank accounts and stock portfolios. iSignthis and NSX Limited enter into ClearPay Joint Venture Melbourne, Feb 20, 2020 AEST (ABN Newswire) - iSignthis Ltd ( ASX:ISX ) ( FRA:TA8 ) and NSX Limited ( ASX:NSX ) are both pleased to announce that they have entered into a Shareholders Agreement to form a joint venture vehicle, ClearPay Pty Ltd ("ClearPay JV"), to develop a multicurrency, real-time, same day DvP platform ("ClearPay"), to be integrated with ISX's ISXPay(R) and Paydentity(TM).The system will initially be utilized alongside with the National Stock Exchange of Australia's ("NSXA") current post-trade arrangements where appropriate. However, the NSXA, NSX's wholly owned subsidiary market operator, intends to ultimately process all transactions via the new platform.With ClearPay, the NSXA will be able to offer a same-day settlement (T+0) capability which will supersede the current (T+ various days delayed for the clearing and settlement) process offered by other domestic and global exchanges. Settlement by other exchanges is usually T+2 or T+3 days.On completion of ClearPay's DvP platform, it is expected that the domestic and international broker network will expand and connect via industry-standard ISO20022 interface and participate using an industry-standard blockchain. This will provide the NSXA with one of the world's most advanced DvP platforms, inclusive of an inbuilt sub-registry.Under the terms of the ClearPay Shareholders Agreement, the first cash call for ClearPay JV post the first NSX placement will be a sum of $3.2 million for a 41% interest by the NSX. ISX will be contributing intellectual property and its subsidiary, Probanx Solutions Ltd, will design and develop the DvP platform for a fee, including the integration into ISXPay(R) and Paydentity(TM) platforms.The second cash call will be a sum of $1.3 million contributed by NSX for a further 9% interest in ClearPay, should NSX raise at least that minimum amount under terms of a proposed further placement, being $3.8 million. NSX and ISX would at that stage equally own 50% of ClearPay JV."It's very exciting for us that the ClearPay JV will bring genuine competition to the Australian cash equities eco-system. iSignthis brings an inherent high technology capability to the NSXA, including its extensive payments and Know Your Customer's Customer ("KYCC") services, ISXPay(R) and Paydentity(TM)" said ISX Managing Director and CEO John Karantzis.Mr. Karantzis will act as the CEO of ClearPay during the software development stage, with the NSXA operating the platform once full technical and business development has been achieved.Thomas Price, acting CEO of NSX comments: "Market commentators are in broad agreement that cash equity exchanges are facing a global technology revolution which is challenging legacy methods of clearing and settlement. Having patiently monitored the development of the appropriate technology and know how we consider that this is the right time for the NSX to act.""The ClearPay joint venture with iSignthis allows the NSX to expedite its plans to transform its licenced exchange market within a cost-efficient framework. The introduction of an already experienced provider of RegTech and payments systems is very satisfying for us as it allows an accelerated build process.""More exciting is that it creates a solid foundation for the NSXA to be a true independent first-class venue of choice for companies seeking to be serviced via the most advanced infrastructure and distribution in their goal of attracting investors from both here and abroad. "About ClearPayClearPay will develop and operate a DLT based multicurrency, real-time, DvP platform. The DLT will be accessible to participants and share registry operators, with NSXA as the central authority.ClearPay supports both the NSXA's ability to navigate the significant technological changes occurring in the Australian post-trade landscape and the NSXA's transformation into a globally competitive digital asset exchange that can provide secure real-time trading of physical world digitised assets and securities.The platform will take advantage of ISX's proposed Exchange Settlement Account ("ESA") at the Reserve Bank of Australia for Australian dollar payments and will leverage ISX's existing Eurosystem Central Bank Exchange Settlement Account for Euro payments.The DvP platform will operate under Bank of International Settlement ("BIS") model 1 initially, with a real-time distributed ledger operated by ClearPay as the central authority. The platform will be accessible to third-party share registers and key participants, using a non-proprietary blockchain technology. This will allow multiple multilateral net settlements daily via the ESA and allow dynamic real-time calculation of participant net payment position against the book.ClearPay will not need, and will not initially seek, a Clearing and Settlement Facility Licence ("CSFL") because the products NSXA offers for ClearPay will be subject to counterparty identification and verification via Paydentity(TM), with a public order and settlement book, creating a "Lit Exchange".The benefit of a "Lit Exchange" is that full anti-money laundering processes will be applied to the buyer and seller, and "dark pools" can be eliminated. BIS Model 1 with real-time also mitigates disadvantages associated with high-frequency traders, by way of an open, fair and equitable DvP process being conducted multiple times daily.ClearPay's blockchain-based Digital Exchange Subregister System ("DESS") will be another competitive element compared to the Australian Security Exchange's ("ASX") Clearing House Electronic Subregister System ("CHESS") monopoly.Use of digital ledger technology to determine net payment position, coupled with instant payments and multiple multilateral daily settlements, effectively eliminates the key disadvantage of BIS Model 1 that requires forward funding of payment by participants which can often fall short during intraday trading. It also eliminates any systemic payments risk as the NSXA grows.ClearPay will, however, shortly apply for a CSFL licence in order to introduce further competition into the Australian market, which presently is serviced by the ASX's wholly owned subsidiary, Austraclear, in a monopoly environment.As the DvP platform will have multiple currencies available to it at launch via ISXPay(R) (including SEPA instant and multicurrency debit cards), the ClearPay platform is expected to be attractive as a technology platform to market operators in jurisdictions outside of Australia. The instant payments technology coupled with real-time blockchain digital ledger technology will allow settlements to move from three days to same-day or early next day. The display, trading, and clearing of securities in multiple currencies can also be made available, potentially providing an attractive drawcard for international participants to trade and list on the NSXA.ISX Licence UpdateISX has previously announced that it has applied for an Australian Authorised Deposit-taking Institution ("ADI") licence, together with non-cash payment facility, custodial and depositary licences, in order to support brokers and Australian Financial Service Licence ("AFSL") holders.ISX has previously supported other classes of Australian Securities and Investment Commission ("ASIC") AFS Licensees with their KYC(C), transaction monitoring and payments requirements.Finalisation of the ADI licence by the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority ("APRA") and ASIC custodial and depositary licensing will allow ISX to further support ClearPay's operations but are not essential for the exchange.ISX will also consider the benefits, if any, of integration of the Australian National Payments Platform ("NPP") being incorporated into ISXPay(R). The NPP, SEPA Core, SEPA Instant and the UK's Faster Payments Network are all based on the ISO20022 protocol.About iSignthis Ltd iSignthis Ltd (ASX:ISX) (FRA:TA8) is a hybrid monetary financial institution and also a RegTech leader in remote identity verification, payment authentication with deposit taking, transactional banking and payment processing capability. iSignthis provides an end-to-end on-boarding service for merchants, with a unified payment, electronic money and identity service via our Paydentity(TM) and ISXPay(R) solutions. By converging payments and identity, iSignthis delivers regulatory compliance to an enhanced customer due diligence standard, offering global reach to any of the world's 4.2Bn 'bank verified' card or account holders, that can be remotely on-boarded to meet the Customer Due Diligence requirements of AML regulated merchants in as little as 3 to 5 minutes. Paydentity(TM) has now onboarded and verified more than 1.5m persons to an AML KYC standard. iSignthis Paydentity(TM) service is the trusted back office solution for regulated entities, allowing merchants to stay ahead of the regulatory curve, and focus on growing their core business. iSignthis' subsidiary, iSignthis eMoney Ltd, trades as ISXPay(R), and is an EEA authorised eMoney Monetary Financial Institution, offering card acquiring in the EEA, and Australia. ISXPay(R) is a principal member of Mastercard Inc, Diners, Discover, (China) Union Pay International and JCB International, an American Express aggregator, and provides merchants with access to payments via alternative methods including SEPA, Poli Payments, Sofort, PRZ24 and others. Probanx Solutions Ltd, a wholly owned subsidiary of iSignthis Ltd, provides API based access to CORE Banking solutions, SEPA Core, SEPA Instant and SEPA business scheme, for neobanks, banks, credit unions and emoney institutions, and provides a bridge to the Eurosystem's Central Bank of Lithuania's CENTROLink service. Lucknow The daylight murder of an engineering dropout, Prashant Singh, 25, at the entrance of a guarded group housing society Alakhnanda Apartments has created fear among the residents. The CCTV footage retrieved by the police shows that the assailants fled unchallenged within two minutes after committing the crime while a security guard was present at the gate. After the incident, a group of residents has raised questions over the security of guarded societies in posh localities. Roop Kumar Sharma, secretary of Gomti Nagar Jan Kalyan Mahasamiti, said: If such incidents occur at a guarded society, they could happen anywhere else. We visited Alakhnanda apartments to examine the security lapse and found that many things need to be improved, he said. He said the security guard at the entrance was unarmed and hence could not challenge the assailants. Resident welfare associations are unable to afford armed guards and other security measures as LDA has not handed over corpus funds to the associations after handing over the management, he emphasised. The victim entered the society in an SUV, without proper security check, followed by the attackers. The incident occurred inside the society gate. This is a big question mark over our safety and security, said Kamal Kumar Yadav, a resident of Alakhnanda Apartments M Block. A group of youth breached security at knifepoint this is quite scary. We are not safe despite guarded gates and barriers, said Rupali Singh, another local resident. INCIDENT CAPTURED ON CAM A police official said the incident is captured in a CCTV camera in housing society and its footage shows that the entire sequence of events took place within two minutes between 3.38pm and 3.40pm. The victims SUV was intercepted by the attackers at the entrance around 3.38 pm. The driver tried to drive in the vehicle when the guard lifted the barrier for another vehicle having entry pass of the society, but the victim was attacked, he said. The official said the guard, Ashok Kumar Yadav, and many other people present at the gate did not intervene. The assailants fled after stabbing the victim in front of them. We are scanning the footages of other CCTV cameras installed outside the premises, he added. Attackers knew about victims movement Initial police probe suggests that the attackers were waiting near the entry gate as they were aware that the victim Prashant Singh was coming to visit Alakhnanda Apartments. Singh was coming to meet his friend living in this society in the SUV of his travel agent friend Sajid around 3.15pm. Sajids driver was driving the SUV when the incident occurred, Singhs friend Alok told the police. RWAs unable to afford armed guards Resident welfare associations are unable to afford armed guards and other security measures as LDA has not handed over corpus funds to the associations after handing over the management, said Roop Kumar Sharma, secretary of Gomti Nagar Jan Kalyan Mahasamiti. European-based Airbus is in a transatlantic battle for aircraft manufacturing supremacy with U.S.-based Boeing. But in Mobile, Airbus is king and talk of tariffs that could harm the companys bottom line has repeatedly met a swift backlash from Republicans and Democrats alike. The somewhat odd dynamic is playing out in a state and region thats fervently pro-President Donald Trump, whos been tossing around the T word with impunity in recent years. The latest developments in the situation came last Friday. For the second time in five months, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer appeared to exempt aerospace parts bound for Mobile from tariffs. Once again, Airbus Mobile Alabama manufacturing plant does not appear to be affected in the immediate term, said Kristi Tucker, spokeswoman with Airbus in Mobile. In the longer term, however, its not yet fully clear. What is clear, of course, is that Airbus is soaring in Mobile, where the company opened a $600 million plant four years ago to assemble its A320 jetliners, and is set to welcome a second assembly line this year to deliver its A220 jets. This is a good outcome, but you have to stay vigilant, said George Talbot, spokesman for Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson. The growth of Airbus is a major story and the opportunity ahead of us in Mobile is just so bright. Investment in region Last week, Lighthizers office raised tariffs on large European aircraft to 15%, up from 10% levied in October and further escalating trade tensions between the U.S. and the European Union. Lighthizers office imposed tariffs on $7.5 billion worth of EU products in October after the World Trade Organization, on Oct. 2, ruled that Airbus had benefited from illegal government subsidies. Along with aircraft tariffs, the U.S. slapped 25% levies on so-called luxury goods from Europe, such as Irish and Scotch whiskey, and Italian cheeses. The EU is vowing to retaliate with its own tariffs while it awaits a separate WTO ruling on a complaint that Boeing received improper U.S. subsidies. Said Tucker, The only real resolution to this long-running dispute is through a settlement agreement, and we are hopeful that the U.S. and the European Union will sit down and negotiate one quickly. A 25% tariff was initially considered last fall for imported airplane components. But the Trump administration, in the list rolled out in October, exempted those components fuselages and other airline sections shipped from Europe to the Port of Mobile that are crucial to Mobiles Airbus plant. The components reappeared on the tariff list in December, prompting Mobile city and county officials to adopt resolutions decrying the tariffs and to encourage the public to speak out on the matter. Airbus Mobile plant has 1,100 workers, and expects the number to climb to around 1,300 by years end. The new $300 million assembly line for the A220 aircraft is set to open in the spring or early summer. Further bolstering Airbus presence is the ongoing development of Flight Works Alabama, an 18,000-square-foot educational and workforce-development complex that will also serve as an Airbus visitors center. It is set to open in the summer. The city of Mobile has committed $150,000 to the Flight Works project, and could potentially increase its investment to $750,000. The Mobile County Commission, meanwhile, dedicated $500,000 in 2018. The Baldwin County Commission is also expected to make a commitment, as soon as early March. According to the terms, Flight Works would provide training and educational opportunities for 10th- and 11th-graders within Baldwin County. Its a function of the investment they are making in the region, and the future opportunities that will come from growth of Airbus in the region, said Lee Lawson, president and the CEO of the Baldwin County Economic Development Alliance. Reoccurrence But will Airbus continue its upward trajectory in the coastal region, or will a trade war bring it down? It is possible we could see reoccurrence of these tariffs? Yes, said Simon Lester, associate director of the center for trade policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. He said the big thing to keep an eye on is how the EU decides to retaliate once the WTO makes a ruling on the Boeing subsidies. That ruling could come at some point this year. It will stir things up, said Lester. It could lead to a resolution and for everyone to negotiate, or it could trigger intensification. You do need to keep an eye on it. Steven Livingston, associate director of Business and Economic Research at Middle Tennessee State University who has extensively researched tariff issues, said it could be difficult for the U.S. to preserve tariff exemptions on aerospace parts while applying tariffs on all matter of other things. He pointed out that the genesis for the tariffs, in this case, was a dispute about Airbus subsidies. Still, unless the EU lays tariffs on U.S. aircraft or parts, Livingston expects no change in the status-quo. I dont think we can ever say that a trade action is off the table after what weve seen the past couple of years, said Livingston. There still more litigation to come on several different Airbus/Boeing disputes. But that said, I would guess than any imported airline part that escaped this last tariff imposition is likely going to continue to escape. Jeffrey Epstein, 66, killed himself in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges The woman at the center of charges against Jeffrey Epstein in New York had reportedly spoke with the FBI in Florida 11 years before his arrest last year. Convicted pedophile Epstein, 66, killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell in August while awaiting trial after pleading not guilty on federal sex trafficking charges. He had already pleaded guilty in a Florida court to a single charge of soliciting an underage prostitute in 2008 under a 'sweetheart deal' that saw him serve just 13 months in prison and required him to register as a sex offender. He was allowed out on day release for a substantial amount of time. Now it has emerged the woman whose allegations of abuse formed a crucial part of the New York charges had already spoken with officials regarding the first investigation into the billionaire, ABC News reports. And despite being subpoenaed for testimony in 2008 when she was 19 years old her account was said to have been ignored after Epstein secured, what the Attorney's Office called, the 'deal of the century'. Now 31-years-old, the woman is one of dozens to have filed a civil lawsuit saying the alleged abuse 'has forever scarred her and altered her life'. She says she was recruited by the pedophile at the age of 14 and made to give him massages before suffering further sexual abuse. Epstein, left, had already pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage prostitute in 2008. Prior to his conviction in June 2008, Epstein's lawyers met with Miami's top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, right, to negotiate a 'lenient plea deal' Epstein, left, and attorney Reid Weingarten, second from right, listen in court in July 2019 West Palm Beach attorney Spencer Kuvin represented three of Epstein's alleged victims in 2008. He told ABC News Epstein's 'entire network from New York to Paris to New Mexico' could been 'unraveled' there and then. Kuvin added: '[The government] shut this thing down and pled this thing out before going through and talking to probably more than half of the women that were involved in this whole thing. 'Had they conducted a full investigation and taken their time, this would've been a whole different story.' Former federal prosecutor Sunny Hostin called the plea deal 'unjust', adding: 'The deal does not match the significance of the evidence in the case.' Prior to his conviction in June 2008, Epstein's lawyers met with Miami's top federal prosecutor, Alexander Acosta, to negotiate a 'lenient plea deal'. Epstein pleaded guilty in exchange for the short prison sentence in a low-security jail, as well as immunity from future prosecution related to his charges. It was later revealed that Epstein was allowed to leave prison on a regularly basis to work at a nearby office. In recent months, critics have been outraged by the lenient sentence, dubbed 'a sweetheart deal'. Acosta - who negotiated the deal - was forced to resign from his post as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration over the fallout. Epstein was released from prison in early 2010 and quickly managed to make his way back into high-powered New York circles. He was spotted walking in Central Park with Prince Andrew later that same year. The woman whose allegations formed a crucial part of the NYC charges had already spoken with officials regarding the first investigation. Epstein's home in Manhattan is pictured Epstein pleaded guilty in a Florida court to a single charge of soliciting an underage prostitute in 2008 under a 'sweetheart deal' that saw him serve just 13 months in prison and required him to register as a sex offender. He was allowed out on day release for a substantial amount of time. Epstein's home Florida is pictured Katie Couric, Woody Allen, Chelsea Handler and George Stephanopoulos were invited to a dinner at Epstein's Manhattan mansion alongside the Prince in 2010. More than 20 Epstein accusers have filed civil lawsuits against the estate after New York City's medical examiner ruled his death as a suicide. His death ended the possibility of a trial that would have involved prominent figures and it sparked widespread anger that he wouldn't have to answer for the allegations. Epstein had once counted the rich and powerful, including President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew, among his associates. BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Beijing's market regulator has started to issue licenses to catering firms after mass closures of restaurants amid nationwide coordinated prevention and control of the novel coronavirus outbreak. The Beijing Municipal Administration for Market Regulation on Tuesday issued a food production license to Xibei Group, a Chinese restaurant chain specialized in northwest Chinese dishes, to allow the company's central kitchen to produce takeout food to consumers. The electronic certificate was the first food production license issued to a catering firm in Beijing after the epidemic outbreak in January. The license was given after Xibei submitted an application to the administration with its plan to reform its central kitchen into a food production workshop making ready-to-cook food products and takeout dishes to cater to consumers' demands during the epidemic control, which have helped reduce cross-infections. The administration has supervised the transformation of the kitchen and prepared guidelines for quality manuals. The administration said it will carry out continuous supervision, inspection and assistance guidance for food production enterprises that resume work and production. It will increase the frequency of product sampling and monitoring. If any violations are found, their licenses shall be revoked, and the companies concerned shall be blacklisted. A LIMERICK family's house has finally become a home, thanks to a huge community effort driven by RTE's DIY SOS: The Big Build. Over the past nine days, countless tradespeople volunteered their time and tools to renovate the home of 13-year-old Amy Mulcahy, who was involved in an accident this time last year which left her dependent on the use of a wheelchair. This Thursday afternoon, hundreds of locals, family, and friends gathered outside the Mulcahy home in Glenside, Annacotty for the grand reveal. Presenter Baz Ashmawy spoke to the crowd, thanking them for their support and hard work - as did Amy and her mum Sharon. I'm here in Glenside, Newtown where @bazashmawy has just presented the Mulcahy family with their newly renovated home on @DIYSOSIRELAND. @Limerick_Leader pic.twitter.com/RiMPCGMtxi Rebecca Laffan (@becca_laffan) February 20, 2020 The Mulcahy's are the second family to feature on the formerly UK-based show, which is set to be aired later in the year. In February 2019, Amy was involved in an accident with her local rowing club, when her boat overturned suddenly and she became trapped underwater for several minutes. While Amy had been resuscitated, she had suffered cardiac arrest, had severe brain damage and her family were given little hope of her recovery. Doctors informed the family that Amy would never see, speak or walk again. Though devastated, Amys mother Sharon knew in her heart that her little girl would prove them all wrong and she did. Nine months after the incident, Amy had regained her sight and her speech. She is determined to walk, though she lost some use of her limbs from the waist down and now uses a wheelchair. The teenager returned to her Limerick home in November after undergoing rehabilitation treatment in Temple Street and National Rehabilitation Hospital. Though delighted to be home, the house which Amy shares with her mother, older brother Calum and his toddler twins was simply not suitable for any of Amys needs. As she cant access the upstairs of the house, the family sitting room became Amys bedroom, and she was without ready access to a bathroom. Amys parents and all the family desperately want Amy to have the space to live with dignity at home and try to continue her rehabilitation, but felt the house was making that impossible and further disabling her. The familys hopes were for a small extension to the back of the house to try and give Amy some dignity with a downstairs bedroom and wet room and of course an accessible space where she can also have her privacy when needed. Chinese local officials have culled residents' pets family by family to stop the spread of coronavirus, according to animal activists. Widespread fears of pets being able to spread the disease began last month after a Chinese health expert claimed animals needed to be quarantined during the outbreak to stop the spread of the disease. However, the World Health Organization dismissed the claims suggesting there is no evidence to show the virus being transmitted to pets. A distressing video shared by Nanchong Missing Animal Aid Group shows a number of bloodied dogs, though to be dead, lying at the back of a truck. The group said started to cull pets from family to family from Monday to prevent and control the coronavirus epidemic Community officers in a county in south-western China's Sichuan Province knocked on doors and ordered villagers to hand over their pets. Nanchong Missing Animal Aid Group claimed the animals were killed moments later on the street. The organisation said the campaign was carried out at the township of Longcan in Peng'an County in Nanchong. A distressing video shared by the group on its account on Twitter-like Weibo shows a number of bloodied dogs, thought to be dead, lying at the back of a truck. It is said that the pooches belonged to families from the villages of Qianqiubang. Another clip, shared by an animal activist, shows one officer who was wearing a face mask touching a lifeless dog by the side of a street while a few of his colleagues watched on. Another clip, shared by an animal activist , shows one officer who was wearing a face mask touching a lifeless dog by the side of a street while a few of his colleagues watched on The activist claimed that the cruel campaign was organised by the Communist Party Secretary of Longcan Town. 'Stop slaughtering pets in the midst of the epidemic. Enforce law in a civilised way,' the activist condemned on Weibo. Animal rights group PETA urged Chinese officials not to use the coronavirus outbreak as 'an excuse to abuse animals'. The group's spokesperson told MailOnline: 'Violent acts like this one don't address the public health problems. They only cause more ocnflicts in society.' Local authorities have denied accusations that they killed the dogs to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The government of Longcan town said they culled the dogs to control rabies. According to a notice shown to MailOnline, the local authority said officials had to take actions because a resident was found to have rabies on February 10. The victim, reported to be a two-year-old girl, died of the disease after being bitten by a crazed dog, reported Red Star News. Just last week, community officers of another residential complex in Nanchong were filmed clubbing stray dogs to death in broad daylight. In a video supplied to MailOnline by animal lovers, one worker can be seen repeatedly hitting a pooch with a wooden rod. A community officer in Nanchong, China, was caught on camera brutally killing a stray dog with a wooden club. The horrifying incident took place last Tuesday, insiders revealed Two stray dogs were killed at around 9am last Tuesday near Wenfeng Road, Nanchong Stray Animal Rescue said. Nanchong Stray Animal Rescue demanded relevant officers halt their act immediately. 'Before the matter escalates, please stop the atrocity of harming animals,' it wrote on its official account on Weibo. Officials of Nanhu Committee, which supervised the complex, denied online allegations. They claimed that the video showed the workers killing a stray dog which had bitten some residents and caused panic in the community, according to a notice shown to MailOnline. Chinese pet owners are flocking to buy face masks for their dogs amid the coronavirus outbreak. No evidence shows that the strain of virus can be passed onto pets, WHO says A woman pushes a stroller with two dogs wearing masks along a street in Shanghai today Fears that animals may be at risk of the coronavirus were sparked by comments made by one of China's top experts for infectious diseases. Prof. Li Lanjuan last month warned that pets would also need to be quarantined should they be exposed to coronavirus patients Similar pets culling campaigns have also been observed in Chengdu and Wenzhou. Communities around the country allegedly started to order the locals to 'get rid of' their pets - or risk having them culled - from last month amid fears that animals could also pick up the coronavirus. The fears were sparked by comments made by one of China's top experts for infectious diseases. Prof. Li Lanjuan, a member of the senior expert team from China's National Health Commission, warned that pets would also need to be quarantined should they be exposed to coronavirus patients. The novel coronavirus has killed at least 2,129 people and infected more than 75,700 globally She cautioned in an interview with state media CCTV that pet owners should take extra care of their animals because the virus 'spreads between mammals'. World Health Organization (WHO) said there is no evidence to show that the virus can be passed onto cats or dogs. In a message posted on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, the group advised people to wash their hands after holding their pets to reduce the risks of catching bacteria from the animals. Animal welfare organisation Humane Society International said: 'The advice by the World Health Organisation that there is no evidence dogs and cats can be infected with the virus, needs to be heard throughout China.' Originating in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, the new coronavirus - known as COVID-19 - has infected more than 74,000 people inside China. The government has locked down tens of millions of people in several virus-hit cities, extended Lunar New Year holidays and pulled flights in a scramble to contain the virus. Hubei, situated in central China, accounts for more than 80 per cent of the confirmed cases and 95 per cent of the deaths globally. Overnight, the Hubei health officials reported 349 new cases out of a nationwide total of 394 and 108 of the 114 new deaths across China. The figures are the lowest daily tolls in a month and Beijing said outbreak control efforts 'are working'. Globally, the coronavirus epidemic has killed at least 2,129 people and infected more than 75,700, and has spread to at least two dozen countries. The most striking thing about Jeff Bezos' new climate philanthropy is the size. A close second is the information void about what it will actually do. Catch up fast: The Amazon founder on Monday announced a $10 billion fund to help scientists, nonprofits and activists and then dropped the mic. His short Instagram post provided almost no information about the plan to spend a slice of his personal fortune. Why it matters: $10 billion is a lot of money in the world of private climate giving, and it could make Bezos an influential player. Consider that in late 2018, 29 philanthropies including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation pledged $4 billion over the next five years combined. This Bloomberg piece cites an estimate that if doled out over 20 years, it would roughly double today's giving levels. An expert with the group Open Philanthropy agrees that it would double current philanthropic support. The intrigue: Bezos said he wants to "amplify known ways and to explore new ways" to fight climate change. But team Bezos isn't yet providing details about funding areas, how proposals will be vetted and who will make decisions, or the timeline for spending the $10 billion. That leaves an immense set of options around policy advocacy and potentially politics, R&D, faster deployment of existing low-carbon technology, and much more. One thing that is known: A source familiar with the effort told reporters including Axios' Orion Rummler that it won't stake for-profit companies or startups. The big picture: Northeastern University communications professor Matthew Nisbet, who studies climate advocacy, says there's a relatively small number of nongovernmental groups with the resources, staff and track record to handle multimillion-dollar grants. "[E]ven if Bezos plans to devote unprecedented resources to hiring the very best staff and advisers to handle his investments, by necessity the rich and established within the climate advocacy and research realm are likely to get richer, whereas it will take a focused effort by Bezos people to identify, work with, and support smaller 'startup' NGOs and initiatives," he tells Axios. The big question: Nisbet points out that we don't even know what "theory of change" will drive Bezos' giving, and he says there are lots of questions. For instance, he wonders if Bezos will fund efforts to push for carbon pricing policies and deployment of renewables, or also "hedge his bets" with giving to help develop next-generation technologies like carbon removal and advanced nuclear reactors. Another question, he says, is whether the fund might focus on federal policy versus state and regional efforts, look to influence policy in other nations, or even bypass government action to put pressure on industries. What they're saying: The scarcity of information combined with the size of the fund has created a cottage industry of experts and advocates weighing in with ideas for how some of it should be spent. For instance... Mexico City, Mexico, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Royal Holiday Vacation Club recently shared a list of benefits of traveling to Mexico. It outlined some activities available to vacationers spending time in the North American country. The destination is a good choice for visitors of all ages. Several travel clubs around the world, including Royal Holiday Vacation Club, offer well-designed packages to resorts in different Mexican cities. Mexico is well-known for its impressive array of stunning attractions, including pristine beaches. It is home to world-famous cultural sites, museums, and eco-parks. Mexican cities provide an ideal setting for enjoying memorable holidays for the entire family. Many travelers take advantage of the offer listed by travel clubs thanks to the affordability of local packages. The country is blessed with a temperate climate that makes the vacations extra-special. Royal Holiday Vacation Club lists the pleasant weather, affordable packages, stunning attractions, and a wide selection of fine resorts as some of the key benefits of traveling to Mexico. The pleasant weather allows vacationers to visit the North American country at any time of the year. Most visitors engage in a wide variety of outdoor activities that are ideal for both kids and adults. On another level, people spending time in the country enjoy delicious local and international cuisine in diners dotted around holiday hotspots. Some of the local and international cuisines available to holidaymakers include tacos and quesadillas. The majority of diners in the country offer mouthwatering cuisines that are unique to Mexico. The northern parts of the country offer cuisines incorporating beef and ostrich in their menus. On the other hand, the southern parts of Mexico offer tantalize dishes with a strong Caribbean influence. Activities Royal Holiday Vacation Club stated some of the fascinating activities available holidaymakers include surfing, mountain biking, scuba diving, snorkeling, quad biking, and mountain climbing. Puerto Escondido is undoubtedly a surfers paradise as it provides access to a shoreline with ideal conditions for both novice and experienced surfers. It comes as no surprise that the area hosts several international surfing competitions. Puerto Escondido is home to Mexico's most popular surfing spots: the Point and Zicatela Beach. Meanwhile, the Yucatan Peninsula boasts all-inclusive resorts and white sandy beaches. The area is popular with tourists since it offers eco-adventure activities like snorkeling. Members of the Royal Holiday Vacation Club can book packages to the Yucatan Peninsula, which hosts several caves and underground waterways. Royal Holiday vacation packages allow families and couples to spend quality time in popular areas of Mexico like Cozumel. On the other hand, vacations at Royal Holiday Vacations Cancun enable holidaymakers to enjoy memorable moments thanks to the presence of stunning attractions. Travel clubs Travel clubs provide a viable way to gain access to exclusive travel deals and other benefits reserved for members. Several clubs offer exclusive packages to premium holiday establishments in Mexico. Members enjoy year-round specials and discounted prices. Some of the leading vacation clubs offering Mexican packages include: Lifestyle Holidays Vacation Club is a prominent club that offers its members exclusive to destinations around the world, including Mexico. Royal Holiday Vacation Club boasts an ever-growing list of members who benefit from a wide array of vacation packages. The club partners with Resort Condominiums International (RCI) to provide members access to more than 6,000 resorts in Mexico and over 100 countries. The offers are available via Royal Holiday Vacations contact number. The Occidental Vacation Club has been offering innovative products to club members since 1993. It offers a wide array of travel packages that are ideal for holidaymakers looking for unique experiences. U.S. President Donald Trump has named Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and special envoy to Serbia and Kosovo, to become the acting director of national intelligence, a move immediately blasted by critics. "Rick has represented our Country exceedingly well and I look forward to working with him," Trump wrote on Twitter on February 19 about one of his strongest supporters. The post of director of national intelligence (DNI) was created after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States. It oversees the 17 U.S. civilian and military intelligence agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Critics assailed the appointment of Grenell as an acting director -- meaning he will not require Senate approval -- and for his perceived lack of experience in intelligence matters. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the move was apparently "an effort to sidestep the Senates constitutional authority to advise and consent on such critical national security positions." Warner also said that "the president has selected an individual without any intelligence experience to serve as the leader of the nation's intelligence community in an acting capacity." Grenell, a vocal supporter of Trumps policies, replaces Joseph Maguire, who had served as acting DNI since August. Maguire was named to the post following Dan Coats' resignation as director. Trump had a strained relationship with Coats, who had supported the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the goal of promoting Trump over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Grenell, who served as the U.S. spokesman at the United Nations during the administration of President George W. Bush, has been known as a controversial figure. In 2018, Germany asked Washington to clarify remarks Grenell made to a right-wing website saying he wanted to empower other conservatives in Europe. He has also vocally criticized Berlin for what he has seen as a lack of support for Washingtons tough stand against Iran, made controversial statements about Germany's domestic policies, and made other critical comments that were seen as unusual for an ambassador to a long-standing U.S. ally. In October 2019, Trump named Grenell to become Washington's special envoy for negotiations between Serbia and Kosovo, acting in the role concurrently with his post as ambassador to Berlin. Trump has hailed his role in helping the two Western Balkan rivals to restore air and rail links in recent months. During a signing ceremony marking the restored ties on February 14 on the sidelines of the Munich Security Conference, Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic praised Trump and Grenell for helping to reach an agreement that he said will "ensure peace for future decades." With reporting by Reuters, AFP, AP, dpa, and The New York Times A soldier lost his leg, and two of his colleagues are missing after their convoy ran into an improvised explosive device (IED) planted... A soldier lost his leg, and two of his colleagues are missing after their convoy ran into an improvised explosive device (IED) planted by suspected Boko Haram insurgents in Korongilum, a community in Chibok local government area of Borno state. The soldiers were deployed on Wednesday morning as a part of a quick response group (QRG) to respond to an attack in the village. The insurgents had attacked the community on Tuesday, burning many houses. Military sources disclosed on Thursday that the troops from the armys 117 battalion, headquartered in Chibok, were a few kilometres into Korongilum when their gun-trucks and other vehicles in the convoy were blown off the road by the explosive. Seven soldiers were badly injured, and the leg of one of them was cut off by the explosion, a source said. The troops were led by an operating officer on the directive of lieutenant colonel SA Yahaya, the commanding officer (CO) who was coordinating from the battalion headquarters. The CO may have been the target as one of his vehicle was part of the convoy, but he was not there. Another source said: It appears Boko Haram insurgents have planted IEDs all round the community, and some of the villagers have started packing their belongings for the fear of another attack. One of the residents who also spoke with TheCable said: As we speak, there are no troops here. Those who were meant to be here ran into the IED yesterday, and we are yet to see another reinforcement. When contacted, Sagir Musa, army spokesperson, said he was not aware of the attack on the soldiers. I cannot react because Im not in Maiduguri. I am not aware, he said. Soldiers have been the target of Boko Haram attacks recently. In January, a driver attached to Olusegun Adeniyi, commander of operation Lafiya Dole, was feared dead when the insurgents attacked the commanders convoy. SAN FRANCISCO, CA February 20, 2020--Viruses are parasites. The only way they can grow is by hijacking their hosts. When they infect a human host, viruses use human proteins to multiply and modify the human cells to sustain the infection. At the same time, the human host activates defense mechanisms to fight the infection. Most current drugs against viral infections target the virus itself. But scientists are interested in developing therapies that aim for host proteins instead, or the genes that produce them, in part because such therapies are believed less likely to elicit drug resistance. A detailed understanding of virus-host interactions is crucial to the success of this strategy. A team of Gladstone Institutes scientists led by Senior Investigator Nevan Krogan, PhD, has been cataloging host proteins that physically bind to virus proteins. These physical interactions identify human proteins that the virus can use to infect cells and propagate. However, they don't reveal how host proteins work together to facilitate infection. To address this gap, Krogan and staff scientist David Gordon, PhD, with colleagues at UC San Francisco (UCSF), University College Dublin, and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, have developed a new way to understand how host cells control HIV infection in human cells. Their approach entails disrupting host genes rather than proteins. It is based on the idea, pioneered by Krogan, that you obtain richer information about the functions of genes--and the proteins they encode--when you disable the genes in pairs, instead of one by one. In a paper published in Molecular Cell, the team describes a map of the genes controlling HIV infection in human cells, which they built by assessing more than 63,000 combinations of human genes associated with HIV infection. "HIV is a major public health concern, with an estimated 36.7 million people living with chronic infection, and over 20.9 million people receiving continuous treatment," said Krogan, who is also a professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at UCSF, and the director of the UCSF Quantitative Biosciences Institute. "Studying the impact of gene disruptions in pairs rather than one by one yields important information on how genes work together to mediate virus infection, highlighting processes we can target with drugs to inhibit infection." The map, which the team refers to as a viral epistasis map (vE-MAP), is an essential advance for HIV research in several other ways. For one thing, it uncovers a previously unsuspected set of genes required for the growth of the virus in human cells. For another, the vE-MAP can be used to analyze how different HIV mutants affect host cells or to test drugs that disrupt HIV-host interactions. Strength in Numbers The vE-MAP is an adaptation of the E-MAP, which Krogan and his colleagues pioneered and refined over the past 15 years to identify genes that control how cells grow. At the core of this approach is the Krogan lab's ability to disrupt a large number of genes, test them in pairs, and analyze the results via sophisticated computational methods. "The principle behind E-MAPs is that when you disrupt two genes at once and examine the impact on a cell, you sometimes see effects that are significantly larger or smaller than you would have predicted from the effect of disrupting either gene alone," said Krogan. These unexpected effects suggest that the functions of the two genes are related. Moreover, by carrying out these pairwise disruptions across hundreds of genes, scientists can find groups of genes with similar patterns of interactions, a sign that they are likely to take part in the same molecular process. "And so, instead of finding important genes one at a time, you can all at once identify multiple, distinct networks of genes affecting the process you are studying," said Gordon. The E-MAP approach has mostly been used to study cell growth. Gordon, in collaboration with a student from University College Dublin, Ariane Watson, had to modify it to study virus infection. The most tricky part was to implement a sophisticated data acquisition and scoring system, which allowed them to measure HIV infection accurately across hundreds of thousands of samples, and compare the effect of pairwise and single-gene disruptions. It would be an overwhelming effort to test all combinations of the over 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. Instead, the scientists focused on genes already suspected to influence HIV biology. In particular, they used the genes encoding a large number of human proteins that the Krogan lab had previously found to bind to HIV proteins. In all, they included over 350 genes in their analysis and tested over 63,000 pairwise disruptions. New Players at the HIV-Host Interface Although HIV is one of the best-studied human viruses and is now well-controlled by antiretroviral therapy, there is no cure for HIV/AIDS. Moreover, antiretroviral therapy is costly, which can make it impractical in resource-poor countries. The search for new means of halting or eradicating the virus is, therefore, still a priority. Among the genes that stood out in the vE-MAP were several members of the CNOT family, whose role in HIV biology had never before been established. The authors demonstrated that the CNOT complex promotes HIV infection by suppressing innate immunity in CD4+ T cells, the type of immune cells that HIV preferentially targets in humans. Innate immunity is a defense mechanism by which host cells can fight infection. "The impact of CNOT on innate immunity is a key, yet previously unrecognized, host pathway critical to HIV infection. It will serve as a potential novel therapeutic target in future studies," said Krogan. For instance, scientists can now study if targeting the CNOT complex with drugs could be a way to help HIV patients fight the infection more effectively. Furthermore, the vE-MAP uncovered genes that had little impact when disrupted individually, but a great effect when tested together. "These genes would be overlooked in classic, single-gene disruption experiments," said Gordon. "They confirm the potential of the vE-MAP to uncover new mechanisms by which HIV interacts with human cells." Combining drugs that target two of these genes at the same time might thus be a promising therapeutic strategy, especially for a virus such as HIV/AIDS, which has evolved multiple ways of tapping its hosts' resources. The vE-MAP was also able to pick up genes that specifically interact with a known HIV mutant. This observation bodes well for the ability of the vE-MAP to identify distinct host factors affecting the various forms of HIV, or the virus mutants that arise in response to currently available drugs. Additional testing with a drug known to interfere with HIV-associated human proteins gives the authors confidence that their vE-MAP approach could, in the future, be used to screen for novel anti-HIV drugs and to understand their mode of action. "This vE-MAP provides an unprecedented view of how HIV hijacks and rewires the cellular machinery in human cells during infection," said Krogan. "It will generate many new ideas and avenues to identify and test novel therapies." And the benefits may not be limited to HIV research. "Our work is proof-of-principle that the vE-MAP approach is a powerful way to map out the interface between HIV and human cells, and to uncover new therapeutic avenues," said Gordon. "We now look forward to testing it on other pathogens." ### About the Research Project Other authors include: Erica Stevenson, Danielle L. Swaney, and Alexander Marson from Gladstone Institutes; Assen Roguev, Gwendolyn M. Jang, Joshua Kane, Jiewei Xu, Jeffrey Z. Guo, Kathy Franks-Skiba, Michael Shales, David C. Crosby, and Alan D. Frankel from UC San Francisco; Ariane Watson and Gerard Cagney from University College Dublin, Ireland; and Simin Zheng and Ivan Marazzi from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York. This work was supported by an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship (5F32GM108303-02), the HARC Center (P50 AI150476), the Host Pathogen Map Initiative (U19 AI135990), the FluOMICS consortia (U1 AI135972), and a Science Foundation Ireland Principal Investigator Award (SFI 10/1N.1/B3.19). Additional funding came from the European Union's Horizon 2020 (grant agreement 666010), NIH grants P30 AI027763 and S10 RR028962, and the James B. Pendleton Charitable Trust. About the Gladstone Institutes To ensure our work does the greatest good, Gladstone Institutes focuses on conditions with profound medical, economic, and social impact--unsolved diseases. Gladstone is an independent, nonprofit life science research organization that uses visionary science and technology to overcome disease. It has an academic affiliation with the University of California, San Francisco. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 23:00:17|Editor: Mu Xuequan Video Player Close ADEN, Yemen, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- A drone of the Houthi rebel group was downed by Yemen's pro-government forces in the country's western port city of Hodeidah on Thursday, a military official told Xinhua. "The air defenses of the joint pro-government forces managed to destroy an explosives-laden drone over the airspace of Durayhmi district of Hodeidah," the source said on condition of anonymity. "The Houthi drone was loaded with explosives and tried to attack military locations in the areas controlled by the government forces," he added. The Houthi drone operation was aborted by the joint pro-government forces and caused no casualties in the area, the source noted. Houthis repeatedly use drones loaded with explosives to carry out attacks against the government forces in Hodeidah and elsewhere in the war-ravaged Arab country. Hodeidah, the lifeline entry of Yemen's most commercial imports and humanitarian aid, has become a focal point of the war since June 2018 when the Saudi-led coalition forces advanced into the southern edge of the port city. The Arab coalition, which intervened in Yemen's civil war in March 2015 to support Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, has halted its assault on Hodeidah since late 2018 to facilitate the peace efforts to end Yemen's war. Tourism Ireland have sent back all of its Irish staff working in China amid coronavirus fears. Three Tourism Ireland staff work in China, two of which are Irish and one employee is Chinese - the two Irish staff have been sent back to Ireland. A trade mission scheduled for next week consisting of 25 companies to China was also cancelled. Speaking at a press conference today, CEO of Tourism Ireland Niall Gibbons said that the situation with China at the moment is very fluid. We suspended our tourism activity over in China just for now. We were due to have 25 companies head out to Beijing, Shanghai and Gwangjong next week, we postponed that at the end of January when it was very clear that for health reasons, it would not be possible to hold that, he said. Well have at least one if not two sales missions at a later point in 2020 when it is safe to do so. Weve taken out Irish staff out of the market as well, theyre back here and our Chinese members are still in China working from home, he added. Read More The company is engaging with Chinese ambassadors daily in monitoring the situation. The steps that Tourism Ireland have taken is that we communicate very closely with ambassador Eoin OLeary who is based in Beijing, Therese Healy our consul general in Shanghai and David Costello, our consul general in Hong Kong, we have a regular contact with them, said Mr Gibbons. He explained that the coronavirus outbreak is very difficult on the ground. The situation is very difficult on the ground, there is a humanitarian side to this and it is very difficult, people in the travel industry are all working from home, so we will put that sales mission into the market as soon as things settle down and as soon as we get the clearance to do that, he said. However, he said that the Irish exposure to the market is small and so the impact for Irish tourism is unlikely to be expansive. The Irish exposure to the market is actually quite small, only 0.9 of 1pc our market comes from China and we have no direct flights during the winter period. Were preparing a weekly report in relation to the impact on tourism, he added. Mr Gibbons was speaking at the launch of the 2020 Global Greening project today, which announced that over 500 buildings across the world will be lit up green on St Patrick's Day. He's never been afraid to experiment with fashion. And on Wednesday, supermodel Jordan Barrett stood out in a quirky ensemble while attending the Moncler presentation at Milan Fashion Week in Italy. The 23-year-old wore a big black nylon coat from the label - valued at $2,523.55. That's different! Jordan Barrett posed up a storm in a quirk nylon jacket during Milan fashion week on Wednesday He paired the look with a pair of extremely loose-fitting black trousers tucked into a heavy-looking boots. Jordan kept the accessories for his look to a minimum, wearing his simple gold chain necklace. The runway star styled his beach blond locks in messy, voluminous waves. Fashion forward: He paired the look with a pair of extremely loose-fitting black trousers tucked into a heavy-looking boots It was recently revealed that Jordan is 'transitioning into film this year'. It is understood the modelling IT boy has landed a role in a yet-to-be named major Hollywood flick which is set to begin filming in September. Jordan has just signed with leading Hollywood talent powerhouse, Creative Artists Agency (CAA), and is also represented by Kate Moss Agency for modelling. From the runway to the silver screen: It was recently revealed that Jordan is 'transitioning into film this year'. It is understood the modelling IT boy has landed a role in a yet-to-be named major Hollywood flick which is set to begin filming in September 'Jordan has been the most successful male model consecutively for the last four years since moving to New York,' a source told Daily Mail Australia this week. 'It is believed he is transitioning into film this year, with an upcoming project filming in September.' The Byron Bay-born model was discovered when he was 14-years-old and has gone on to walk the runways for some of the biggest designers including Tom Ford, Versace and Tommy Hilfiger. Click here to read the full article. Designer Brands Inc. is the latest company to hop on a growing C-suite trend. The firm announced on Tuesday the appointment of William Bill L. Jordan to the newly created position of chief growth officer, effective immediately. While the role of chief growth officer may not be as familiar as other executive positions, the post is growing in popularity, especially at large companies like Kimberly-Clark and Coca-Cola, according to Shawn Burcham, founder and CEO of PFSbrands and the author of Keeping Score with GRITT: Straight Talk Strategies for Success. Burcham says a CGO can help improve synergy across a business. The purpose of the CGO is to bridge silos in departments such as: business development, sales, marketing, IT, and operations. CGOs help to better align these internal departments to focus on revenue growth by studying external market dynamics, buyer behaviors and customer preferences, while also engaging with potential prospects, explained Burcham. CGOs may be needed to help companies create different ways to develop their prospects and help to align internal teams to create better customer experiences. In the chief growth officer post at DBI, Jordan is expected to chart strategic growth opportunities for the firm. He is tasked with identifying new partnership opportunities, innovating new retail concepts and integrating operations across DBIs portfolio, according to CEO Roger Rawlins. As DBI executes its growth initiatives to increase our market share via differentiated products and differentiated shopping experiences, we believe Bills expertise is best utilized to help guide and grow our organization as a whole, said Rawlins. Bill is a seasoned executive with a unique set of skills, and we look forward to benefitting from his talents in this newly created role. DBIs creation of the CGO post appears to be part of its push to bridge its retail, and design and production branches. The firm traded under the DSW ticker until its 2018 acquisition of the Camuto Group, in partnership with Authentic Brands Group. DBI has a significant foothold in retail, with about 1,000 retail locations under the DSW, Shoe Warehouse and The Shoe Company banners. In 2018, the company stepped into the design and production space by purchasing Camuto Group through a joint venture with Authentic Brands Group. DBI has a 40% stake in Camuto, while ABG has a 60% majority stake. Under the deal, the pair acquired the intellectual property of brands including Sole Society, Louise et Cet and Vince Camuto. Story continues Camuto Group has taken over design, sourcing and production for DSWs private-label brands, allowing for higher-margin potential. DBI is also seeking to bolster Camutos wholesale business across its DSW and Shoe Company platforms. Just this month, DBI announced the launch of the JLo Jennifer Lopez shoe and accessories brand, coming this March, which is being designed and produced by Camuto Group; the products will be sold exclusively on DSW.com and in DSW stores. Prior to being named DBIs chief growth officer, Jordan had been serving in dual posts as president of DSW Designer Shoe Warehouse and EVP of Designer Brands. Before becoming president of DSW, Jordan held several positions over 14 years at DSW (before it became Designer Brands), including DSW chief administrative officer, EVP and chief legal officer as well as Town Shoes president. As Jordan assumes his new post, Rawlins will serve as interim DSW president. The company is conducting a search to fill the role permanently. Want more? Market Watchers Divided on Designer Brands After a Disappointing Q3 DSW Parent Designer Brands Stock Tumbles on Earnings Miss and Slashed Outlook More from Footwear News China, which claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of south Tibet, has objected to Home Minister Amit Shah's visit there to attend the statehood day on Thursday, saying it is "firmly opposed" to his trip as it violated Beijing's "territorial sovereignty and sabotaged political mutual trust". Photo: PTI , officials said. China routinely objects to Indian leaders' visits to the northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh to highlight its claims over it. "China's position on the eastern sector of the China-India boundary, or the southern part of China's Tibet region, is consistent and clear," China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told online media briefing here on Thursday while replying to a question. "The Chinese government has never recognised the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' and is firmly opposed to the Indian politician's visit to the southern part of China's Tibet region as it violated China's territorial sovereignty, undermined stability of the border area, sabotaged political mutual trust, and violated relevant bilateral agreement," he said. "The Chinese side urges the Indian side to stop taking any action that may further complicate the border issue and take concrete actions to uphold peace and tranquillity of the border area," he said. The India-China border dispute covers 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC). China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of Southern Tibet and the two countries have so far held 22 rounds of Special Representatives talks to resolve the border dispute. On February 20, Arunachal Pradesh became full state from union territory. Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, visits the Taikang Tongji Hospital in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 15, 2020. (Xinhua/Xiao Yijiu) Currently, more than 30,000 medical personnel, including military medics, have been sent to Wuhan from across the country. BEIJING, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- China has gone all out to treat COVID-19 patients both with mild symptoms and in severe conditions alike in the epicenter city of Wuhan as the number of hospital beds reserved for COVID-19 patients has risen to about 40,000 and the supporting medical personnel over 30,000. Chinese Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, who is leading a central government team guiding the epidemic control on the ground, visited frontline medical workers in Wuhan and made further instructions on treating patients with all-out efforts. Noting that some effective methods have been tried, Sun said it is necessary to draw experience in a timely manner and form treatment protocols that can be promoted across hospitals. She also called for concerted efforts from multi-disciplinary medical teams to treat critically ill patients to reduce the mortality rate. Military medics arrive at Tianhe International Airport in Wuhan, central China's Hubei Province, Feb. 13, 2020. (Xinhua/Li Yun) Currently, more than 30,000 medical personnel, including military medics, have been sent to Wuhan from across the country with specialties in a number of disciplines, including respiratory infections, heart and kidneys. Wuhan now has 11,000 intensive care medical staff, accounting for 10 percent of the nation's total. Sun said some positive changes have taken place in the epidemic prevention and control, but the situation remains grim in Wuhan. She urged the medical treatment work to be moved forward to prevent mild symptoms from developing into severe ones, and called for strengthening treatment combining traditional Chinese and Western medicine in temporary hospitals. The guiding team also called for strengthening the detection of fever patients in Wuhan to block the transmission route of the virus. The number of designated hospitals in Wuhan, reserved to treat COVID-19 patients, especially those with severe symptoms, has risen to 45, with a capacity of 19,161 beds. In addition, 12 temporary hospitals, which were converted from gyms, convention or exhibition centers, have all been put into use with a combined over 20,000 beds planned for patients with mild symptoms. Eric Williams Photography This weeks top local story is a complicated affair. But moving forward, the narratives about immigration and crime must be addressed and solved in a progressive and sustainable fashion. This story revolves around the immigrant-friendly status, declared and enforced by the city since 2018. Thats when the City Council, under the aegis of newly elected progressive powerhouse mayor Tim Keller, affirmed legislation that declared this town to be on the side of the tide of migrant families passing through or settling in Albuquerque. That resolution means that here in Albuquerque, immigration status is not an issue for city officials interacting with an increasingly diverse local population. Subsequently, US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US Border Patrol and the draconian policies of the current federal administration have had little impact on this city ... so far. Just four years after that resolutions implementation, the designation is causing trouble that reaches down from the aforementioned federal level, trouble that may prevent the city from accessing federal grants having to do with everything from increased police staffing to the testing of rape kit evidence. The relentless pursuit of criminals in Albuquerque means compliance with the strict immigration policies of the Trump administration, as overseen by Attorney General William Barr. To leaders at the local level, the situation reeks of political manipulationand may presage a dark vision of the authoritarian tactics the Trump administration may use going forward, toward re-election. And so, this story has it all and is happening at many levels. The people involved range from frightened local immigrants who fear for their children to an Attorney General preparing to flex his muscles with post-impeachment power toward Albuquerque. There are also a couple righteously upset city councilors, a county sheriff with political ambitions whos hovering in Barrs orbit and the possibility that future enforcement efforts will engage a federal SWAT-like force to deal with immigrants. An upsurge in Albuquerque ICE arrests this past couple weeks must be reckoned with in story whose main subplot has to do with a mischaracterized rise in violent crime in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. In fact, crime in Duke City, N.M. is such a pressing background issue, that the US Attorney for the District of New Mexico recently penned an op-ed for the local daily that suggested compliance with Trumps immigration laws is the most prudent and practical path forward for Albuquerque and the nation. So hold on to your horses as Weekly Alibi explores the latest in a news story practically guaranteed to keep you thinking about fighting crime, the nature of immigration, due process, democracy and our own ineluctable connection to the border that lies 250 miles south of Downtown. In order to get a better handle on this complex, culture-changing series of events, Weekly Alibi spoke with a number of city and government leaders on the subject, including City Councilors Pat Davis and Klarissa Pena, as well as reaching outwith no success as of press timeto US Attorney John C. Anderson. Immigrant Friendly A glance through city records reveals that this current immigration imbroglio can be tracedfor good or badto a decision the Albuquerque City Council made back in April of 2018. In an official press release addressing the matter, Councilor Pena writes, As stated in Resolution 18-07 passed by [the] City Council and signed by the Mayor in May 2018, I uphold the City of Albuquerques right to create a safe city for all its residents and reaffirm our commitment to civil rights regardless of immigration status. According to Pena, the 2018 resolution is just a re-affirmation. Its not something that I originally put forward. Brad Winter put the original resolution forward in 2000. I was just reaffirming what he had already established. Councilor Davis essentially agreed with his colleague but added, We clarified that specifically people were welcome at city facilities. But youll recall that former Mayor Berry used what he called a loophole in the resolution to allow ICE agents into the city prisoner transport center. His reasoning was that it wasnt a jail and its not at a public building, either. Berrys acquiescence to federal immigration authorities seeking access to arrest and detention records for possible actionable items was put aside when his tenure ended and the new administration quickly moved away from such questionable policies. Davis added, In the newest reaffirmation, which we joined together in 2018 to present to the council to say we have a long history of this. But were going to close the loophole that Berry was using to let ICE in. And were explicitly going to say anyone is welcome to engage with the citywhether its through an after-school program or to come to City Council meetingswithout concern or fear. Importantly, we just told the new administration and mayor that we must be sure to review all of our policies to make sure that we are not accidently creating a list that could be targeted by ICE. The resolution effectively brands Albuquerque as an immigrant-friendly city. Although not officially a sanctuary city, our municipal government, through the aforementioned policy, not only affords immigrants the agency to act as members of the community, it also enhances protections for individual privacy for all residents of Albuquerque. There has been support from citizens for those measures. Last year the city and many of its people rallied to help migrants from Latin America on their way through the asylum process. The city even put aside a quarter of a million dollars to facilitate the safety and care of such travelers through the Duke City. Crime But in the meantime, crime, especially violent crime, has risen in Albuquerque, leading some to blame the immigrants who are either traveling through town or have settled in Albuquerque for the uptick. This perception exists despite the fact that, as Davis noted, property crime has actually decreased. Although city leaders have spoken to such successes as well as the root causes of criminality in generaland have undertaken vast reconfigurations of the way the city does things, from managing homelessness and addiction to establishing a plan for community policing undocumented immigrants continue to bear the brunt. This is especially true on the right, where drastic changes in immigration policy have caused children to be separated from their parents and political dissidents to be returned to Central America to face certain death. To Councilor Pena, it all comes down to history. Although she says Latin American immigrants tend to be scapegoats when it comes to criminality in our community, the reality is, she told Weekly Alibi, [that] the root causes of issues we have in our community have to do with poverty, but not so much anymore. The socioeconomic lines of drug addiction have blurred everything. Its everywhere. We are pointing a finger one way when we should be looking at some of the other stuff. Federal Money Of course much of that other stuff referred to by Pena means programs to ameliorate the underlying problems, programs that cost big money. A lot of times, funding for such wide-reaching, society-changing programs requires more money that a city or state has in order to see genuine progress. Thats where the federal government comes in. With income streams far more lofty and solvent than anything available at the state or local level, federal funding can sometimes make the difference between the success or failure of local projects based in law enforcement. At the end of this year, the Department of Justice announced a new federal law enforcement initiative called Operation Relentless Pursuit. US Attorney General Barr included Albuquerque on the list of cities that informed the creation of Relentless Pursuit and said that cities on the list would be eligible for up to $71 million in grant funding if they partner with the Feds on such law and order efforts. But therein lies the rub. To be eligible for the grants, applicant cities have to be compliant with current federal immigration directives. In fact, this year the Trump administration has made blatant efforts to defund sanctuary and immigrant-friendly cities throughout the US. Relentless Pursuit Penas idea that leaders should be looking at root causes instead of lashing out at productive local residents doesnt seem to jibe with Donald Trumps Justice Department, headed by Attorney General Barr. Barr and his representatives have been busy in Albuquerque since November, making Relentless Pursuit a thing while actively threatening to withhold crime-fighting funds unless local leaders repeal the Duke Citys prized and profound immigrant-friendly status. Davis told Weekly Alibi that the city wasnt even invited to Barrs press conferences, saying, This Attorney General has really taken justice into a new political era. They show up in our city, they want to attack Albuquerque for having what they perceive as high crime rateswithout acknowledging that our property crime rates are going down, our incarceration rates are going down, our treatment center numbers are going upall because were making progress on behavioral health. Theyre speaking out of two sides of their mouth. Asked to explain, Davis clarified his statement, adding, On one side they say, Working with DOJ, weve created the best community policing program in the country. Were listening to our residents! But at the same time, they show up and have a press conference with the county sheriff where they dont listen to what our people want. I think thats blatantly political. No one believes for a moment that they are going to cut this grant check to the city of Albuquerque because theyre using the DOJ as a political weapon. We will not play along with that. DOJ In a game thats more about submission to the man than it is about progressive change toward sustainability, Davis notes: Dont forget this is about the DOJ saying, Hey, well give you this money if you do a little favor for us. Theyre already working with us on the worst of the worst. Theyre already prosecuting our worst offenders. The FBI Violent Crimes Task Force works with APD on a daily basis to target bad offenders. Its not like theyre saying theyre not going to do anything else, but they are saying, Well do some more press conferences with you, well bring some immigration officers to your city to work on federal law enforcementif you let us go through the personnel files of all 6,000 city employees. Asked to explain further, Davis explained a search process that could easily be called insidious, could easily devolve into danger. Theres a piece of this that requires them, that gives them [ICE] the authority to go through city records to look for people that they want to target. What does that have to do with crime? Why dont they help us with the Violent Crime Task Force instead? Whats Next The immediate results of this growing schism between local and federal government priorities has so far played out with subtle but noticeable effect. Locally, Michelle Melendez, the director of the citys Office of Equity and Inclusion, sent out a missive last week noting that there had been a ten-fold increase in the number of individuals arrested and detained in Albuquerque by federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents. During these arrests, witnesses have photographed ICE agents wearing vests that say Police. They are not Albuquerque Police Officers. Melendez press release continued with strong, defiant language, stating, We denounce any attempts to create panic and confusion among the people living in Albuquerque. Mayor Tim Keller and the Albuquerque Police Department have worked hard to go gain the trust, respect and cooperation of all our citys residents to address our communitys crime problem. We want immigrants to feel safe when they need to call the police for help. For now, city police officers and employees are prohibited from asking about or collecting immigration status data; city employees are prohibited from using city resources to investigate an individuals immigration status; and ICE agents are not allowed access to non-public areas on city property without a warrant. Davis and Pena arent taking that for granted though and say they will continue to fight for civil rights for all, despite the maneuvering of the DOJ and Homeland Security. Were not repealing this law, Davis concluded. Preliminary clinical results in China show that Chloroquine Phosphate, used as anti-malarial, is quite effective in treating novel cor... Preliminary clinical results in China show that Chloroquine Phosphate, used as anti-malarial, is quite effective in treating novel coronavirus pneumonia. The drug was banned in Nigeria 14 years ago. Several other antiviral drugs to treat the novel coronavirus outbreak in China that has claimed over 1,500 lives are under clinical trials and some have shown fairly good efficacy, a Chinese official said. Chinese researchers have narrowed down their focus to a few existing drugs, including Chloroquine Phosphate, Favipiravir and Remdesivir, after multiple rounds of screening, Zhang Xinmin, director of the China National Center for Biotechnology Development under the Ministry of Science and Technology, told reporters in Beijing. In vitro experiments have shown that Chloroquine Phosphate, an antimalarial drug which has been widely used for many years, can effectively inhibit the novel coronavirus infection. It is now under clinical trials in more than 10 hospitals in Beijing and Guangdong, which enrolled a total of over 100 patients. Clinical trials on the drug will also be launched in central Chinas Hunan Province soon, Zhang was quoted as saying in the state-run Xinhua news agency. Favipiravir, an influenza drug available on overseas markets, has been put in a clinical trial in Shenzhen, south Chinas Guangdong Province, with 70 patients enlisted, he said. The initial outcome of the trial shows the drug has relatively obvious efficacy and low adverse reactions. Three to four days after treatment, the group that takes the drug has a significantly higher turning-negative rate in the viral nucleic acid than the parallel group, he said. Remdesivir is developed against Ebola infections by Gilead Sciences, an American pharmaceutical company. It has shown fairly good antiviral activity against the novel coronavirus at the cellular level. The China-Japan Friendship Hospital and the Institute of Materia Medica under the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences have been authorised to conduct a clinical trial on the drug in over 10 hospitals in Wuhan, the centre of the epidemic in central Chinas Hubei Province. Next, we will make timely recommendations on the COVID-19 treatment according to the results of these clinical trials, Zhang said. The researchers scanned more than 70,000 drugs or compounds through computer simulations and in vitro enzyme activity tests, and selected 5,000 potentially effective drug candidates. Then they were tested at the cellular level against the common coronavirus infection, and about 100 drugs were chosen for further experiments, which helped to select the final drugs for clinical trials, he said. The most urgent scientific research task is to improve the cure rate and reduce the mortality, which rely on effective clinical treatments, Zhang said. New products and technologies have been adopted to treat severe and critically ill patients, a key approach to reduce mortality, and some have achieved good clinical effects, he said. One of the recent progresses is the development of convalescent plasma. It is processed from the plasma collected from recovered patients, which contains a large amount of protective antibodies. So far, a total of 11 severe patients from several hospitals in Wuhan have received the convalescent plasma therapy, with all their clinical indicators getting better and no obvious adverse reactions. Clinical studies on the stem cell therapy, which can inhibit the overreaction of the bodys immune system, have also been carried out to treat severe patients, Zhang said. A cause of death for severe and critically ill patients infected with the COVID-19 is cytokine storm, which is an overreaction of the immune system, said Zhou Qi, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). We are also searching for existing drugs that can curb the appearance of cytokine storm, including drugs against rheumatism. Some of the drugs that are proven effective at the cellular level have been applied in clinical trials, Zhou said at a press conference. A trial has been conducted on 14 severe or critically ill patients aged up to 82 in an affiliated hospital of the University of the CAS, and the results appeared encouraging, he said. Now, a multi-centre, randomised, parallel-group clinical trial is underway. If the initial results show a drug is effective, we may speed up the process and provide severe patients with effective treatments as soon as possible, he added. The killer's lawyer Ian Brookie said while his client accepted the judge must sentence him, he still maintained his innocence. Loading Brookie said the pair engaged in consensual sex that night and there was no evidence of a non-consensual attack on Grace. He said this was not a sustained attack and burying and concealing a victim's body was not that uncommon in New Zealand. "There's no evidence from the scene or the post-mortem that would support a brutal and callous death," Brookie said. The defence still did not accept the intimate photographs were taken after Grace's death and that the killer viewed pornography, he said. The killer had a difficult and traumatic upbringing and was cut off from his mother and brother from an early age, he said. The man who killed Grace, whose identity has been suppressed, being interviewed by police. In December 2018, he was isolated from his family and there was no question he had "issues". Justice Moore agreed with the Crown. He said the killer had searched for pornography and taken intimate photos of her after her death. The judge said the killer tailored his story to match what he knew of the police investigation into Grace's disappearance and what the police were likely to uncover. Justice Moore said a psychologist had found the killer at "very high risk" of reoffending. No mental health issues had yet been diagnosed. Grace Millane disappeared on the eve of her 22nd birthday in December 2018. Credit:Stuff Justice Moore accepted manual strangulation was a physical and intimate force of violence, but accepted the murder was not pre-meditated. "This was not driven by rage or loss of self-control," Justice Moore said. Loading Justice Moore said Grace was vulnerable as she trusted the killer enough to go into his room and engage in intimate physical activity. "You were a large powerful man, she was diminutive ... you were in a position of total physical dominance." Justice Simon Moore addresses the court on Friday. Credit:Getty Image Justice Moore found Grace must have died before 1.20am on December 2 when the killer searched "Waitakere Ranges" on his phone. Millane's lifeless body was in the room when he searched and accessed pornographic sites. Loading "You took grossly intrusive intimate photos." The killer's sense of self-entitlement and his objectification of Grace's body showed his high degree of callousness, Justice Moore said. "In my view, you can [take] little credit for showing the police where Ms Millane's body was ... the police were already on your heels." After the hearing, Crown prosecutor Brian Dickey said he had spoken to the family and they "seemed happy" with the sentence. Auckland Crown Solicitor Brian Dickey addresses the court on Friday. Credit:Getty Images Speaking to media outside the court, Detective Inspector Scott Beard, who led the police investigation, thanked those who worked tirelessly to get "justice for Grace", and spoke of the "absolutely unbelievable" support from the public. Turning to the case, he said rough sex should not be used as a defence to murder and said strangling someone for five to 10 minutes until they die "is not rough sex". He said the impact of having to listen to intimate details about their daughter was tough for the Millane family, and losing her on her birthday while she was alone in a foreign country was a life sentence for them. Family ripped apart Grace's family, including her mother Gillian, brother Declan and sister-in-law Victoria read their victim impact statements via a video link from Essex. Grace's mother Gillian Millane holds a family photograph during her televised victim impact statement from her home in the UK. Credit:Getty Images The three told the court their lives had been ripped apart. "No life sentence you receive today will match the life sentence without my Grace. But I will do my utmost to ensure that any other family will not go through what we have endured," Gillian said. Add CoolSocial badge. Show it by adding this HTML code on your site: Indiangarb.com scored 54 Social Media Impact. Social Media Impact score is a measure of how much a site is popular on social networks. 2.5/5.0 Stars by Social Team This CoolSocial report was updated on 5 Aug 2013, you can refresh this analysis whenever you want. 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Twitter account link TWITTER PAGE LINK NOT FOUND A BJP youth wing leader from Pune on Thursday submitted a complaint application to the police against AIMIM leader Waris Pathan for his controversial remarks made recently in Karnataka. Pathan has claimed he has been quoted out of context. Parismal Deshpande, a BJYM worker, submitted the written application at the Deccan Gymkhana police station, demading action against Pathan for allegedly promoting enmity between different groups and outraging religious feelings of a community. Deshpande, in his complaint stated, that Pathan reportedly said "15 crore hai lekin 100 crore pe bhari hai' (We are 15 crore but we can dominate 100 crore). "The statement by Pathan promotes violence and create a divide between two communities. "Because of such statements, there are possibilities of atmosphere getting vitiated. Hence, he should be booked under IPC sections 153A (promoting enmity between different groups, 295A (outraging religious feelings), and 504 (provoking breach of the peace)," Deshpande said in the complaint. An officer from the Deccan police station confirmed receiving the application. Meanwhile, in Mumbai, the BJP slammed Pathan. The saffron party on Thursday tweeted @BJP4Maharashtra saying, "Waris Pathan, who are you threatening to? Shiv Sena led government may tolerate your comments; but BJP and people of Maharashtra will teach you a lesson that your hate- mongering speeches will be shut." However, Pathan has issued a statement to the media, saying he has been quoted out of context. "I hereby wish to state that the media reports on TV channels showing my statement made in the public meeting at Gulbarga five days back have totally quoted me out of context," Pathan claimed on late Thursday evening. "I wish to reiterate that I can never say anything intentionally or unintentionally that hurts the sentiments of any caste, community or gender. I am a proud Indian and respects the plurality of this country," he said. While admitting that he has been angry like many Indians that the Centre is neglecting issues concerning CAA, NRC and NPA, the former MLA from Mumbai said, "Neither me nor my party supports anything that creates a divide between people on the basis of caste, creed and religion. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Keystone Bank Limited, Nigerias most innovative banking services provider, has restated its commitment to environmental sustainability as it recently embarked on tree planting campaign. According to the lender, the event which saw staff of the bank plant trees at the Nigeria Conservation Foundation in Lagos, is in line with its bid to further align with the Sustainable Development Goal 15, which stresses the call by the United Nations to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, halt and reverse land degradation, halt biodiversity loss and ultimately for environmental sustainability. Commenting on the initiative, Keystone Bank executive director, Adeyemi Odusanya said: As a bank, our goal is to lead the movement promoting environmental sustainability in Nigeria and we are clearly going to sustain that. One of the ways to sustain this initiative is by planting trees to preserve the environment. Tree planting remains a strong tool to tackle the effect of climate change. Climate change is the most significant material risk to the future because it poses most devastating threat to human survival. Keystone Bank fully aligns itself with the UN ideology. We cannot live a healthy life, conduct business and create wealth amidst a sick environment. Hence, this gesture is our commitment towards a sustainable future that will benefit all, Odusanya noted. Keystone Bank is a technology and service-driven commercial bank offering convenient and reliable solutions to its customers. Members of the opposition Shiromani Akali Dal SAD on Thursday stormed the Well of the Punjab Assembly after the House Speaker refused to accept their calling attention notice on high power tariff in the state. Soon after the Question Hour during the Budget session ended, members of the SAD sought from the Speaker about the status of their calling attention notice. When the Speaker did not allow the same, all the members of the SAD and the BJP rushed to the Well of the House and raised slogans against the state government. Earlier before the start of the session, the Akalis held a protest outside the Assembly over the issue. Leading the protest, senior Akali leader and former minister Bikram Singh Majithia accused the Congress government of putting additional burden on power consumers. "Power is costliest in Punjab at this moment," claimed Majithia and added the power rate was much cheaper during the previous SAD-BJP government than what was now under the Congress-led regime. The opposition party also brought some families, who had received "steep power bills", to the protest site. "The Congress had promised to provide electricity at Rs 5 per unit. But now, people are being charged Rs 9-10 per unit which was exorbitant, " said Akali leader Parambans Singh Romana. Power rates in Punjab were hiked by 36 paise a unit from January 1 for domestic consumers. The Akalis also accused the Congress of "striking underhand deals" with the management of private thermal plants which resulted in a loss of Rs 4,100 crore to the state exchequer. They said people were receiving inflated bills and demanded an immediate rollback of the power tariff hike as well as an independent inquiry into the "Rs 4,100 crore power scam". Legislative party leader Sharanjit Singh Dhillon and Majithia said the Congress government should immediately reverse the power hike and provide power to domestic and industrial consumers at Rs 5 per unit as promised in the party's election manifesto. The leaders said the chief minister's announcement of bringing out a white paper on the issue was an excuse to divert attention from the real problem. "People are not interested in white papers. They want power at Rs 5 per unit. You should provide the same at the earliest," said Majithia. He said the underprivileged sections of society, including the scheduled caste and backward communities, were the most burdened by the repeated power hikes along with the common man. He said during the SAD-BJP tenure both SC and BC communities were provided 200 units of electricity free of cost. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Warren Buffett uses the "newspaper test" to make decisions. And Jeff Bezos says "most decisions" need to be made with "70 percent of the information you wish you had," otherwise "you're probably being slow." So how does fellow billionaire Mark Cuban make better, faster decisions? "I continue to always be learning. That's first and foremost. Change is constant," Cuban said during a Q&A via media site The Boardroom's Twitter account on Tuesday. "Beyond that, I think I learned to be nicer and to micro manage much much less." Cuban learn tweet In 2014, Cuban told Inc. as a boss he's "a d---." "I micromanage you until I trust you," he said. "It's a back and forth continually," he said in 2014. "If I send you 30 emails I expect quick responses and direct action. Then we'll go to weekly reports. And I want the bad news first. I want to read, 'God dammit, we lost this sale.' I want to know the setbacks so that I can help you." Since then, Cuban, 61, says he has adjusted his style, learning to micro-manage less, to make the best use of his time and to hire better. "The most important thing I have tried to do is partner with and hire people whose skill sets complement mine. I want people who know what I don't and that I can learn from," he said via The Boardroom's Twitter account. "That's worked for me 90pct of the time." Cuban hire people tweet However Cuban says he is "still learning" despite his huge success in business first selling his start-up, MicroSolutions, in 1990 for $6 million and then, nine years later, selling Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion in Yahoo stock. He also owns the NBA's Dallas Mavericks and invests in start-ups both on and off of ABC's "Shark Tank." "I tried to figure it out as I went. Some things worked and others didn't. I'm still learning," Cuban tweeted during the Q&A. Like this story? Subscribe to CNBC Make It on YouTube! See also: President Nana Addo Dankwah Akufo-Addo has charged the Police Service to work harder on their reputation. He said they cannot maintain law and order with a dent reputation. Speaking during his State of the Nation Address, he explained that his government has resourced and equiped the Police Service more than any other government. This he says was done to ensure that the police will be able to dispense their functions effectively. "We will continue to resource the police and the security agencies to enable them to work effectively in ensuring law and order in the country. "We are also going to increase the intake of personnel into the Police Service until we gradually meet the required ratio for the police across the world. "But I must say the police are doing well and they should continue with their service to the country," he said. The Ghana Police Service has been ranked as the most corrupt institution in the country. According to a survey conducted by the Institute of Economic Affairs, twenty-three percent of the persons spoken to believed that the police are the most corrupt. Research Fellow at the IEA, Prof. Ransford Gyampoh said the results point to the severity of bribery and corruption in the country. The services which people had to pay bribe from the most likely to the least likely are; avoiding a problem with the police, like passing a checkpoint or avoiding a fine or arrest at 6.7%, getting electricity connection is 6.6%, getting a document or a permit is 6.3%; getting treatment at a local hospital thats 5.1%, getting a place in Government SHS for a child is 5.1%. Respondents view on the corruption of ten state institutions namely the office of the President, Members of Parliament, Government Officials, according to the results of our survey, 23 percent of the people were of the opinion that nearly all police officers are corrupt. Only 4.4% said not all police officers are corrupt. The police are followed closely by the office of the President, thats 19.2%, tax officials at 15.4%, MPs is 15%. Others are generally government officials at 13.9%. DCEs 13.3%, Judges and magistrates at 13.1%, Assemblymen and women as 11.9%, Immigration is 10.4% and the army is 7%. This implies that the army is perceived by the public as the least corrupt institution, the report stated. 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 GLAAACC CELEBRATES 27 YEARS OF HONORING BUSINESS LEADERS For twenty-seven years the Greater Los Angeles African American Chamber of Commerce (GLAAACC) Annual Economic Awards Dinner has been the premiere event of the African American business community. The event recognizes individuals, small businesses and corporations who have contributed to the economic growth and development of the African American small business community. The awards dinner has honored top corporate leaders such as L.A. Metro CEO Phillip Washington and Los Angeles World Airports CEO Deborah Flint, the late Kaiser CEO Bernard Tyson, as well as political leaders at the local, state and federal level. The GLAAACC Economic Awards Dinner will be held on Wednesday, April 8, at the JW Marriott LA Live, 900 West Olympic Boulevard in downtown Los Angeles, beginning at 5:00 p.m. ADVERTISEMENT Throughout the evening, awards will be presented in categories such as African American Business of the Year, Banking and Financial Institution of the Year, Public Service, Purchasing Executive, Construction Company of the Year, Small Business Advocate, Public Works Contractor of the Year and Corporation of the Year. GLAAACCs Annual Economic Awards Dinner is more than an event, its an annual opportunity to network and meet face-to-face with top executives from a variety of industries, said GLAAAC Chairman Gene Hale. If business owners only attend one event per year, this is it. Since 1994 when Sam Iacobellis, former chief operation officer for Rockwell International and the person responsible for development of the B-1 bomber, chaired the inaugural Economic Awards Dinner in 1994 and Daniel S. Goldin, NASAs longest tenured administrator was the keynote speaker, the event has continued to grow in stature and prominence. Over the past two and a half decades, the Economic Awards Dinner has had have many distinguished guests and keynote speakers from a variety of industries such as presidential appointees, elected officials, executives from private and public sectors and sports. Notable keynote speakers include Los Angeles County Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke, California Governor Gray Davis, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, former L.A. Laker superstar star Earvin Magic Johnson, U.S. Small Business Administrator Maria Contreras-Sweet, U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Commerce Manufacturing and Services Nicole Y. Lamb-Hale, and L.A. Clippers owner Steve Ballmer. Mistress and masters of ceremonies have greatly contributed to the stature of the GLAAACCs Economic Awards Dinner. The legendary defense attorney Johnnie Cochran was the first master of ceremonies. Actresses Dawn Lewis (A Different World, Hangin with Mr. Cooper), Vivica A. Fox (Independence Day, Soul Food, Set it off), Terri J. Vaughn (Steve Harvey Show, All of Us), actor and comedian Flex Alexander (Uptown Comedy Club, Girlfriends), KABC7 Anchor Mark Brown and Los Angeles City Council President Herb Wesson are a few of the professionals that added star power and prestige to the gala while keeping the audience entertained and the evening running smoothly. ADVERTISEMENT Southern California Edison (SCE) is the Diamond Sponsor for the 2020 Economic Awards Dinner. According to Southern California Edison Supplier Diversity Manager Dennis Thurston, the utility company is one of the largest supporters of African American businesses in the state. SCEs diversity has been at 40 percent for disadvantaged business enterprises (DBE) suppliers for the past six years, spending over $2.1 billion with diverse companies in 2018. Thurston said that SCE was on track to spend the same in 2019. Southern California Edison recognizes that African American businesses are an important component in keeping the economy moving forward, said GLAAACC Co-Chair Jamarah Hayner. We are proud to partner with them once again to recognize individuals and corporations that support our businesses. For ticket information for GLAAACCs 27th Annual Economic Awards Dinner, visit GLAAACC.org/awards-dinner or call (323) 292-1297. A British couple diagnosed with coronavirus in Japan have said they are in the best place as they posted pictures from their hospital beds. David and Sally Abel, from Northamptonshire, have been transferred for hospital treatment from the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which has been quarantined near Yokohama, Japan. Around 70 other Britons from the ship are due to fly back to the UK from Tokyo on Friday on a repatriation flight organised by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Thursday 20th February. Thinking of all the Brits flying to UK tomorrow. Here I am having given 10 files of blood, ECG (EKG) and radiogram Posted by David Abel on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 In a Facebook post, Mr Abel said: We arrived in lovely hospital a couple of hours ago. Taken by ambulance blues & twos the entire journey. Outside the hospital I came over a bit weird and nearly passed out. Every pore on my body opened and i was wheelchaired to our room. Full health inspection and now we know whats going on. We both contracted a cold (unaware of) and it has not yet turned into pneumonia. (we do have coronavirus). (PA Graphics) Tomorrow the big tests commence. chest x-rays, ECG, chest scan, urine + more. We are both in the best place! They do know what they are doing and our two nurses are gorgeous. Sally likes the Dr too. Mr Abel said that following treatment, the couple will need three rounds of all-clears on coronavirus tests. He added: Wi-fi will not work for me, so this will be the final communication for some time. See you all before you know it. Now Sallys turn. Both beds in same room. Posted by David Abel on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 In further posts, Mr Abel said his wife Sally had a bed in the same room as him and that they were thinking of all the Brits flying to UK tomorrow. He also said it was impossible to send or receive emails and he was unable to contact the British Embassy or his family. Story continues Another British national on the ship who has recovered from the virus posted on Facebook on Wednesday to say he is heading home. Alan Steele wrote: Informed we will have to do another 2weeks quarentine back in blighty although japan has set me free as all ok. Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab confirmed the evacuation flight for British nationals on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship will leave from Tokyo. The PA news agency understands it will leave late on Friday evening Japanese time, and land at MoD Boscombe Down near Salisbury, Wiltshire. Mr Raab said: Details have been sent to those who have registered for the flight. We urge other British nationals still seeking to leave to contact us. We will continue to support British nationals who wish to stay in Japan. I can confirm the evacuation flight out of Tokyo on Friday for British nationals from the Diamond Princess cruise ship: https://t.co/vBYNRkvBbK Dominic Raab (@DominicRaab) February 20, 2020 The update comes as authorities in Tokyo said two elderly Japanese passengers taken off the ship have died from the virus. Meanwhile, Britons in Cambodia who left another cruise ship, the Westerdam, and who have been cleared for travel are being assisted by the Foreign Office to make their way home, sources told the PA news agency. The group are receiving health advice and being helped with commercial flight bookings. All have tested negative after one case was diagnosed on board. The number of Britons in the group has not been disclosed, and it is unclear whether some have already come back to the UK. Public Health England (PHE) said airport health teams will meet the flights and speak to Westerdam passengers about any symptoms. Passengers leave the Westerdam (Heng Sinith/AP) If they do not have symptoms, the group will be given health advice and told to self-isolate at home for 14 days, PHE said. If they have symptoms, they will be taken to hospital for testing. A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said on Wednesday that those Britons repatriated from the Diamond Princess will be quarantined for 14 days at Arrowe Park Hospital on the Wirral on their return. There were 78 British passengers on the cruise liner when cases of the coronavirus strain known as Covid-19 started to emerge. Four British cases have since been confirmed by the Foreign Office, although the number could be higher. Meanwhile, the European Commission has announced the EU will be financing the repatriation of citizens from any of the EU27 still stuck on the Diamond Princess. WHO is working with an international network of statisticians & mathematical modelers to estimate key epidemiologic parameters of #COVID19, such as the incubation period, case fatality ratio, serial interval. WHO Situation Report 19 February https://t.co/hbG6I4qBpV#coronavirus pic.twitter.com/IeD8FaiXjm World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) February 19, 2020 As of 2pm on Wednesday, a total of 5,216 people in the UK have been tested for coronavirus, of whom nine have tested positive. Reports on Wednesday from mainland China said there have been 2,004 deaths and 74,185 confirmed infections of the virus. New cases have fallen to less than 2,000 per day for the past two days but officials and analysts have warned that the threat of a more serious outbreak remains as people gradually return to work following a prolonged Lunar New Year holiday. While the overall spread of the virus appears to have been slowing, the situation remains severe in Hubei province where the virus is thought to have originated. A social worker from Kerala has launched a hunger strike at the Sharaniyavas slum where the Ahmedabad municipal corporation has built a 600-metre wall apparently to hide slums from United States President Donald J Trump's sight during his Ahmedabad visit. Uttam Ghosh offers his take on how Trump -- who wants to build a wall between his country and Mexico -- may react to the Gujarat wall on his visit to Ahmedabad on Monday. The homepage of the free online learning platform launched by China's Ministry of Education and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology Video PlayerClose BEIJING, February 19 (Xinhua) A free online learning platform launched for China's primary and secondary school students studying at home during the outbreak of COVID-19 has seen good results since it was launched Monday. More than 23 million visits have been paid to the platform's website as of noon Wednesday. The platform offers a series of learning resources including epidemic prevention education, moral education, digital teaching materials and physed. Jointly launched by China's Ministry of Education and Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the platform covers the 31 provincial-level regions on the Chinese mainland. In addition, the two ministries have also set up a working mechanism to ensure the platform's smooth operation. (Source: Xinhua) Violence erupted in the seedy Olomore Market, Abeokuta this morning as dozens of Hausa traders protested the death of one of them during alleged shooting by Operatives of the Special Anti Robbery Squad (SARS). The angry Hausa traders selling onions, pepper, tomatoes, yam and fruits, allegedly went violent, smashing objects, including the operational vehicle of the Ogun State owned Television broadcasting station and many other property in sight. The SARS operatives were said to have chased some suspected criminals towards the Olomore market and fired at them when they ran into the midst of the traders, touching off the angry reactions. The traders in Olomore market were soon joined by those from nearby Lafenwa market, who got wind of the shooting and took to the Lafenwa Abeokuta Lagos expressway, disrupting traffic flow. They marched towards Olomore with bonfires mounted in various locations on the ever- busy road. Many fled in different directions seeking where to hide from harm. Business activities came to abrupt end. Follow Us on Facebook @LadunLiadi; Instagram @LadunLiadi; Twitter @LadunLiadi; Youtube @LadunLiadiTV for updates Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 12:57:52|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close YINCHUAN, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- The pleasure derived from helping others financially was a new experience for 54-year-old Wang Wanhui, who has just bid farewell to poverty. He wired 500 yuan (71.4 U.S. dollars) through WeChat along with a note "Go, China! Go, Wuhan!" in the chat group of his village of Yushu, which is tucked away in what was once one of the most impoverished areas in northwest China's Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. "Everyone in the village wanted to offer help, no matter how insignificant," the lifetime farmer said. "We've received so much from government and people all over China in the fight against poverty. We want to be useful in the fight against the epidemic." In the anti-poverty campaign, over 53,000 people of the area's 122 villages, including Wang's, were lifted out of poverty. Last year, Yushu's per capita disposable income reached 10,000 yuan. Its incidence of poverty dropped to 0.39 percent from 2014's 33.9 percent. With favorable subsidies, Wang expanded production of corn and marigold, a Chinese medicinal herb, and raised dozens of chickens. The renovation of his home was also completed thanks to government funding. "Water, electricity and Internet are all available. Villagers now lead a life as convenient as city residents," said Wang. However, the outbreak of the novel coronavirus epidemic in Wuhan put the village on alert. Wang volunteered to guard the village entrance, disinfecting vehicles and taking temperatures. He also paid home visits to share virus prevention tips. When a donation proposal was initiated, villagers showed great enthusiasm. A total of 15,000 yuan was raised within four hours. Even Wang's 8-year-old grandson donated 100 yuan which he had saved up little by little. "I'm proud of my grandson," he said. "It's a touching scene to see so many villagers chipping in. The amount is small, but their gratitude is sincere," said Zhang Xuejie, a village cadre. Zhang said six other nearby villages also donated about 100,000 yuan in total. In central China's Henan Province, leek growers in Zhuyuangou Village organized a special donation. They scraped together 50,000 kg of the local special agricultural product worth about 150,000 yuan and transported it to Wuhan. For the growers who have just escaped poverty, the donated leeks would have represented a considerable source of income. "But the anti-virus fight matters to Chinese. Our fellow villagers are united as ever," said Zhu Delin, a village cadre. Zhu said more than 300 villagers worked three days on end to help harvest the leeks and load the truck. "We owe today's improved life to so many people caring about us. We just did what we can to give back," said Zhu. "We have prepared another 50,000 kg for donation if people in Wuhan are still in need." Ameyo Adadevoh Way that is the new name of a major road in the federal capital territory (FCT). The road was renamed after the lat... Ameyo Adadevoh Way that is the new name of a major road in the federal capital territory (FCT). The road was renamed after the late medical doctor whom TheCable unveiled as the Nigerian of the Decade based on her role in preventing Ebola epidemic in the country. The road, located along Ahmadu Bello Way, close to the Nigerian Air Force Conference Centre, was renamed after Adedovah, about six years after she died from the disease in Lagos. Her death occurred on August 19, 2014, while she was managing a Liberian-American who brought the virus to Nigeria. She was the most senior doctor who participated in managing Patrick Sawyer at the First Consultant Hospital, Lagos. The late nurse insisted on keeping Sawyer in the hospital despite pressure from the patient and his country for him to be freed. SHE DESERVES MORE When a Twitter user shared a picture of the new road named after her, some lauded the gesture while others called on the relevant authorities immortalise her in a bigger way. She deserves more than that, a national holiday, her face on of our naira notes, a place in the national museum, part of our history & civic education textbooks & her children getting their entire education funded by the government for life, a user tweeted via @CeOdimz. Below are some of the reactions to the tweet: This is amazing. Such a brave and patriotic doctor. I also personally think that the National Hospital in Abuja should be renamed after her. Chiemeziem MD (@DrChiemeziem) February 19, 2020 An airport, seaport or even a stadium should be named after her. And her family paid till eternity. Mazi Frank Ifeanyi (@OkonkwoPerez) February 19, 2020 I think something more lasting should do more than this. Even the hospital she worked for should be named after her. CHUKWUBUIKEM (@chionyeadinizu) February 19, 2020 Good start but she deserves a bit more Le Gen (@chuxugo) February 19, 2020 Beside her, Nigeria also lost Justina Echelonu, a 25-year-old nurse who assumed work at the hospital just a day before Sawyer entered the country. Some other healthworkers also paid the ultimate price. The governments of three states are investigating samples of drugs prepared by M / s Digital Vision Company, located in Kalaamb in Sirmour district of Himachal Pradesh, India. Apart from this, the governments have sent sample inquiries to other states besides their own states. At the same time, taking the matter seriously, the governments of the three states are making coordination among themselves. With this, the report of the sample taken in the Kalaamb pharmaceutical company may come by Friday. After this, the governments of the three states will match the sample report. At the same time, after the death of children and kidney failure in Jammu, the three governments are investigating against M / s Digital Vision Company. Owaisi's stance on the government, says 'Welcome to New India, criminals are getting reward' Additional Chief Secretary Health is monitoring this matter. With this, what action has the drug controller taken against the company so far? The government has asked for a detailed report and the drug controller informed the government that the company's documents were being scrutinized. The team is collating the documents of the government and the company, and along with this, the records of the medicines supplied by the company are being scrutinized. All this information has been given on the phone to the senior officer of the Health Department. Sonia and Rahul Gandhi may soon lose Indian citizenship: Subramanian Swamy Additional Chief Secretary (Health) RD Dhiman said that instructions have been given to seal the records of the company, whereas no medicine will be produced in the company. Has summoned records from the drug controller. Officers are also informed on the phone. With this, state drug controller Navneet Marwah told that the records have to be matched with the government documents. At the same time, samples of the company's medicines are taken. The report can come by tomorrow. Action will then be taken against the company. Along with this, the record of where the company has supplied the medicine is also being seen. Mahashivratri will also be celebrated in Pakistan, 'Har Har Mahadev' will echo in these 3 ancient Shiva temples ANKARA, Turkey Two Turkish soldiers were killed Thursday in an airstrike in northwestern Syria, Turkey said, after an attack by Ankara-backed opposition forces that targeted Syrian government troops. The deaths came after the Turkish president threatened to expand his nations involvement in Syria if another one of his troops were hurt. At least 15 Turkish soldiers have been killed in Syria this month amid a crushing offensive by Syrian President Bashar Assads forces aimed at recapturing remaining opposition-held areas in the region. Intent on halting the advance, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had vowed Feb. 12 to take military action everywhere in Syria if another Turkish soldier was killed or wounded. The multiple front offensive has triggered the biggest single wave of fleeing civilians in Syrias nine-year war, displacing nearly 1 million people who have rushed toward the Turkish border and are sheltering in tents or sleeping rough in harsh winter weather. It has also risked completely shattering a fragile cooperation between Ankara and Moscow, which back opposing sides of the Syria war. Ankara has sent thousands of soldiers to northwestern Syria to try to stem the Syrian government advance on the province near the Turkish border, leading to the repeated flare-ups. Thursdays exchange marked a serious escalation that risks growing into a full-blown conflict between Turkey and Syria. Erdogan has also called on Assads forces to retreat from Idlib or face an imminent Turkish attack. The exchange began after opposition fighters shelled Syrian government forces and entered the village of Nairab, which Assads forces had captured Feb. 3, the Turkish Anadolu agency said. The Russian military said the militants actions were supported by Turkish artillery fire, which allowed them to break through the Syrian armys defenses. Four Syrian soldiers were wounded in the Turkish shelling, it said. At the Syrian militarys request, Russian Su-24 bombers then struck the militants to prevent them from advancing and allowing Syrian government forces to successfully repel all attacks, the military added. It was not immediately clear whether it was the Russian airstrikes that killed the two Turkish soldiers and injured five others. Fahrettin Altun, a top aide to Erdogan, said the attack was carried out by Syrian government forces. On Twitter, he wrote: The blood of our martyrs wont be left unaccounted for. The Turkish Defense Ministry tweeted that as many as 50 Syrian government soldiers were killed and that five tanks, two armored personnel carriers and other equipment were destroyed. In Moscow, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova raised what she called serious concern about the Turkish military support for the militants. This incident represents a violation of the Russian-Turkish agreements on separation between the armed opposition and terrorists and the creation of a demilitarized zone. It risks provoking further escalation of the conflict in that part of Syrias territory, she said in a statement. Turkey and Russia have closely coordinated their moves in recent years in Idlib province. Turkey maintains observation posts in northern Syria that were set up to monitor a 2018 cease-fire agreement with Russia. The truce collapsed in late 2019, leading to the current Syrian offensive, backed by Russia. Russian officials have said they hold Turkey responsible for the collapse of the cease-fire deal, saying Ankara had not held up its end to rein in militants who continued attacking Syrian and Russian targets. Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar on Thursday rejected the Russian assertion, saying Ankara was making progress against radical groups in Idlib when the Syrian government launched its offensive. Ankara sent in thousands of additional troops and armored vehicles in recent weeks, vowing to halt the governments advance. We are delivering our final warnings. We have not reached the desired results as yet, Erdogan said Wednesday. The operation in Idlib is a matter of time. We could enter (Idlib) suddenly one night. Akar said Turkeys military has prepared plans A, B and C for a possible offensive in Idlib. So far, talks between Turkish and Russian officials have failed to reach agreements that would ease tensions there. While both Russia and Turkey likely seek to maintain their cooperation across Syria more broadly, growing tensions in Idlib between the two countries threatens to derail that cooperation, said expert Mona Yacoubian, in an analysis for the United States Institute for Peace. Akar said Turkey had no intention to come head to head with Russia, insisting that Turkeys aim was to ensure that the Syrian government abides by the cease-fire agreement for the province. Asked how Washington can support Turkey in Idlib, he said the United States or other NATO countries could deploy Patriot missile defense systems on the Turkish border with Syria to guard against possible attacks from Syrian territory. In the past, they sent us air defense batteries. Our country faces a missile threat. In this way, there could be a support (through the deployment) of Patriot batteries, Akar said. In Washington, a U.S. official said the United States was aware of Turkeys request for Patriot missiles for use on the border with Syria. But no decision have been made, said the official, who agreed to comment on the matter only on condition of anonymity. Russian President Vladimir Putin discussed Idlib in a phone call with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Kremlin said, noting the leaders emphasized the need to avoid negative humanitarian consequences for the civilian population. In the call, Putin underlined the need to take efficient measures to neutralize the terrorist threat while respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity of Syria, it said, adding that the leaders of France and Germany offered to help reduce tensions. The French offered a slightly different version of the conversation, saying in a statement after the call that Merkel and Macron warned President Putin about the humanitarian situation for the civilian population in Idlib, and called for an immediate stop to hostilities and an end to the blocking of humanitarian aid. Macron and Merkel said they were available to meet quickly with Putin and Erdogan to find a political solution. The region is seeing 900,000 people on the run in Idlib during a bitterly cold winter with nowhere to go. Aid organizations said they were overwhelmed and facing severe shortages. We are burning through our supplies much faster than anticipated. We just do not know how long this will continue, how many more people will need help and for how long, a level of emergency that is impossible to comprehend, said Mercy Corps country director Kieren Barnes. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said a massive cross-border operation was underway in Syrias northwest to assist civilians. A total of 1,227 trucks of humanitarian assistance crossed from Turkey through Bab al-Hawa and Bab al-Salam cross-border checks last month compared to 928 trucks in December, Dujarric said. This is the largest amount of aid the United Nations has sent across the Syrian-Turkish border in (any month) since the operation was authorized in 2014. In the attack on the village of Nairab, the Anadolu agency said the opposition moved in after Syrian government targets there were hit by artillery fire. They destroyed a tank and an APC belonging to Syrian forces and seized a second tank, according to the report. Syrian opposition activists confirmed the report, saying Turkey-backed insurgents stormed the village near the strategic town of Saraqeb, both of which were held by Syrian troops. The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Syria war monitor, said the clashes and bombardment in and near Nairab left two Turkish soldiers dead as well as killing 14 insurgents and 11 pro-government fighters. It said the opposition facts withdrew from the village by evening. Syrian state TV reported that government forces have repelled the attacks on Nairab. Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Russian and Turkish delegations would hold more talks on reducing tensions in Idlib province and that the Turkish and Russian leaders could meet too, if needed. It is true that at the moment, there are differences in the (two sides) positions, Cavusoglu told state broadcaster TRT. The delegations narrowed their differences a bit but are not yet at the point we want to be, he said. ___ Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser reported this story in Ankara and AP writer Vladimir Isachenkov reported from Moscow. AP writers Lolita C. Baldor in Washington, Bassem Mroue in Beirut, Angela Charlton in Paris and Edith M. Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report. CHICAGO/NEW YORK/MILWAUKEE, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The year is off to a strong start for Tidal ETF Services LLC (Tidal) , an innovative leading provider of ETF services. Today, the company announced assets under administration (AuA) have jumped to $700 million in the Tidal ETF Trust (Trust). Just in 2020, Tidals AuA has increased over 30%. Tidal has facilitated the development and launch of 8 unique ETFs to-date. Among its current clients are Aware Asset Management, SoFi, Advanced Research Investment Solutions (ARIS) and SP Funds. The company is looking to file additional ETFs with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shortly. Eric Falkeis, Chief Executive Officer of Tidal, said, Launching and growing ETFs that will be successful involves mixing tried and true tactics with a large dose of customization. Finding the right formula is essential, and we have the years of experience and large reputable network to help companies turn their innovative ideas into great products. Tidal offers a comprehensive suite of services designed to bring lasting ideas to market and help grow their AUM. These services include: strategic guidance and product planning, trust and fund services, legal and compliance support, operations support, marketing and research, and distribution support services. Clients have the option to select one or multiple service packages offered by Tidal, or to advance through the program sequentially. Media Contact: Leann Gaines leanng@tidaletfservices.com (847) 309-5497 ABOUT TIDAL ETF SERVICES Formed by ETF industry pioneers and thought leaders, who have collectively launched hundreds of ETFs, Tidal ETF Services LLC sets out to modernize the way ETFs have historically been developed, launched, marketed and sold. With a focus on helping ETF issuers and asset managers, Tidal offers a comprehensive suite of services, proprietary tools, and methodologies designed to bring lasting ideas to market and place them on a trajectory of steady growth. As advocates for ETF innovation, Tidal partners with clients who share their vision to provide investors with access to the most interesting and viable ETFs available today. DISCLOSURES This release is being made available for informational purposes only and should not be used for any other purpose. The information contained herein does not constitute and should not be construed as an offering of advisory services or an offer to sell or solicitation to buy any securities or related financial instruments in any jurisdiction. Investments in ETFs involve risk. Some investment products have more risk than others. Please read each prospectus for specific details regarding the ETFs risk profile. FOLLOW TIDAL ON LINKEDIN AND TWITTER Government says range of measures in place to combat COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore The Singapore government has taken proactive steps to secure essential supplies, including masks, to combat the COVID-19 outbreak in the city-state. As for the production of masks, MND said they are looking towards developing local manufacturing capabilities after some places like Taiwan, Thailand and India have banned or tightened regulations on mask exports. Photo courtesy: Twitter/@Indounik The Ministry of National Development (MND), in a written reply in Parliament to a question by Ang Mo Kio MP Gan Thiam Poh, said many lessons have been drawn from past experiences to improve readiness for the outbreak. Gan had asked what lessons could be learnt from the current COVID-19 outbreak, what could be improved to better equip Singaporeans against a pandemic and whether the government will include the production of masks and medical protective gears as a strategic facility and support the investment of these kinds of facilities in Singapore. The reply emphasised the responsibility of the individual and swift measures taken to combat the COVID-19 disease in the early stages. Even before Singapore had its first confirmed case, we anticipated that we would need a whole-of-Government effort to respond effectively to this threat and we set up the Multi-Ministry Taskforce on January, 22, 2020 to coordinate our responses and measures. Since then, the Taskforce has put in place a whole range of measures from border controls to extra precautions within Singapore, the reply read. Issues like personal hygiene, supporting society around them, and being careful not to spread undue fear were also pointed out as precautions in the current scenario. As for the production of masks, MND said they are looking towards developing local manufacturing capabilities after some places like Taiwan, Thailand and India have banned or tightened regulations on mask exports. We are therefore strengthening the resilience of our supply chain, including looking for new sources, and developing local manufacturing capabilities, the MND stated. The reply also said that it was important not to spread unverified information or false news which can cause panic and fear, adding the Government would push timely information through various platforms including broadcast media, display panels in HDB estates, websites and social media about the outbreak. WINNIPEG, Manitoba, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Kane Biotech Inc. (TSX-V:KNE) (the Corporation or Kane Biotech), a biotechnology company engaged in the research, development and commercialization of technologies and products that prevent and remove microbial biofilms, today announced that it has appointed Jean Gauvin, DVM, as its Chief Veterinary Officer (CVO), effective immediately. In the newly-created position of CVO, Dr. Gauvin will serve as a liaison between Kane Biotech and industry, guide the Kane Biotech R&D teams Animal Health research and product development, and be the media voice of Kane Biotechs Animal Health business unit. Dr. Gauvin will also serve as a member of Kane Biotechs Scientific Advisory Board. Dr. Gauvin has 40 years of experience in veterinary medicine and is the co-founder and co-owner of the DMV Veterinary Centre in Montreal (Lachine), Quebec. He is the Chairman of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Associations (CVMA) communications advisory group; immediate past President of the Association des Medecins Veterinaire du Quebec en pratique des petits animaux (AMVQ) and past Chairman and member of the AMVQs governance committee. Dr. Gauvin received his Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine and Small Animal Dentistry Certificate from the University of Montreal; and his Certificate in Fish Health Management from the University of Georgia. Dr. Gauvin has been involved in veterinary associations, nationally and provincially, since 1984. In 2009, he became the Quebec representative on the CVMA Council, and became a member of the CVMAs National and International Issues Committee the following year. After being elected as an executive member, he became President of the CVMA and chaired the CVMA Summit on Antimicrobial Stewardship in 2014. Dr. Gauvin also has more than 30 years of experience in the field of broadcast (radio, television) and social media, and is currently a veterinary columnist for the Moteur de recherche (Search Engine) radio show that airs on Ici Radio-Canada Premiere. We are delighted to welcome Dr. Gauvin to our executive leadership team, said Marc Edwards, CEO of Kane Biotech. His many years of experience in veterinary medicine, particularly antimicrobial stewardship, will be an invaluable asset to Kane Biotech as we continue to develop and commercialize products that prevent and disperse bacterial biofilms. Joining Kane Biotech provides me with the opportunity to pursue my three passions: animal welfare, antimicrobial stewardship, and the World Organization for Animal Healths concept of One Health, said Dr. Gauvin. I am completely supportive of Kane Biotechs vision of discovering new technologies that will prevent biofilm-related infections in humans and animals, as well as in industrial settings. I believe that my 40 years of experience in veterinary medicine which includes antimicrobial resistance, media and work with veterinary organizations will help Kane Biotech to fulfill this vision. About Kane Biotech Kane Biotech is a biotechnology company engaged in the research, development and commercialization of technologies and products that prevent and remove microbial biofilms. The Corporation has a portfolio of biotechnologies, intellectual property (56 patents and patents pending, trade secrets and trademarks) and products developed by the Corporations own biofilm research expertise and acquired from leading research institutions. StrixNB, DispersinB, Aledex, bluestem, AloSera, coactiv+ and Kane are trademarks of Kane Biotech Inc. The Corporation is listed on the TSX Venture Exchange under the symbol "KNE". For more information, please visit www.kanebiotech.com, or contact: Marc Edwards Chief Executive Officer Kane Biotech Inc. +1 (514) 910-6991 medwards@kanebiotech.com Ray Dupuis Chief Financial Officer Kane Biotech Inc. +1 (204) 298-2200 rdupuis@kanebiotech.com Stephen Kilmer Investor Relations +1 (646) 274-3580 skilmer@kanebiotech.com 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. Caution Regarding Forward-Looking Information This press release contains certain statements regarding Kane Biotech Inc. that constitute forward-looking information under applicable securities law. These statements reflect managements current beliefs and are based on information currently available to management. Certain material factors or assumptions are applied in making forward-looking statements, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in such statements. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, risks relating to the Companys: (a) financial condition, including lack of significant revenues to date and reliance on equity and other financing; (b) business, including its early stage of development, government regulation, market acceptance for its products, rapid technological change and dependence on key personnel; (c) intellectual property including the ability of the Company to protect its intellectual property and dependence on its strategic partners; and (d) capital structure, including its lack of dividends on its common shares, volatility of the market price of its common shares and public company costs. Further information about these and other risks and uncertainties can be found in the disclosure documents filed by the Company with applicable securities regulatory authorities, available at www.sedar.com. The Company cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. A specialist on sexual and spiritual abuse discusses the progress made one year after the Vatican held a top-level meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church. By Francesca Merlo One year ago, Pope Francis hosted a Meeting in the Vatican on the Protection of Minors in the Church. It took place from 21 to 24 February 2019. One year later, Fr Stephane Joulain, a psychotherapist, speaks to Vatican Radios Olivier Bonnel about the outcome of the meeting, what has improved, and what still needs improving. He says that straight after the meeting there was a period of silence, in which Bishops Conferences around the world received documentation and the Presidents of Conferences shared with their brother bishops what they experienced. Now, he continues, we have entered a new phase, and we can see that Bishops Conferences and dioceses are taking measures. We are now in the time for action, he adds. In order to fight child sex abuse, several different tools must be developed, says Fr Joulain. One that is currently developing, he continues, is the establishment of offices that people can go to, or phone, with their complaints and be listened to. Fr Joulain continues saying that work on sensibilisation should also be done in parishes. This, he continues, is not only for the lay people that work in parishes. There is also a need for the formation of the clergy and the consecrated people. It must be stressed that formation is not something against them but something that must be done so as to protect the people of God, especially the most vulnerable. Fr Joulain spends 4-5 months on the ground, working to help fight child sex abuse, especially in African countries. His first example of this progress is in Ivory Coast, where a centre has enabled the majority of dioceses in the country to receive formation. Likewise, continues Fr Joulain, in Kenya, a programme has been implemented following research in Catholic schools on sensibilisation. The programme encourages children to be able to speak when they have a concern about their safety and about the integrity of their body and mind. One year has passed and something is changing, says Fr Joulain. We are not so much focusing on witch-hunting but rather on protecting. And that, he continues, is a turning point, something which is changing. Finally, Fr Joulain discusses the different realities that different cultures face when dealing with children. In many cultures the child is not a person but rather property of the family, he says. How are these children supposed to voice their concern and suffering if they are not supposed to talk to the adults, asks Fr Joulain. I am confident for the future and things will change, he says but what we have to take seriously are some of the obstacles, especially for victims. There is still a tremendous level of difficulty based on the administrative level of the Church. It is often very slow and complicated and can be an obstacle for victims today in their search for justice. A day after President Donald Trump issued executive clemency to 11 people including former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, another potential Trump pardon is in the news, this one for Julian Assange. Assange's lawyers claimed in a London court Wednesday that they would provide evidence that then-Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., promised Assange a pardon or some other favor related to a U.S. prosecution if he provided information absolving Russia of responsibility for hacking Democratic Party emails in 2016. Assange's lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, said he had a statement from another Assange lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, that shows "Mr. Rohrabacher going to see Mr. Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr. Assange . . . said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks." As with all claims by Assange, it's worth skepticism and careful assessment. The first thing to note is that Assange's credibility is questionable, and he has reason to make such an allegation. He is fighting extradition to the United States, and one of the ways you can beat extradition is by arguing that you are being targeted politically. This claim could feed into such an effort. The White House on Wednesday denied authorizing such an offer and distanced itself from Rohrabacher. "The president barely knows Dana Rohrabacher other than he's an ex-congressman," White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said. "He's never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject. It is a complete fabrication and a total lie. This is probably another never ending hoax and total lie from the DNC." Rohrabacher, meanwhile, has confirmed to Yahoo News that he told Assange he would get him a Trump pardon deal, but he also said he never spoke with Trump about it. In other words, he's suggesting it was more of an idea than a sanctioned proposal. "I spoke to Julian Assange and told him if he would provide evidence about who gave WikiLeaks the emails I would petition the president to give him a pardon," Rohrabacher said. "He knew I could get to the president." The bigger point, though, is that there is a public backstory here, and Assange's claim kind of fits and kind of doesn't. Rohrabacher visited Assange at the Ecuadoran embassy in London back in August 2017. Rohrabacher said at the time that he got "earth-shattering" information out of the meeting and that he intended to brief Trump on it. He indicated that the information pertained to Russia not being responsible for the 2016 election hacks. This was also the first time that he floated a pardon for Assange. He told The Daily Caller afterward that "if [Assange] is going to give us a big favor, he would obviously have to be pardoned to leave the Ecuadoran embassy." The Wall Street Journal then reported in September 2017 that the congressman had promoted such a deal to the White House. Rohrabacher reportedly floated the deal to then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who declined to pass it along to Trump. At the time, Rohrabacher declined to confirm or deny the report. By late September 2017, though, Rohrabacher was publicly complaining that White House aides were blocking his effort to facilitate that deal. After Trump said he had not heard about a potential deal for an Assange pardon, Rohrabacher told The Daily Caller, "I think the president's answer indicates that there is a wall around him that is being created by people who do not want to expose this fraud that there was collusion between our intelligence community and the leaders of the Democratic Party." Rohrabacher was still complaining about not getting an audience with Trump in February 2018, when he told The Intercept that Kelly had prevented him from briefing the president. He still hadn't briefed Trump as of May 2018, when CNN spoke with him. In November of that year, he lost his reelection bid. But while Rohrabacher struggled to get a meeting with Trump to talk about the proposal, he did get one before his visit with Assange. Rohrabacher met with Trump in April 2017 for 45 minutes in the Oval Office. Trump had seen the Russia-friendly congressman on Fox News and called him to deliver the invitation shortly after Rohrabacher walked off set, according to Politico. That suggests the White House's claim that Trump hadn't spoken with Trump "on this subject or almost any subject" isn't quite true. Even if they didn't talk about pardons - which Rohrabacher now says they didn't - it stands to reason they would have spoken about Russia. So clearly there was at least some line of communication between Trump and Rohrabacher. That doesn't mean Trump actually signed off on such a proposal, though, as Assange's lawyers say Rohrabacher conveyed to them. But it was at the very least a proposal that Rohrabacher pushed - and we know he at least wanted to get the White House involved. Rohrabacher was coy about whether the White House was involved when he first talked about a pardon in August 2017. He told The Daily Caller at the time, "I can't remember if I have spoken to anybody in the White House about this." How could he forget such a thing? The fact that this meeting was so steadfastly opposed by Kelly and others is an intriguing part of this. Perhaps they knew the content of the April 2017 meeting between Rohrabacher and Trump and believed no good would come of another. Or perhaps they just knew Rohrabacher's general reputation and that he would only feed Trump's conspiracy theories about Russia not actually being behind the 2016 interference. A couple of pieces that don't quite fit here, though. First is that the statement from Assange's lawyers states that Assange was promised leniency or a pardon "if Mr. Assange . . . said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks." This is something that Assange has said publicly already. Why would that be the reward here if it's nothing new? The answer, judging by Rohrabacher's comments, is that Assange wouldn't just say Russia didn't do the hacking but would provide evidence to back that up. He told The Daily Caller that Assange was reluctant to turn the information over because it could jeopardize his actual source - he's sworn he'd never reveal such sources - but that he was perhaps desperate enough to make an exception if he got a pardon. And second is that, if this was something Trump approved before Rohrabacher met with Assange, why would Rohrabacher then feel the need to pitch the idea to Kelly afterward? It's possible he was doing so to help get another audience with Trump, but that seems unnecessary if the whole thing had been agreed to beforehand. And while Trump regularly talks openly about pardons, when he was asked about one for Assange he didn't do so. If he had actually signed off on some kind of bargain, perhaps he would want to obscure that. But generally Trump will leave something like that on the table and claim the authority to make it happen. Rohrabacher also told The Daily Caller in October 2017 that he was working with Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., as a means of getting the situation onto Trump's radar. Again, that doesn't suggest terribly close coordination. Finally, it's worth emphasizing that there were two other people in that April 2017 White House meeting, according to CNN's report at the time: then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and then-chief strategist Steve Bannon. If Trump authorized such a deal and it occurred at that meeting, they would ostensibly know about it. Following another stretch of mild weather, a brief shot of Arctic air will return to the Northeast during the second half of the week and be accompanied by narrow, but intense, lake-effect snow squalls. Temperatures in Philadelphia reached the 50s on Monday and 60s on Tuesday, with highs near 50 reaching as far north as Boston. Even in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, highs on Tuesday were at or above the 50 F mark. However, a cold front that recently moved through ushered in much colder conditions in the Great Lakes region and interior Northeast on Wednesday and will reach the coastal Northeast by Thursday. Thursday will be the most harsh day in the Ohio Valley, mid-Atlantic and New England. Highs on the coldest day this week will be some 20 to 30 degrees below what they were on the warmest day earlier in the week in most spots. When compared to normal for late February, temperatures will be about 10 to 15 degrees below normal across the Upper Midwest, northern Great Lakes region and New England, and about 5 to 10 degrees below normal from the Ohio Valley to the mid-Atlantic. Lows on Friday morning will fall below zero in northern New England, into the single digits between the Interstate 80 and I-90 corridors and into the lower 20s in the I-95 corridor from Washington, D.C., to New York City. "Without much wind to accompany the cold, AccuWeather RealFeel Temperatures will not be too far below the actual air temperature reading," AccuWeather Meteorologist Courtney Travis said. "During the day, when the sun is shining, RealFeel Temperatures may actually be a little higher than the actual air temperature." In comparison to the blast of Arctic air that froze the central and eastern parts of the nation late last week, the lowest temperatures with this shot of Arctic air should be about 5-10 degrees higher. AccuWeather RealFeel Temperatures will be considerably higher than that given the lack of strong winds. Story continues "Even though this Arctic outbreak will not be as intense as late last week, it will last a little while longer," AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski said. Sosnowski added that this cold outbreak will last between two and three days in any one location, whereas the blast from last week was limited to one or two days. Still, people heading out the door to work or school this week should make sure to wear protective layers and gloves to prevent the chance of frostbite. In addition to the cold, an added danger with this cold blast will be narrow but intense and persistent bands of lake-effect snow downwind of lakes Superior, Ontario and Erie. Cities such as Springville, Warsaw and Syracuse, New York, will receive the worst squalls into Thursday. CLICK HERE FOR THE FREE ACCUWEATHER APP Since winds will generally be northwesterly Thursday, areas not typically hit the hardest by lake-effect snow will get targeted this week. Syracuse may receive as much as 6 or more inches of snow through Thursday morning with the narrow band of snow expected to set up right over the city. As is typically the case with lake-effect snow, a distance of only 5-10 miles can separate nearly 1 foot of snow from virtually no snow at all. Motorists traveling on portions of I-81 and I-90 in western New York should be prepared for rapid reductions in roadway visibility and drastically reduce speed in potentially white-out conditions. This radar image shows light snow (light blue) and heavy snow (dark blue) over parts of New York state at 11:30 p.m., Wednesday, Feb, 19, 2020. (AccuWeather) Although the lake-effect snow bands will be narrow, the sudden shift of traveling on dry roads and in ideal visibility to encountering snow-covered roads and near-zero visibility can increase the risk of multi-vehicle pileups. By Thursday night and Friday, high pressure moving over the Ohio River Valley will force very dry air into the Northeast, in effect shutting off the lake-effect snow machine. As the high pressure moves into the western Atlantic, southwesterly winds will bring milder air building in the center of the nation on Friday back into the Northeast just in time for the weekend. Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier and Verizon Fios. Advocate AP Singh, lawyer of the convicts in the Nirbhaya gangrape and murder case, on Thursday said that he has filed a complaint before the Election Commission of India because the mercy petition of Vinay Sharma was forwarded to the President at a time when Model Code of Conduct was in force in Delhi. "We have filed a petition before the Election Commission of India because the mercy petition of Vinay Sharma, which reached Delhi government on January 30, was forwarded with the signature of the Home Minister of Delhi at a time when Model Code of Conduct was implemented in Delhi," Singh told reporters here. He said that the Home Minister of Delhi was not in power at the time when the mercy petition and recommendation to reject the petition was forwarded to the President of India. "The mercy petition was not supposed to be forwarded to the President of India at the time as the elections were scheduled for February 8. Therefore the mercy petition could not have been rejected," Singh added. President Ram Nath Kovind had on February 1 rejected the mercy petition of convict Vinay Sharma after which the rejection was challenged in the Supreme Court. The top court had said that it did not find any grounds for considering the petition filed by Sharma seeking a review of the rejection of his mercy petition's dismissal. Sharma had filed a mercy petition on January 29. Meanwhile, a Delhi court has issued a fresh death warrant for the four death row convicts -- Vinay Sharma, Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta and Mukesh Singh -- in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape and murder case for their hanging at 6 am on March 3. The case pertains to the brutal gang-rape and killing of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012 by six people including a juvenile in Delhi. The woman had died at a Singapore hospital a few days later. One of the five adults accused, Ram Singh, allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail during the trial of the case. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) By Jung Min-ho U.S. Forces Korea (USFK) has banned personnel from traveling to and from Daegu after a spike in new coronavirus cases there. "All service members' non-essential travel to and from Daegu will be prohibited, and off-installation travel minimized; I highly request all family members, civilians and contractors do likewise regarding their travel as well," USFK Commander Gen. Robert Abrams said Thursday (KST). The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) has confirmed more than 50 additional cases of the COVID-19 virus since Wednesday, saying most are from the city and the surrounding North Gyeongsang Province. A member of a religious sect called "Shincheonji" is blamed for the surge. "All service members who've attended the New World Church (Shincheonji) since Feb. 9 will undergo a mandatory self-quarantine and it is highly recommended for family members, civilians and contractors until the KCDC completes their contact trace procedures to determine who has been exposed to COVID-19," Abrams said. "All USAG-Daegu and Area IV schools, child development centers, and child and youth services activities will be closed Thursday, and we will make a decision regarding a Friday closure tomorrow." Visitors who are not performing essential missions or official business will be denied access to USAG-Daegu and Area IV military installations for 24 hours from Thursday. The directive will be reassessed every 24 hours, according to the military. So far, no U.S. service members or their families have contracted the virus, which has killed more than 2,100 people and infected over 75,000 people around the world, mostly in mainland China, in the past few weeks. "I want to emphasize the care and well-being of our Daegu service members, families and civilians is a top priority of mine," Abrams said. "Finally, good hygiene practice is the best preventive measure to controlling the spread of viruses. We must protect the force and our community by maintaining our 'Fight Tonight' readiness." WhyHotel is a natural fit for the many residents and corporations that are considering Downtown Columbia's newest live, work, play neighborhood as an ideal relocation destination. With a burgeoning business community, the Merriweather District will now be able to provide group and business travelers with luxury pop-up hotel stays in a brand-new apartment building with a 24/7 onsite hospitality staff. "The area surrounding Merriweather Post Pavilion has a great mix of business and leisure," said Jason Fudin, CEO and Co-founder of WhyHotel. "Our pop-up concept is a perfect fit for the Merriweather District to provide business travelers a 'like-home' hotel stay as well as allow potential permanent residents an opportunity to 'try before they buy' and experience what the new area has to offer first hand." WhyHotel's roots are based in the DMV area with its headquarters in Washington, DC and three of its current pop-up hotels being in Virginia. The company, founded in 2017, secured a $20M+ Series B financing round in December of 2019, fueling its continued national expansion. In addition to the development of its pop-up product model, WhyHotel has also created a business unit, known as Hospitality Living, dedicated to building permanently flexible-use assets from the ground-up. "WhyHotel embodies the spirit of innovation and creativity that drives our development in the Merriweather District. Its unique business model will benefit both residents and travelers as Downtown Columbia delivers on its promise, becoming the third city in the Baltimore/Washington corridor," said Greg Fitchitt, President, Columbia, The Howard Hughes Corporation. "WhyHotel complements the growing business, leisure, and residential populations in the vibrant Downtown Columbia community." Simultaneously, WhyHotel is gearing up for the official opening of its Houston, TX location in March. Once live, the Columbia, MD pop-up will bring WhyHotel to a total of five operational locations. The company plans to announce a number of additional pop-ups throughout 2020 across the US. For more information, please visit www.whyhotel.com or view the pop-up explainer video on YouTube. About WhyHotel Spacious. Innovative. Hospitality. WhyHotel operates "turn-key, pop-up hotels" out of the vacancy of newly built luxury apartments during the lease-up phase. Blurring the line between hospitality and home, WhyHotel's model provides the value and space of a home-share and the consistency and service of a luxury hotel. The company's new business arm, Hospitality Living, will deliver a first of its kind ground-up, flexible use developments. About The Howard Hughes Corporation The Howard Hughes Corporation owns, manages and develops commercial, residential and mixed-use real estate throughout the U.S. Its award-winning assets include the country's preeminent portfolio of master planned cities and communities, as well as operating properties and development opportunities including: the Seaport District in New York; Columbia, Maryland; The Woodlands, The Woodlands Hills, and Bridgeland in the Greater Houston, Texas area; Summerlin, Las Vegas; and Ward Village in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Howard Hughes Corporation's portfolio is strategically positioned to meet and accelerate development based on market demand, resulting in one of the strongest real estate platforms in the country. Dedicated to innovative placemaking, the company is recognized for its ongoing commitment to design excellence and to the cultural life of its communities. The Howard Hughes Corporation is traded on the New York Stock Exchange as HHC. For additional information visit www.howardhughes.com . About Downtown Columbia A development of The Howard Hughes Corporation, Downtown Columbia is located at the center of Columbia, MD, one of the first master planned communities in the U.S. founded by legendary developer James W. Rouse in 1967. Conveniently located between Washington, DC and Baltimore, Columbia is comprised of 14,000 acres including ten completed residential villages and a deep pipeline of commercial development opportunities within its Downtown. At full buildout, the redeveloped 391 acres of Downtown Columbia will include three new and reconfigured neighborhoods the Merriweather District, Lakefront District and Central Districtfeaturing more than 14 million square feet of residential, office, hotel, retail, cultural, and public uses including public parks, trails and more. Safe Harbor Statement Statements made in this press release that are not historical facts, including statements accompanied by words such as "will," "believe," "expect," "enables," "realize", "plan," "intend," "assume," "transform" and other words of similar expression, are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are based on management's expectations, estimates, assumptions, and projections as of the date of this release and are not guarantees of future performance. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in these statements. Factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are set forth as risk factors in The Howard Hughes Corporation's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Quarterly and Annual Reports. The Howard Hughes Corporation cautions you not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this release. The Howard Hughes Corporation does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future events, information or circumstances that arise after the date of this release. Media Contacts: WhyHotel N6A for WhyHotel Email: [email protected] Phone: 212.334.9753 Ext. 101 The Howard Hughes Corporation Vanessa Rodriguez Vice President of Marketing, Columbia [email protected] 410-964-4891 Cristina Carlson Vice President, Corporate Communications and Public Relations [email protected] 646-822-6910 Investor Relations David O'Reilly Chief Financial Officer david.o'[email protected] 214-741-7744 SOURCE WhyHotel Related Links https://whyhotel.com (Natural News) If Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) continues to spread throughout China at its current rate and the government finds no good way to control it, millions of workers are going to be laid off from their jobs as two-thirds of small-to-medium businesses fail. According to a Google translation of a Yahoo! Taiwan story, the virus is continuing to spread on the mainland, leaving many firms unable to reopen. Thus, more and more employees are watching their paychecks shrink, are being given unpaid leave, or worse, are being laid off altogether, with no timeframe for rehiring being given. At the same time, small-to-midsize shops are being shuttered at an increasing pace, leaving some analysts to predict that, if the virus continues spreading and more business are forced to close because they cant find workers or because there is little business due to quarantines and so forth, as many as 4.5 million people are likely to be out of work. And that will have a great impact on the mainland, the news report said. Researchers at Peking University and Beijing Tsinghua University conducted a joint survey of almost 1,000 small-to-medium-sized businesses; just 34 percent of shop owners said they only have enough cash flow to remain open for a month, while a much smaller number 18 percent said they only have enough cash on hand to remain open for three months. [I]f the epidemic continues, there may be a wave of closures, the news site reported, according to the translation. Chief economist Wang Jun of Beijing Central Plains Bank said he believes that the current situation with the coronavirus is very similar to the global financial slowdown of 2008, caused by the Great Recession in the U.S. Then, Wang noted, some 20 million Chinese workers were idled, which forced the Communist government to inject 4 trillion yuan into the economy to keep it afloat. That caused an increase in economic growth, but not without adding new debt. The means of production are owned by the state British Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) analyst Dan Wang added that he believes the service industry in China has been particularly hard-hit due to the virus, leaving smaller companies unable to turn a profit. Analysts believe that if the government cant find a way to bring the pandemic under control by the end of March, mass layoffs of Chinese workers are coming, affecting millions which is sure to ratchet up internal unrest and make it more difficult for the regime to exert control over the population. To head off mass unemployment, the State Council has pledged to avoid layoffs, while asking local governments to bolster jobless and other benefits to reduce peoples panic, the Yahoo news site reported. Unrest is of particular importance to the Chinese Communist regime, according to retired Air Force brigadier general and China expert Robert S. Spalding. During a recent event at the Global Taiwan Institute, Spalding said Beijings leaders are struggling to maintain their grip on the countrys massive population in the face of rare, unpredictable events that have the potential to cause severe consequences, The National Sentinel reported. He said that a trio of black swan events are currently playing out in China that could eventually have a deleterious effect on the ruling regime: The ongoing trade war with the United States, the protests in Hong Kong, and the negative effects of the Wuhan coronavirus, all of which are placing extreme pressure on the regime. The means of production are owned by the state, he said, with even private businesses in China co-opted by the Chinese Communist Party because it is the sovereign of the people. The means of production are owned by the state, he said, but that wont matter if the virus-induced economic downturn doesnt reverse itself. And it wont if the virus cant be contained. Sources include: TheNationalSentinel.com tw.News.Yahoo.com [February 20, 2020] The "World's Worst Business Decisions" Questionmark, the leading provider of enterprise-grade assessment software, has released a report on why decisions matter. When it comes to decisions we make at work, most of us can point to the occasional mistake we would rather forget. However, as a report released today by Questionmark shows, some workplace mistakes are destined to go down in history. The report highlights seven ill-informed business decisions. Some, such as Excite's decision not to buy 'overpriced' start-up Google (News - Alert) for just $750,000, were caused by a failure to spot the evolving trends of their sector. Others, such as the infamous 1999 Mars probe crash, were triggered by basic and avoidable mistakes. The seven ill-judged business decisions Math mayhem destroys Mars probe - in 1999, the Mars Climate Orbiter hit the planet's atmosphere and burst into flames. After 10 months in space and a budget of $125million, its failure resulted from one simple mistake. During the design phase, the probe's speed had been calculated in metric units. When building the thrusters, however, the engineers programmed the speed in imperial measures. Google fails to Excite - by the late 1990s, Google was making headway. But not everyone saw its potential. Early internet pioneer 'Excite' was offered the chance to buy Google for just $750,000. Their decision to decline is surely one they regret. Blockbusters spurns Netflix - compared to the old-fashioned and poorly run local video store, Blockbusters appeared to be a symbol of modernization in the 90s. Unfortunately for them, the world was already changing. In 2000 they turned down the chance to purchase a mall 'mail-order' internet start-up called 'Netflix'. In 2013, they closed their doors forever. Motorola's (News - Alert) not-so-smart call - smartphones may be all but ubiquitous in 2020, but their emergence was a trend that, some argue, Motorola's futurologists failed to spot. Despite being a leading player in the mobile market, Motorola chose to prioritize alternative innovations. A Kodak (News - Alert) moment to forget - the beloved camera brand was the first to innovate and understand digital technology. However, they chose not to use it. Despite making early advances, they lacked faith that it would ever deliver a quality that would satisfy consumers. The business left the technology in the lab and for others to pioneer. Aon fails to insure against bribery - in 2009 the insurance company was fined 5.25million for failing to establish an effective anti-bribery system. At the time, this was the biggest ever fine levied by the FSA. Regulators were unimpressed that they had insufficient processes and had failed to test staff on their knowledge of counter-bribery procedures. UK publishing industry fails divination - the rest of the decisions on this list reflect poor judgement by individual companies. However, in the 1990s almost the entire publishing industry famously failed to judge the marketability of the world's most famous wizard. Twelve publishers turned down J.K. Rowling's submission for 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' before Bloomsbury finally took a chance on the risky project. Today the Harry Potter franchise is worth $25 billion "Decisions matter. So, the decision-making process should be informed and defensible. Our report explores how organizations that are serious about getting the best out of their people and process need to be serious about assessment. That way employers and employees can learn, adapt, and improve the decisions that matter the most. "Read our report to understand these ill-fated decisions and the more common mistakes organizations make." The cost of poor decisions Poor decision making comes at a tangible cost. Not only is performance weaker but the risks of compliance failure are higher. Regulators continue to show their teeth with considerable fines levied on financial services ($300bn since 2009), US utility businesses ($20bn since 2000) and US pharmaceutical companies ($38bn since 2000). The report highlights that staff assessments make a real and lasting difference to an organization's performance. Studies show that after introducing assessments, 58% of companies see an increase in employee retention, 58% in productivity and 60% in customer satisfaction. For more information on the impact of good decision making, the consequences of bad decisions and how staff assessments can drive business performance, download the full report. About Questionmark Questionmark provides a secure enterprise-grade assessment platform and professional services to leading organizations around the world, delivered with care and unequalled expertise. Its full-service online assessment tool and professional services help customers to improve their performance and meet their compliance requirements. Questionmark enables organizations to unlock their potential by delivering assessments which are valid, reliable, fair and defensible. Questionmark offers secure powerful integration with other LMS, LRS and proctoring services making it easy to bring everything together in one place. Questionmark's cloud-based assessment management platform offer rapid deployment, scalability for high-volume test delivery, 24/7 support, and the peace-of-mind of secure, audited U.S. and European-based data centers. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005718/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Last month, fried chicken and waffles fanatics were sad to lose the San Francisco Ferry Building location of Brown Sugar Kitchen. However, it's now clear that star chef Tanya Holland already had something else up her sleeve. On Wednesday, Holland announced that she is opening a new cafe called Town Fare at the Oakland Museum of California, according to Eater. Town Fare is part of the museum's $15 million renovation project, and is expected to open in August. It will be a "plant-forward" restaurant with a focus on health and sustainability that means a bigger emphasis on vegetables, including salads and maybe rice bowls, as well as sustainably sourced meat dishes. A few items from the Brown Sugar Kitchen menu might make their way in as well. Holland is still working on the new menu, but she already knows for sure there will be no waffles. We've lost count of how many times insiders have accumulated shares in a company that goes on to improve markedly. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of examples of share prices declining precipitously after insiders have sold shares. So we'll take a look at whether insiders have been buying or selling shares in InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding AB (publ) (STO:INDEX). What Is Insider Selling? Most investors know that it is quite permissible for company leaders, such as directors of the board, to buy and sell stock in the 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. View our latest analysis for InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding The Last 12 Months Of Insider Transactions At InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding While no particular insider transaction stood out, we can still look at the overall trading. InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding insiders may have bought shares in the last year, but they didn't sell any. The average buy price was around kr7.05. This is nice to see since it implies that insiders might see value around current prices (around kr6.90). You can see the insider transactions (by individuals) over the last year depicted in the chart below. By clicking on the graph below, you can see the precise details of each insider transaction! OM:INDEX Recent Insider Trading, February 20th 2020 InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding is not the only stock insiders are buying. So take a peek at this free list of growing companies with insider buying. Does InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding Boast High Insider Ownership? Looking at the total insider shareholdings in a company can help to inform your view of whether they are well aligned with common shareholders. Usually, the higher the insider ownership, the more likely it is that insiders will be incentivised to build the company for the long term. Based on our data, InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding insiders have about 4.0% of the stock, worth approximately kr25m. We prefer to see high levels of insider ownership. Story continues So What Does This Data Suggest About InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding Insiders? There haven't been any insider transactions in the last three months -- that doesn't mean much. However, our analysis of transactions over the last year is heartening. Overall we don't see anything to make us think InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding insiders are doubting the company, and they do own shares. Therefore, you should should definitely take a look at this FREE report showing analyst forecasts for InDex Pharmaceuticals Holding. If you would prefer to check out another company -- one with potentially superior financials -- then do not miss this free list of interesting companies, that have HIGH return on equity and low debt. For the purposes of this article, insiders are those individuals who report their transactions to the relevant regulatory body. We currently account for open market transactions and private dispositions, but not derivative transactions. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin (Agence France-Presse) Thu, February 20, 2020 20:01 691 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad2065b01e3 2 Lifestyle Raf-Simons,Dr-Martens,shoes,fashion,Belgium,Britain Free The 60th anniversary celebrations for Dr. Martens' Original 1460 boots are continuing with the presentation of a reworked version of the model by Belgian designer Raf Simons. The punk-styled limited edition boots will go on sale on February 22. To celebrate the six-decades-long success of its Original 1460s, Dr. Martens has invited 12 world-renowned designers and labels to create limited edition versions of the iconic British boots, which will be presented at a rate of one drop per month throughout 2020. Hot on the heels of the Japanese streetwear label BAPE in January, Raf Simons has now unveiled his personal interpretation of the boots that became a streetwear legend. Read also: Surabaya mayor, UK ambassador share fondness for Dr. Martens shoes The decision to call on Raf Simons was not taken by chance. The Belgian designer has regularly collaborated with Dr. Martens for more than a decade, so it was natural that he should participate in celebrations for 60 years of the Original 1460s. In a punky design, which reflects his anti-conformist spirit as well as the Dr. Martens brand heritage, Raf Simons has adorned the smooth leather uppers of the 1460s with nickel rings, and an embossed Dr. Martens x Raf Simons logo. The limited edition model will be available from February 22 in selected stores and on-line from Drmartens.com. Four new LNG carriers on contract with Shell In December 2019, Shell signed separate agreements for four LNG carriers with affiliates of Knutsen LNG, two LNG carriers with Korea Line Corporation and two LNG Carriers with Global Meridian Holdings Limited. These state-of-the-art 174,000 cbm LNG carriers will be built by Hyundai Heavy Industries and Hyundai Samho Heavy Industries. They will all be equipped with efficient dual-fuel X-DF engines, boil-off management plants, air lubrication systems and shaft generators for auxiliary power. They will be integrated into Shells time-chartered trading fleet. Dr Grahaeme Henderson, Vice President of Shell Shipping & Maritime, said: These high technology ships deliver significant benefits for the Shell fleet by reducing emissions and improving fuel efficiency, and will support Shells trading businesses in safely and reliably delivering LNG to our customers around the world. Improvements in ship hull and machinery design, and the introduction of digital performance management systems, has resulted in up to 40% more fuel efficiency than equivalent ships operating in 2008. We have taken further steps with the addition of energy efficient technologies on these ships, such as air lubrication, making a substantial reduction in the carbon intensity of our operations. Mr. S. Y. Park, Chief Operating Officer & Senior Executive Vice President of Hyundai Heavy Industries said: This project is unique in the sense that its success depends on strong and close partnership among multiple parties. Thus, we are proud of the fact that, through exemplary collaboration between each of the parties, we have successfully brought the project to execution. We are also excited to envision that this project will lead the global LNGC shipbuilding/shipping industry by introducing vessels which are safer and more efficient and eco-friendly than ever. Accordingly, we look forward to successful construction and delivery of the vessels through continued cooperation with the partners. Mr. Trygve Seglem, owner of Knutsen OAS Shipping AS, says: I am proud to be part of this agreement with Shell. This contract further extends our cooperation with Shell, and ensures that we can provide Shell with state of the art transportation services with these safe, efficient, and lower-emission LNG carriers. Lucknow, Feb 20 : At least 3,000 artistes will present colourful cultural programmes to welcome US President Donald Trump in Agra, officials said on Thursday, adding that Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath will personally receive the visiting foreign dignitary. The programmes will include Ramlila, Raslila, Nautanki (drama) performances among others. The Chief Minister's Office is closely monitoring the preparations to receive the US president in the Taj city that has received an "unprecedented" face-lift in recent days. Trump is scheduled to reach Agra from Ahmedabad during his February 24-25 tour to India. Agra District Magistrate Prabhu N. Singh told the media that 3,000 artistes will present cultural programmes to welcome Trump Trump will reach the Taj Mahal's East Gate from the airport, covering a distance of 15 km. The artistes will present cultural programmes in around 12 places that fall between the airport and the East Gate of the Taj. Sources said the Adityanath government is keen to showcase the art and culture of Braj, Bundelkhand, Purvanchal and Awadh regions. The artistes will enact the roles of Radha-Krishna and present other cultural performances. They will also perform the 'Kala Alha' and 'Nautanki' of Bundelkhand, and the Ramlila of Purvanchal. The artistes will arrive in Agra on February 23, a day before Trump's visit. All of them are from Uttar Pradesh. In the aftermath of the United Auto Workers betrayal of last falls 40-day strike, General Motors is forcing workers throughout the country to work overtime. Over a half-dozen facilities in Michigan have been on emergency status since workers returned to the plants in October. The company, which lost $3.6 billion due to the strike but still made an operating profit of $8.4 billion in 2019, is determined to get back its pound of flesh. Workers are being forced to work six or even seven days a week, for nine to twelve hours per day. GM is doing this with the support of the UAW, which worked behind closed doors with the company to force through historic concessions in the latest contract, including a blank check on the use of temporary workers. The eight-hour day, one of the main social achievements of the working class gained through decades of struggle, was a thing of the past for many autoworkers even before the strike. The UAW sanctioned the destruction of the eight-hour day through the Alternative Work Schedule in 2012. Moreover, the collapse in wages has forced many autoworkers to seek second and third jobs. Eighty-hour workweeks across multiple jobs are not uncommon. The World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter has received many requests from autoworkers to expose the conditions in these factories. Acting on a tip from a worker, we went to Lansing, Michigan, last week to speak to workers at GMs Delta Township complex during their shift change. According to workers, the plant is operating on emergency status through the month of Augustover 10 months after the end of the strike. There are roughly 2,800 workers at the plant, who manufacture the Buick Enclave and Chevy Traverse. Delta Township was one of several plants where workers voted down the UAW contract, 810 to 1090. The first worker we spoke with said that she needed the work to catch up on bills, because of the hardship caused by the miserable $250 per week strike pay paid out by the union. The UAW uses its $760 million strike fund as a piggy bank for top officials, who continued to earn their full salaries during the strike. The schedule is brutal, but we have no choice, she said. Under emergency status all scheduled production is compulsory. Two years ago a union official told us that the normal work week was no longer 40 hours, she said. It was now 54 hours he was saying. Now were working 60 hours a week. But wasnt [the eight-hour day] the foundation of the AFL-CIO and all the unions? she asked. We were just talking about it [on the shop floor] today. The Civil War and the American Revolution were long ago, but they were not that long ago. It was only a few generations. We are still fighting for the same things today that they were fighting for back then: education, fair housing, work, the eight-hour day. As the shift ended, another assembler responded to our questions by repeating one, What happened to the eight-hour day? he asked glaring and indignant. The UAW gave it back, along with a lot of things. We work 50-plus hours every week, said another. Five times out of the year we can call in and get a day off. This contract and the previous contracts have been a joke, he continued. I dont know why we were on strike for six weeks if this is what the contract is like. The contract for temps is a joke, he added. I was talking to a woman who is pregnant. If they hire replacements while shes out having her baby, she will get passed over and lose her chance to get rolled over [to full-time]. Thats not right. The eight-hour day is out the window. The UAW is a joke. Another worker expressed his support for the Silao Seven, Mexican GM workers fired for supporting the strike in the US. Thats good to know they were supporting workers in the US, another added. When it comes to war, climate and our living conditions, they are all connected. The only way to fight a global corporation is to unite across the world. The contract was terrible before, and its terrible now, added a workmate. I look at the union like I look at the US government: corruption in the government, corruption in the UAW. If they cut my wages, they dont lower the price of the trucks. He was particularly angered by the gross inequalities imposed across the industry over decades of concessions, bankruptcies and spin-offs that took parts divisions from the big three into low-paid suppliers which now constitute more than two-thirds of all auto production. Mary Barra makes $22 million a year with a bonus. They get all their money from the workers who make $6.00 and $7.00 an hour making parts. I just do the assembly. Its like Capitol Hill. They wont slit their own throats to stop making money for themselves. The UAWs abandonment of the eight-hour day is one of the clearest expressions of its transformation into an arm of management. The eight-hour day was won after titanic class battles spanning 150 years. Out of the death of slavery, a new and vigorous life at once arose, wrote Karl Marx in Capital. The first fruit of the Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran with the speed of an express train from the Atlantic to the Pacific. A decade after the Civil War, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 erupted in class warfare, to be suppressed only by military violence. The workers movement fought back converging on Chicago in 1886, again rallying to the demand for the eight-hour day. But again the workers were rebuffed, this time with the aid of police provocation, frame-ups and hangings. The Russian Revolution of 1917 had a profound impact on the working class movement in the United States. Militant struggles during the Great Depression built the industrial unions and laid the basis for the eight-hour day. Many of these, including the general strikes in San Francisco, Minneapolis and Toledo which erupted in 1934 and the Flint sit-down strike of in 19361937 were led by socialistsin the case of Minneapolis, American Trotskyists in the Communist League of America, a forerunner to the Socialist Equality Party. The fight for the elementary interests of workers, such as decent and safe working conditions, job security and the reinstatement of the eight-hour workday requires that workers break with the UAW and form new organizations of struggle, rank-and-file committees in every factory and work site. The tasks of such committees will require the development of a leadership in the working class based on an internationalist and socialist perspective in opposition to the nationalist and pro-capitalist program of the UAW. Sharp increase in gross profit Regulatory News: CLASQUIN (Paris:ALCLA): 2019 Q4 2019 2018 Change at current scope exch. rates Change at constant scope** exch. rates (LFL) Ch. vs Q4 2018 at current scope exch. rates Ch. vs Q4 2018 at constant scope** exch. rates (LFL) CONSOLIDATED (unaudited) Number of shipments 273,875 264,179 +3.7% +4.1% +7.3% +1.1% Sales (m)* 331.3 308.3 +7.4% +7.4% +11.9% +3.4% Gross profit (m) 76.7 68.9 +11.4% +10.7% +20.1% +11.0% * Note: Sales is not a relevant indicator for assessing activity in our business, because it is greatly impacted by changing sea and air freight rates, fuel surcharges, exchange rates (especially versus the $), etc. Changes in number of shipments, volumes shipped and-in terms of the Group's finances-gross profit are relevant indicators. ** Constant consolidation scope: excluding July 2018 Favat acquisition, late October 2018 sale of ECS US and October 2019 Cargolution acquisition. MARKET REVIEW (2019) Expected growth in international trade (in value): +1.5% (Euler Hermes forecasts). Growth in global air freight market (in volume): -3.3% (Source: IATA). Growth in global sea freight market (in volume): +1/+2%. Against this backdrop, there was a significant increase in the number of Group shipments in Q4 (+7.3%), boosted by the acquisition of Canada-based Cargolution on 1 October 2019 (+1.1% like-for-like). Full year performance: Air freight: Decrease in tonnage (-9.5%) due to declining trade between Asia and Europe but a sustained increase in the number of shipments (+5.1%) in particular due to the acquisition of Cargolution (+3% excluding acquisition). Sea freight: Strong growth throughout the year in the number of containers transported (+9.1%) while the number of sea freight shipments (+0.2%) remained stable like-for-like. Roll-on/roll-off**: Sharp increase in the number of shipments (+14.2%) related to the development of trade with North Africa. ** Roll on/Roll off: Combined road sea transport (trailers or trucks on ships) Gross profit increased sharply in Q4 (+20.1%) driven by: The impact of changes in consolidation scope: +7.7% (Cargolution acquisition on 01/10/19 less ECS US sale on 31/10/18) The impact of exchange rates: +1.4% Robust business growth like-for-like: Air: +14.5% Sea: +11.2% Roll-on/roll-off: +16.7% Other: +5.4% The solid increase in gross profit observed throughout the year (+10.7% like-for-like) was driven by robust unit margins and vigorous growth in the US business (+52.1%) and trade with North Africa (+19.3%). BREAKDOWN BY BUSINESS LINE NUMBER OF SHIPMENTS at current scope and exchange rates GROSS PROFIT (m) at current scope and exchange rates 2019 2018 2019 vs 2018 Q4 2019 vs Q4 2018 2019 2018 2019 vs 2018 Q4 2019 vs Q4 2018 Sea freight 115,858 119,246 -2.8% +0.4% 33.5 30.5 +9.8% +15.5% Air freight 85,607 81,437 +5.1% +10.7% 25.4 23.5 +8.2% +24.3% RORO* 46,374 40,596 +14.2% +7.4% 8.5 7.2 +19.3% +16.7% Other 26,036 22,900 +13.7% +28.2% 7.1 5.9 +20.3% +33.0% TOTAL FORWARDING LOGISTICS 273,875 264,179 +3.7% +7.3% 74.5 67.0 +11.2% +20.4% LOG System 3.2 2.8 +13.7% +16.9% Consolidation entries -1.0 -1.0 NS NS TOTAL CONSOLIDATED 76.7 68.9 +11.4% +20.1% * Roll-on/roll-off VOLUMES 2019 2018 2019 vs 2018 Q4 2019 vs Q4 2018 Sea freight 217,530 TEUs* 199,473 TEUs* +9.1% +8.7% Air freight 62,865 T** 69,466 T** -9.5% +5.9% * Twenty-foot equivalent units ** Tons Q4 2019 HIGHLIGHTS Ongoing integration of Canada-based Cargolution Inc. acquired on 1 October 2019 Phase 2 deployment (USA, Japan, India, Vietnam, Italy) of new-generation finance software (accounting, reporting, planning cash management) integrating two new applications, Workday Kyriba. Signing on 27 November 2019 of an initial syndicated loan for a total amount of 60.8m with a pool of 8 banks. 2020 OUTLOOK Market The health crisis related to the coronavirus pandemic is expected to impact growth in international trade during the first months of the year, with subsequent catch-up likely. CLASQUIN CLASQUIN will be impacted by these market conditions. UPCOMING EVENTS (publication after-market closure) Wednesday 18 March 2020: 2019 annual results Thursday 30 April 2020: Q1 2020 business report Thursday 27 August 2020: Q2 2020 business report Wednesday 23 September 2020: H1 2020 results Thursday 29 October 2020: Q3 2020 business report CLASQUIN is an air and sea freight forwarding and overseas logistics specialist. The Group designs and manages the entire overseas transport and logistics chain, organising and coordinating the flow of client shipments between France and the rest of the world, and more specifically to and from Asia-Pacific, North America, Maghreb and Sub Saharan Africa. Its shares are listed on EURONEXT GROWTH, ISIN FR0004152882, Reuters ALCLA.PA, Bloomberg ALCLA FP. For more information, see www.clasquinfinance.com. CLASQUIN confirms its eligibility for the share savings plan for MSCs (medium-sized companies) in accordance with Article D221-113-5 of the French Monetary and Financial Code established by decree number 2014-283 of 4 March 2014 and with Article L221-32-2 of the French Monetary and Financial Code, which set the conditions for eligibility (less than 5,000 employees and annual sales of less than 1,500m or balance sheet total of less than 2,000m). CLASQUIN is listed on the Enternext PEA-PME 150 index. LEI: 9695004FF6FA43KC4764 View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005713/en/ Contacts: CONTACTS CLASQUIN Philippe LONS Directeur General Delegue/Group CFO Domitille CHATELAIN Group Head of Communication Groupe CLASQUIN 235 cours Lafayette 69006 Lyon Tel: 04 72 83 17 00 Fax: 04 72 83 17 33 LAS CRUCES Sgt. 1st Class Antonio Rodriguez returned to Las Cruces a hero. The Las Cruces native was killed in an ambush Feb. 8 in Afghanistan. His body was flown into the Las Cruces Airport about 1 p.m. Tuesday and then escorted by members of the Patriot Guard, Las Cruces Police Department, Dona Ana County Sheriffs Office and the Las Cruces Fire Department to Getz Funeral Home. Residents lined Picacho Avenue and Solano Drive, many waving U.S. flags and recording the procession, to show their support for an American hero. Rodriguez, known as Rod, was a 2009 graduate of Mayfield High School and joined the Army shortly after that. He was killed, along with Javier Gutierrez, 28, of San Antonio, Texas, when an Afghan in an Afghan army uniform opened fire on his squad. Six others were wounded in the attack. A rosary for Rodriguez will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, 1240 S. Espina Street. The funeral Mass will be at noon Friday at the cathedral. Interment will be at Arlington National Cemetery on March 3. Among the first places the procession passed on Picacho Avenue was Fairacres Elementary, which Rodriguez attended. About 150 Fairacres students, kindergarten through fifth grade, stood by the road to wave to the motorcade. Principal Gail Estrada said it was important to honor Rodriguez. I cant even say in words what it means to me, to be such a hero and to know that he was a part of our community, she said. At Fairacres Elementary, we really practice kindness and we thought this would be a kind gesture for our entire school to go out and just honor him and remember him in a respectful way, Estrada said. Adrianne Telles, who grew up with Rodriguez, traveled with her mother from Austin, Texas, to pay their respects along the procession route. My mom and his mom were best friends growing up in Las Cruces, so we kind of grew up with each other, she said. Telles remembers Rodriguez as smart and devoted to his mother. He joined the Army right after he graduated, so I kind of lost touch, she said. But I would talk to Lupe (his mom) a lot about him and she never really said where he was at or what he was doing. But I always asked, Hows Antonio? and shed always say, Good, good. Martha Benegas-Legarreta learned recently that she was related to Rodriguez family. She attended the funeral procession to honor them. She said the death of her distant cousin has affected her in many ways. My father was in the military. He was a Bataan Death March survivor, so anyone in the military just stands out to me as a very special thing to me because of my father, she said. Benegas-Legarreta said shes keeping the family in her thoughts and prayers. Frank Duran, who served in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom, said he was there to show respect to one of his fallen brothers. This hits home. Theres just no words to say how were feeling right now other than to say we lost a brother and our hearts ache, he said. Rodriguez leaves behind a wife, Ronaleen Hill Omega-Rodriguez; parents, Guadalupe Rodriguez-Jaramillo and her husband, Javier D. Jaramillo; father, David Hernandez and his wife, Isela Hernandez; brothers, Christopher James Rodriguez-Jaramillo and David JR Hernandez Jr.; and a sister, Valerie Hernandez. Sign of respect Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham has ordered all flags to fly at half-staff on Friday in honor of Sgt. 1st Class Antonio Rey Rodriguez, whose funeral service is the same day. Latest version enables security teams to make faster and more informed decisions by providing a single Platform for threat intelligence analysis, incident response plans, and security processes. ThreatConnect, Inc., provider of the industry's only intelligence-driven security operations platform, is proud to announce the release of ThreatConnect version 6.0. Among other features in this new release, ThreatConnect introduces Workflow, which enables interactive intelligence-powered investigation and case management capabilities for Incident Responders, Security Operations Analysts, and Cyber Threat Intelligence Analysts. ThreatConnect's Workflow functionality reduces the risk of missing critical steps and relevant artifacts, and decreases the time it takes to uncover relevant intelligence. ThreatConnect Workflow allows security teams to investigate, track, and collaborate on information related to threats and incidents with automated and manual tasks and standardized, consistent processes -- all from a central location. Security team members using the ThreatConnect Platform now have a mechanism that correlates artifacts from an investigation to existing intelligence, as well as historical case data from past incidents and investigations. The Platform allows users to not only enrich cases with both internal and external threat intelligence, but also generate intelligence from those cases to be used to enhance detection, prevention, and to build out a library of relevant threats facing the organization. This leads to a more complete picture and better understanding of an organization's own internal threats. Adam Vincent, ThreatConnect CEO, said, "With Workflow, we have realized the vision we had for the core capabilities of our Platform. Nine years ago we set out to build a platform with the necessary capabilities to improve the cyber analysis process. We led with threat intelligence, then developed orchestration and automation through Playbooks, and now, Workflows. With ThreatConnect, security teams have a Platform that is a single source for their intel, response plans, and processes that provides a common reference point enabling collaboration, consistency, and that increases accuracy for threat-based decision making." ThreatConnect's combination of security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) plus threat intelligence, provides the ability to enhance human and machine-driven security processes with internal and external intelligence on threat actors, attack techniques using MITRE ATT&CK, and traditional indicators of compromise. In addition to improving response time with consistent and documented processes, this allows teams to maximize the amount of internally sourced threat intelligence obtained from incident response and operations teams. In addition to Workflow, other 6.0 features include: Custom User Roles - customers are now able to give access to the Platform to more users based on their specific and unique requirements without jeopardizing data or process integrity. - customers are now able to give access to the Platform to more users based on their specific and unique requirements without jeopardizing data or process integrity. Unlimited Read-Only Commenter User Licensing allows customers with designated ThreatConnect licenses to provide unlimited read-only, commenter, and read-only API users to the team to enable more individuals the ability to explore data captured in the ThreatConnect Platform. allows customers with designated ThreatConnect licenses to provide unlimited read-only, commenter, and read-only API users to the team to enable more individuals the ability to explore data captured in the ThreatConnect Platform. App Services Users now have additional ways to loop ThreatConnect into their existing technology stack, including custom Playbook triggers, Webhooks, and custom API's. Furthermore, they can develop these capabilities directly from App Builder and new Service app integrations will be made available through App Catalog. ThreatConnect's 6.0 release will be generally available to all existing and new customers by the end of Q1. About ThreatConnect: ThreatConnect, Inc. provides a proactive and efficient approach to security by enabling enhanced detection, shortened response, and reduced risk. Designed by analysts but built for the entire team (security operations, threat intelligence, incident response and security leadership), ThreatConnect's intelligence-driven security operations platform is the only solution available today with intelligence, automation, analytics, and workflows in a single platform. To learn more about our threat intelligence platform (TIP) or security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions, visit www.ThreatConnect.com. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005537/en/ Contacts: Levick Communications (US) Maggy McCarthy Phone: +1 202.973-5341 ThreatConnect@levick.com Lewis Communications (UK) Danny Mitchell Phone: +44 207.802.2626 Fax: +44 207.802.2627 hellolondon@teamlewis.com WASHINGTON Amy Berman Jackson is no stranger to working under pressure. As a federal prosecutor three decades ago, she was in the final hours of a momentous murder trial when prospective jurors for her next trial an armed robbery case against three defendants showed up in the same courthouse. Rather than delay that case, she broke away from the murder trial long enough to pick the jury for it. Then she returned to deliver her closing argument against the murder defendant. And while those jurors weighed their verdict, she delivered her opening statement about why the armed robbery defendants should be convicted. All before lunch. Now a federal judge in Washington, Ms. Jackson faces another high-stakes morning on Thursday when she sentences Roger J. Stone Jr., President Trumps longtime friend and former campaign adviser, for obstructing a congressional investigation. Mr. Trump and his allies have already denounced Mr. Stones prosecution as a vendetta and attacked Judge Jackson as biased, and the case is at the center of a Justice Department storm over fears of political interference. The invective is only likely to grow should she send Mr. Stone to prison, as expected. Prosecutors in western Mexico said Thursday that the arrest of a criminal gang led to the discovery of a house that had been used to dispose of 24 bodies. Michoacan state attorney general Adrian Lopez Zolis said the remains were found buried in a 40-foot deep clandestine ditch in the municipality of Coeneo following last Friday's operation in the city of Patzcuaro. The dead included five women and 19 men, whose ages ranged from about 20 to about 40. Many had either had their throats slashed or been decapitated. Lopez Zolis explained during a news conference Thursday morning that the dismantling of the criminal group - six men and three women - led authorities to the private property in the Coeneo neighborhood of Comanja, where law enforcement unearthed mass burial ground. Members of the Michoacan state attorney general's office canvassed a home in the municipality of Coeneo on Tuesday and Wednesday and discovered 24 decomposed bodies that were buried in a clandestine mass grave Authorities, including crime scene experts, were dispatched Tuesday to the house in Coeneo, a township west of the Michoacan state capital of Morelia, where they discovered several excavated patches of land with the bodies littered inside. Lopez Zolis said some of the bodies found had been dismembered and buried in the patio of the house, which was under construction. Experts estimated the victims had been killed between four and six months ago. The bodies were transferred to the Forensic Medical Service to start the process of identifying them. Lopez Zolis said experts were also tasked with searching the national missing persons database system to determine if any of the bodies found were reported missing in the past. The Michoacan state attorney general's office said the dead included five women and 19 men, whose ages ranged from about 20 to about 40. Many had either had their throats slashed or been decapitated Authorities also confiscated five vehicles which had been reported stolen since November in the municipalities of Quiroga and Purepero. Clandestine burial sites have often been used by drug cartels in Mexico to hide the bodies of executed rivals or kidnap victims. The state of Michoacan has been caught in the middle of a power struggle war that has pitted four criminal organizations : La Nueva Familia Michoacana, Tepalcatepec Cartel, Zicuiran Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, considered by analysts as the most powerful syndicate in all of Mexico. Michoacan authorities have found six secret mass graves with at least 34 bodies during the first seven weeks of 2020. The Mexican government unearthed 1,124 bodies from December 2018 to December 2019. Vinay Sharma, one of the four death row convicts in the December 16, 2012 gang-rape and murder case, attempted to hurt himself by banging his head against a wall in his cell on February 16, a Tihar Jail official said. One of the death row convicts of 2012 Delhi gang-rape case, Vinay had attempted to hurt himself by banging his head against a wall in his cell, on February 16. He had received minor injuries, the official stated. The four death row convicts will be hanged on March 3 at 6 am, a Delhi court had ordered earlier this week. The Patiala House Court on Monday issued fresh death warrants against four convicts while hearing a petition by the state and the victims parents. During the hearing, convicts lawyer AP Singh told the court that Vinay is on a hunger strike and his mental status is also not well. Singh also sought the courts direction to jail authorities for his health check-up and proper medical report. Earlier, Delhi High Court on February 5 granted a weeks time to the four convicts to avail of all legal remedies available to them and said that the convicts cannot be hanged separately since they were convicted for the same crime. The case pertains to the brutal gang-rape and killing of a 23-year-old paramedical student in a moving bus on the night of December 16, 2012, by six people including a juvenile in Delhi. The woman had died at a Singapore hospital a few days later. One of the five adults accused, Ram Singh, had allegedly committed suicide in the Tihar Jail during the trial of the case. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear the plea of the Karnataka government challenging issuance of non-bailable warrants against its Director General of Police by the high court. A bench headed by Chief Justice S A Bobde was told by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Karnataka government, that an "unusual" order has been passed by the Karnataka High Court. The law officer sought urgent hearing on the plea, saying the high court has issued NBW against the DGP to be executed through the state home secretary. "We will take it at the end of the board," the bench said. The Karnataka High Court has issued the NBW against the state police chief in a case. Further details are awaited. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Miami, Florida--(Newsfile Corp. - February 20, 2020) - Grand Havana, Inc. (OTC Pink: GHAV) announces an agreement with O.C. Coffe Service Corp to distribute Grand Havana Coffee products throughout the Puerto Rican market. The agreement includes products from both our Wholesale Food Service and Retail Divisions- emphasizing on our newly launched 12oz. Cuban Style Ground Espresso Bags. "This relationship will be the next step in Grand Havana's expansion into the Puerto Rican market. We're excited to be partnering with O.C. Coffe Service Corp, a distributor known for its high level of expertise and experience in the coffee industry," comments Luis Bustelo of Grand Havana, Inc. The San Juan-based O.C. Coffe Service Corp. supplies coffee products to a variety of clientele throughout the Caribbean. "Our company delivers a completely integrated contribution that extends beyond Puerto Rico. We're excited to provide our retail partners the opportunity to present Grand Havana in Puerto Rico," says Osvaldo Carpentino, president and general manager of O.C. Coffe Service Corp. About Grand Havana, Inc.: Grand Havana is a specialty coffee company headquartered in Miami, Florida offering a broad array of coffee products and service. Grand Havana's Optimum Blend is available nationwide and proudly served in locations including supermarkets, cafes, convenience stores, hotels and online marketplaces. We also offer a B2B solution that provides our coffee product paired with high quality coffee machines, reliable delivery and timely technical service. Grand Havana - Americano and Espresso Coffee To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/6807/52585_552a05b79429395f_002full.jpg Grand Havana is the consumer's brand of choice for delving into the essence, allure and nostalgia of HAVANA. Safe Harbor Statement: The information posted in this release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. You can identify these statements by use of the words "may," "will," "should," "plans," "explores," "expects," "anticipates," "continue," "estimate," "project," "intend," and similar expressions. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, general economic and business conditions, effects of continued geopolitical unrest and regional conflicts, competition, changes in technology and methods of marketing, and various other factors beyond the Company's control. For more information, visit www.grandhavanacoffee.com, call 1.800.608.5441, or email orders@grandhavanacoffee.com Find out more about the company at www.facebook.com/grandhavanacoffee, twitter.com/grandhavcoffee1, or www.instagram.com/grandhavanacoffee/ To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/52585 In the backdrop of the growing demand for its cars in the country and to manufacture newer models, MG Motor is planning to ramp its capacity and set up a second facility in India. The future launches including a possible affordable electric car for the Indian market. The brand is planning to make its full-size SUV MG Gloster available in the market by Diwali 2020. The vehicle is likely to be in the Rs 40-50 lakh proce bracket. The company will have four products in the market in one-and-a-half years of its operations in India. It is planning another SUV as the fifth product in 2021 and ... COLUMBUS, Ohio - The protracted negotiations on Education Choice vouchers in Ohio are starting to conflict with state lawmakers fundraising plans. On Thursday, the Ohio Senate Republican Campaign Committee hosted a fundraiser, expected to last from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m., at the Ocean Key Resort and Spa - Sunset Pier - in Key West, Florida. Donors are being asked to contribute $500 to $10,000. But around that same time is a meeting in which public testimony is being accepted from people on all sides of the voucher debate, expected to last into the late hours of Thursday or possible go into early Friday. Its the last in a series of public hearings -- which have occurred for nine days since Feb. 11, including on Saturday. The fundraiser lasts only one day, yet its common for lawmakers to spend some extra time before the event, sometimes meeting privately with lobbyists and other supporters who either have second homes in Florida or want to have a drink, go fishing or participate in other activities. Ohio Senate President Larry Obhof, a Medina Republican, attended the fundraiser in Florida, a Senate GOP spokesman said. He traveled to Key West on Wednesday and is expected to return to Ohio on Friday. Also with him is Sen. Bob Peterson, a Washington Court House Republican who is a member of the conference committee that is hearing public testimony on voucher changes. Peterson left for Florida on Wednesday as well to attend the fundraiser. A member of the conference committee who was supposed to attend the fundraiser was Sen. Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican expected to replace term-limited Obhof as Senate president. Huffman stayed in Columbus, however, due to the conference committee. He said that he had to miss the last part of last Fridays testimony, and all day Saturday, Monday and Tuesday, however, because he and his wife were visiting grandchildren in Pensacola, which they had previously planned. He said he cut short his visit with the grandchildren for the conference committee. The plans were made back in December, when we bought the plane tickets and did all that, Huffman said. President Obhof appointed me and I said, Sure, Ill be on it, Then, they sent out the schedule. The conference committee schedule was made by the House, since the two sides are technically negotiating a House bill. They set the dates and didnt consult us about that, said John Fortney, the Senate GOP spokesman. Fortney said that other senators filled in when Peterson and Huffman were gone, including Sen. Kristina Roegner, a Hudson Republican. Since its an election year, politicians are fundraising heavily. Florida has long been a destination for Ohio politicians chasing snow birds. The Senate fundraiser has occurred for at least a decade. Former Ohio House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger used to host a fundraiser for House Republicans in the Naples area. Other Columbus stories: With Larry Householder, Ohio legislature has missed the deadline on key bills -- including EdChoice vouchers Ohio college professor who refused to use a transgender students preferred pronouns loses religious freedom case 6 people in Ohio have tested negative for COVID-19 coronavirus Ohio man expected to emerge from quarantine coronavirus-free after leaving Wuhan, China Roughly 600 doctors can recommend Ohio medical marijuana. Search by name and ZIP Newly elected TD Reada Cronin looks likely to avoid party disciplinary action over a series of controversial tweets. Ms Cronin, who lost her Kildare County Council seat last May but rebounded to win a first Dail seat for Sinn Fein in the recent general election, wont be disciplined by her party. Read more County Kildare news Sinn Fein TD Pearse Doherty said the remarks did not conform with the party's views and Ms Cronin was correct to react to the comments. He also said the party has protocols in relation to the use of social media. Ms Cronin has apologised for the comments and withdrawn them. Dep Doherty also pointed out that come of the comments predated Ms Cronin joining the party. In one post Ms Cronin said Israel had "taken Nazism to a new level and suggested a picture of monkeys working on computers reminded her of the Israeli embassy. Late last year she criticised the judiciary over perceived lenient sentences for child sex abuse or other sexual crimes . The Israeli embassy described some of the tweets as shocking nothing they came from an elected TD. Taoiseach Leo Varadkar described the comments as anti semitic and anti science. He added the tweets should trouble us all. President Donald Trump's 2016 pledge to expand the Navy's fleet by 30% to 355 ships was celebrated as good news for defense contractors Huntington Ingalls (NYSE:HII) and General Dynamics (NYSE:GD), which together are responsible for most of the United States' shipbuilding capabilities. Three years later, officials insist the Defense Department "remains committed to the 355-ship Navy." But the fiscal 2021 budget proposal includes a year-over-year decline in the number of warships to be purchased. And over the five-year budget projection, additions and retirements would keep the total number of ships about flat. The Navy's aspirations have crashed into the cold realities of the budgeting process. The Pentagon is trying to rework the entire military to meet the threat of a great-power conflict with Russia or China, which involves revamping ground and air forces that for the past 20 years have been focused primarily on fighting insurgents in the desert. And although the new Columbia-class ballistic submarine is perhaps the nation's top priority, and sure to be funded, that program's estimated $115 billion total construction budget for just 12 vessels is pulling funds away from other ships. On a recent investor call, Huntington Ingalls CEO Mike Petters described paying for the Columbia "the elephant in the room that has to be dealt with," costing the Navy the opportunity to expand more aggressively. Until the Columbia is further developed, and the total program cost is clearer, it is going to be more difficult for the Navy to commit to buying more ships. General Dynamics and Huntington Ingalls are the primary contractors on the Columbia and have large-enough backlogs to ensure that their shipyards stay busy. But that hoped-for windfall of 355 ships now seems unlikely to materialize. An autonomous future? The Navy's spending woes go well beyond ship sticker prices. Each new carrier, destroyer, or submarine comes with substantial additional crew costs that compound over time. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Navy base budget grew by nearly 50% from 1997 to 2015 even while the fleet size shrank by 20%, raising questions about whether it would be possible to afford operating a vastly expanded fleet even if all those new ships were built. The obvious answer is to focus on ships that don't need crews. The Navy is investing billions on autonomous research, and last year awarded a contract to construct four large unmanned submarines. It's also making progress with its surface fleet, successfully sailing an autonomous ship from San Diego to Hawaii and back in 2019 with little human intervention. For the shipbuilders, autonomy is both an opportunity and a threat. The lead contractors on the unmanned sub and autonomous ship are Boeing and Leidos Holdings, respectfully, two names not normally associated with shipbuilding. Huntington Ingalls is providing the construction work on Boeing's Orca sub, but the shipbuilders don't want to end up as low-margin metal benders as more of the value, and money, flows to the electronics and software developers. Huntington Ingalls identified the move toward autonomy years ago, but much of the company's engineering focus at the time was committed to existing projects, including the Navy's new aircraft carrier. The company has responded by trying to build up its capabilities, including a deal announced earlier this month to buy marine robotics developer Hydroid for $350 million. On the investor call, Petters said he believes that combining the newly acquired autonomous expertise with Huntington Ingalls' existing facilities, manpower, and manufacturing expertise will "accelerate the development of the unmanned space on behalf of our customer." And, presumably, give his company a one-stop-shopping advantage in winning future autonomous business. That might be correct. But the Boeing and Leidos examples show that the disruption the Navy is experiencing as it tries to find new ways to grow the fleet could open doors to new competitors and end up eroding the advantages of Huntington Ingalls and General Dynamics as well-established shipbuilders. Investors need to watch closely It should be noted that the Huntington Ingalls and General Dynamics shipbuilding businesses are at no risk of drying up overnight. The estimated $20 billion warship request in the new budget, while down from recent years, is still well above the $14 billion to $16 billion annual figure Petters said he has seen through most of his career. Significant funds are going toward the Columbia and the Navy's new carriers, but the service remains committed to buying mainstays including Arleigh Burke destroyers and Virginia-class attack subs well into the future. The hard question is where the growth will come from. General Dynamics investors can fall back on the company's key role in the Army's modernization effort, as well as its rebounding business jet unit. Huntington Ingalls is more of a pure play tied to the Navy, and it's harder to make the bull case for the company without an expanding fleet. Huntington Ingalls has already done one autonomous deal in 2020, and I'd expect the company to aggressively look for further acquisition opportunities to augment its capabilities and reshape its portfolio. That's likely a wise move, but it would create new integration risks and potentially prevent the company from returning substantial free cash flow to shareholders. There is no reason for existing holders to abandon ship, but investors need to watch closely as these shipbuilders try to navigate the Navy's shifting priorities as the service aims to build its fleet. In his speech, during the presentation of the 2019 export figures , the Head of State affirmed that the achievements to be made by the upcoming Parliament will be "a great legacy for Peru." "We welcome the fact that various political groups have signed a governance agreement covering among other things the political and judicial reform," he said, recalling the signing of said document by representatives of Accion Popular, Alianza para el Progreso, Podemos Peru, and Somos Peru parties. In this regard, the Peruvian leader expressed he is confident the new Parliament will join the shared effort to work for the country, "going beyond political and ideological differences." As is known, the aforementioned parties announced the signing of a governance agreement to promote several projects to the benefit of the population. Likewise, said groups are part of a multiparty list that will seek the presidency of the Congress Board of Directors for the 2020-2021 period. (END) JCC/FHG/RMB Officials in Mississippi have launched a hate crime investigation after a 12-year-old received a disturbing doll during a festival. The incident took place at Krewe of Nereids parade, a Mardi Gras festival in Waveland, Miss., the Sun Herald reports. Nicole Fairconeture told the newspaper that her daughter received the doll from a man on a New Orleans Saints-themed float. She grabbed the item, put it to her chest, and was coming back. [The man] called her back and when she turned around, he said, Thats you . The toy, which Fairconeture said was dressed like a slave, also had a string of beads tied around its neck. Fairconeture said she believed the beads were meant to resemble a noose. Fairconeture quickly called over a police officer and one of her family members filed a report. Mike Smith, Wavelands mayor, told the Sun Herald his towns police department is working with officers to investigate the case as a hate crime. When I saw that it had happened, it infuriated me. The Waveland Police Department will certainly do whatever it can to aid Bay St. Louis [police] in trying to get to the bottom of it. Don Cooper, president of Juno Beach Centre, a museum dedicated to the 14,000 Canadian troops who landed on D-Day, has taken aim at local French politicians who plan to build high-density housing at a site widely considered to be sacred. Cooper said the proposed construction of a 70-person residence overlooking Juno Beach would wreak havoc and unanticipated costs for the museum and nearby areas. The apartment complex would replace a currently empty industrial building, which has, despite repeated attempts, taken 17 years to demolish. In the letter signed February 12, the Centre decries that they never further imagined that the Town of Courseulles would choose to hide the Juno Beach Centre once again and forever behind a four-storey residential complex. The often overlooked contributions of Canadian troops at D-Day are on full display at the museum, located roughly a quarter of a mile away from where infantrymen first ran ashore 76 years ago. The 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and the 2nd Armoured Brigade, tasked with establishing a bridgehead on the roughly five-mile stretch of beach codenamed Juno, were met by a withering hail of machine-gun fire from the entrenched Germans along the heavily defended Atlantic Wall. Flanked by the British at both Sword and Gold beaches, the Canadian objective was to secure their beachhead and link up with the British forces. Casualties were high, especially those landing in the first wave. By midnight, writes the Imperial War Museums, The Canadians had yet to link up with the British at Sword but had cleared exits off the beach, advanced several miles inland and ultimately joined up with the British at Gold. Twitter screenshot (@JunoBeachCentre) The JBC, built in 2003, serves to memorialize the deeds of those men. According to its mission statement, JBC: pays homage to the 45,000 Canadians who lost their lives during the War, of which 5,500 were killed during the Battle of Normandy and 359 on D-Day. Opened in 2003 by veterans and volunteers with a vision to create a permanent memorial to all Canadians who served during the Second World War, the Centres mandate is to preserve this legacy for future generations through education and remembrance. JBC fears that if the project proceeds there will be negative financial impacts, operational conflicts, and traffic and security concerns for the museum. In 2019 JBC had a record 103,000 visitors, and is currently seeking a UNESCO designation of the Normandy Beaches as a World Heritage Site. The apartment complex proposal, they write, could seriously affect the museums outreach. Citing a lack of discourse, the JBC seemingly seeks to fight this decision by withdrawing their initial 150,000 pledge to help build a pedestrian bridge from the museum to the town center of Courseulles-sur-Mer. The museum writes that they seek to protect the memory of those who died on Juno Beach and beyond. We have a successful memorial, the open letter states. We need to keep it that way. OAKLAND, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- California BanCorp (OTCQX:CALB), the holding company for California Bank of Commerce (CBC), today announced the hiring of Gokul Nair as Senior Vice President and Treasury Management Consultant. The addition of Nair further expands CBCs Treasury Management team, which helps companies and organizations optimize their use of cash through a mix of strong client service and technology. Nair has a deep knowledge of technology solutions for treasury professionals, said Scott Myers, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Lending Officer. That familiarity, combined with his ability to partner with clients to understand their unique challenges and implement solutions to meet their goals, will be a great asset to our team and clients. Nair joins California Bank of Commerce with more than 15 years of experience in commercial banking. He has held various positions with Wells Fargo, most recently serving as Vice President and Senior Treasury Management Consultant for the past three years. Nair was named Wells Fargos Top Treasury Consultant in 2018. To learn more about CBCs Treasury Management solutions, visit its website at californiabankofcommerce.com/treasury-management . About California BanCorp and California Bank of Commerce California BanCorp, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, California Bank of Commerce, offers a broad range of commercial banking services to closely held businesses and professionals located throughout Northern California. The stock of its parent company, California BanCorp, trades on the OTCQX marketplace under the symbol CALB. For more information on California BanCorp and California Bank of Commerce, call us at (510) 457-3751, or visit us at www.californiabankofcommerce.com . Contact California Bank of Commerce California BanCorp Steven E. Shelton, (510) 457-3751 President and Chief Executive Officer seshelton@bankcbc.com Thomas A. Sa, (510) 457-3775 Senior Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer tsa@bankcbc.com Scott Myers, (916) 807-0933 Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Lending Officer smyers@bankcbc.com Media Contact Spokesman for Egypt's Foreign Ministry Ahmed Hafez has warned that the infiltration of terrorists into Libya, particularly from Syria, would have serious consequences on North Africa as well as European countries. Hafez made his statements on Thursday in the meeting of the communication cell group of the global coalition against the Islamic State terrorist group, hosted by London. He highlighted that extremism has spread internationally with increasing technological and organisational capabilities by terrorist groups to launch attacks worldwide. The spokesman underscored that Egypt has adopted initiatives to combat terrorism and extremism and prevent spreading extremist ideologies by terrorist organisations, topped by the Islamic State, Al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood group, in order to guarantee the stability of the region and the world. Hafez shed light on President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisis initiative to renew religious discourse along with the formation of parliamentary committees to combat terrorism and extremism amid great efforts exerted by Al-Azhar and the ministries of culture and endowments on this score. Search Keywords: Short link: German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron told Russia's Vladimir Putin they want to meet him and Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan to defuse the crisis in Syria. In their phone call with the President Putin, Merkel and Macron expressed their "concern over the humanitarian catastrophe for residents of Syria's Idlib province," Merkel's office said. A months-long offensive by Russia-backed Syrian troops against rebels backed by Turkey in northwest Idlib has seen close to one million civilians flee the violence. The two European Union leaders "expressed their willingness to meet President Putin and Turkish President Erdogan to find a political solution to the crisis," the chancellor's office said. Merkel and Macron "called for the immediate end to the fighting and unfettered humanitarian access to people in need," their statement said. Since Syria's civil war erupted in 2011, the country has never seen so many people displaced in so short a time. In nine years, millions of civilians have fled their homes and more than 380,000 have been killed. Russia on Wednesday objected to the UN Security Council adopting a statement that would have called for a ceasefire in Idlib, diplomats said, after a tense closed-door meeting. The UN urged neighbouring Turkey to admit the new displaced people but Ankara is resisting as it already has some 3.7 million Syrians on its territory. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Broadband Kajeet Adding CatchOn to Catalog; ENA Adding Kajeet Kajeet, which produces a device delivering wireless Internet access to students who lack broadband connectivity, has expanded its selling options. The company has signed agreements with Education Networks of America (ENA) and ENA affiliate company CatchOn. ENA develops connectivity and communication systems for education settings. CatchOn provides software that analyzes program usage in schools and districts for better decision making. ENA will begin selling two products from Kajeet: SmartSpot, a portable WiFi hotspot; and SmartBus, a school bus WiFi system. In turn, Kajeet will add CatchOn to its catalog of products. "ENA and CatchOn share our focus on education and understand the unique challenges of providing patented managed connectivity to K-12 environments," said Greg Jones, Kajeet's chief technology officer, in a statement. "This collaboration is a perfect complement of solutions, with CatchOn providing data analytics and Kajeet ensuring students can connect to their education." A woman who was sexually assaulted by a man she'd been friends with for years in a hotel while her roommate slept beside them has told how the ordeal left her terrified of being violated again. Ishita Gupta, 25, from Mumbai, was attending a conference in Bangalore (officially known as Bengaluru) when she went out for drinks and ended up back at her male companion's accommodation. The counselling psychologist told how she was 'quite drunk' and her roommate had passed out when the man put his hand down her pants, believing she too was asleep. When Ishita pushed him off and took her female friend to the bathroom to explain what had occurred, she claims her roommate dismissed the incident as 'something that happens when you're drinking'. Ishita Gupta, 25, from Mumbai, was attending a conference in Bangalore when she was sexually assaulted by a man she'd been friends with for years in a hotel while her roommate slept beside them Shockingly her roommate then returned to the bedroom and began having sex with Ishita's abuser, while she lay on the floor traumatised until morning. When she confronted her abuser via text, she told how he 'gaslighted' her, denying everything and accusing her of making it up. Ishita shared her story on Twitter, inspired by the #MeToo movement in India - a manifestation of the international campaign that began in 2018. Speaking to FEMAIL, she said despite not having a large online following, she feels it's important to talk about incidents like this to make other women realise it's not OK. 'It's not normal, but it's common,' she said. 'I thought I was dealing with this alright, but the last couple of years have been really hard for me. I struggled and I don't really have a solution, but at least I can talk about it.' The counselling psychologist told how she was 'quite drunk' and her roommate had passed out when the man put his hand down her pants, believing she too was asleep Ishita said the ordeal, which happened in December 2017, has had a profound impact on her - intensified by the fact she was previously in a sexually abusive relationship. 'I feel like over a period of time it affected my mental health - I get trauma counselling for it now,' she explained. 'It's made things difficult for me; I have a hard time in my relationship, and I have developed vaginismus [where the vagina involuntarily tightens whenever penetration is attempted, causing a great deal of discomfort].' Ishita, then 23, had travelled to Bangalore for the two-day conference, and said her male friend, whom she'd known since she was 18, took advantage of her both nights they were there, which made her feel 'stupid'. 'He was staying in a hotel and I was staying in another one across town with my roommate,' she recalled. Ishita said the ordeal, which happened in December 2017, has had a profound impact on her - intensified by the fact she was previously in a sexually abusive relationship 'His hotel was closer to the pub, so we decided to stop there and drink some coffee. 'We were watching TV on his bed and my friend passed out, and I was trying to wake her up. I was in and out of consciousness myself, and I remember at some point when I was half asleep, thinking "It's really late and we should get going but I'm really tired" - and my male friend stuck his hand down my pants. 'He didn't know I was awake and he started feeling around. I just quietly lay there and waited for it to be over because I didn't want to confront him and have that conversation. What is vaginismus? Vaginismus occurs when the vagina suddenly tightens up whenever penetration is attempted. The woman has no control over it, which can be extremely distressing. It affects between 0.5 and one per cent of women. As well as struggling to have vaginal sex, many also find it difficult to use a tampon. If they can achieve penetration, sufferers may then experience a burning or stinging sensation. However, vaginismus does not necessarily affect a woman's ability to get aroused or enjoy other forms of sexual contact. Vaginismus often has no clear cause but can include a woman: Vaginismus can sometimes occur even if a woman has enjoyed penetrative sex in the past. If a woman suspects she may have vaginismus, she should make an appointment to see her GP. The consultation usually involves asking about her symptoms and rarely requires an internal examination. Treatment is usually therapy to help a women understand her feelings about sex and her body. Relaxation techniques such as mindfulness can also help. Pelvic floor exercise can also help a woman gain control of her vaginal muscles. In more severe cases, vaginal trainers, which are shaped like tampons and come in different sizes, can help a woman get used to have something inserted in her vagina. Source: NHS Advertisement 'He stopped at some point and two minutes after that I pretended to wake up and said, "It's 3am, it's really late, it's time to go." I woke my roommate and we left. 'I feel really stupid but I did the same thing again the next day. We went to the conference, went to the pub again, and for whatever reason stopped at his hotel again.' This time Ishita said her abuser had 'grown in confidence' and was more 'grabby' when he thrust his hand beneath her underwear. 'It was more pushy, there was more pressure,' she recalled. 'I pretended to be asleep again, but at some point I said, "This is not OK," and I woke up and pushed him off and took my roommate into the hotel bathroom. 'I told her he'd been touching me and I didn't know what to do, and she said, "That's fine, that's something that happens when you're drinking." 'We came back out and we were watching another movie, and they started making out. I felt really uncomfortable, so I just kind of lay on the floor and waited for it to be over again. 'I slept on the floor, the two of them slept on the bed. I'm not super sure that they had sex but I think they did. 'This sounds strange but I've had an ex who was sexually abusive to me and any time something like this happens, my brain and my body just shuts down. The only thing I could think of was, "Just, lie here, close your eyes and wait for it to be over." 'When I was on the floor I couldn't think of leaving because they were on the bed - I could hear things and it bothered me.' The following morning the two women returned to their hotel, where Ishita suffered a 'huge meltdown'. 'I didn't eat for ages and I was sobbing, I wasn't coherently speaking,' she said, adding that her roommate was remorseful and helped her when she realised she was 'losing it'. 'She fed me and pushed me in the shower before helping me back in bed,' she explained. 'It was very conflicting for me because she didn't help me at all the night before.' A week later, after both women had been on separate vacations, Ishita said her friend broke down and apologised for what had happened. Ishita didn't report her male friend to authorities because he had a flight to the US from India the following morning, and knew he'd be gone by the time police tried to contact him. Ishita shared her story on Twitter, inspired by the #MeToo movement in India - a manifestation of the international campaign that began in 2018 She did text him to say what he did was not acceptable, but claims he accused her of making up stories. 'He said, "You were asleep, you were drunk, are you sure you're remembering?"' she recalled. 'I was like, "Yeah I was drunk but I wasn't imagining things." It's a really serious accusation to make. I knew what was going on, I wasn't asleep, and it happened twice; I had to be right at least one of the times. 'He never apologised or admitted it, and that's the last time I spoke to him he flew to the US the next day. By the time I was in a fit state to report anything, I too was in a different state and a different city. 'He was a really good friend of mine. I don't really know what happened.' Ishita said what happened, coupled with the sexual abuse she received at the hands of an ex-boyfriend, makes it difficult to trust and be intimate with her current partner. 'The way I was treated by my ex, it was extremely manipulative and I was never really allowed to say no, I was coerced into having sex a lot,' she said. Ishita said what happened, coupled with the sexual abuse she received at the hands of an ex-boyfriend, makes it difficult to trust and be intimate with her current partner 'I was really young, I was kind of stupid and taken advantage of, and I know that now. 'I feel constantly like I have to be careful, because the next thing I say is going to make him mad or it's going to hurt me. I'm not able to switch that part of my brain off where I don't have to worry about something constantly, and the anxiety builds and builds, and then after 10 minutes I'm like, "I need to stop, I feel extremely overwhelmed and I need a break." It's just incredibly hard now.' She added: 'What's funny is, I'm a therapist, so I see people who have the same problems as I do, anxiety related to sexual assault, and I do what I like to think is a good job, and I can help them through it. But when I try and turn it inwards I just can't; my brain shuts down.' Ishita, who now only goes out socialising with close girlfriends from school and her boyfriend, said she was pleasantly surprised by the outpouring of praise and support she received from strangers when she spoke out on social media. 'The week before I talked about what happened in the tweet, I was feeling very lonely not being able to talk about it. It's such a big part of my life and what's going on,' she added. 'If I tried to have this conversation with my partner, he doesn't understand because he's a man - he doesn't understand vaginismus or what it's like to feel unsafe. He can sympathise with me, but I didn't have anybody to talk to about this. 'A lot of what I talk about online, mental health-wise and sexual assault-wise, is so somebody else knows that other people are talking about things like this.' * Quarantine was unable to stem infections onboard * More than 540 people on ship have been infected * Potential headache for Abe ahead of Olympics By Rocky Swift and Elaine Lies TOKYO, Feb 19 (Reuters) - As the virus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship is evacuated, Japan faces deepening criticism over its response to the outbreak, tarnishing what was supposed to be a triumphant Olympic year for Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. More than 540 people onboard have been infected with the coronavirus, the most outside of China. The United States evacuated more than 300 citizens from the ship on Monday, and more countries are following suit. But as the crisis off the coast of Yokohama winds down, focus now turns to Tokyo, where critics say the government's response has seemed more concerned with managing public perception than the outbreak. They say the ship quarantine may not have been effective. Japan is just months away from hosting the 2020 Olympic games. For some Japanese, the outbreak carries an uneasy echo of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown, when the government was widely criticised for downplaying another crisis. "The spread of the virus is wider than the government said," said Shinichi Niwa, an adjunct professor at Fukushima Medical University. "During the (Fukushima) disaster, the government said there was no meltdown. So they hid the truth at the time, and I'm afraid the same situation is happening with the coronavirus." The health ministry did not respond to requests for comment. The government has repeatedly said its response has been appropriate, and some prominent doctors have defended it. "Epidemiological evidence shows that our isolation strategy worked," Shigeru Omi, president of the Japan Community Healthcare Organization, told reporters at a recent briefing. "Almost 4,000 people stay on this ship, which is not designed for isolation for several weeks, and this is a very challenging situation." Story continues The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has praised Japan's "extraordinary efforts" in the quarantine but said it may not have been sufficient to prevent transmission. DANCING, QUIZ SHOWS The U.K.-flagged Diamond Princess arrived in Yokohama on Feb. 3 with roughly 3,700 people onboard after a man who disembarked last month in Hong Kong was diagnosed with the virus. From the start, experts raised questions about the quarantine process. Unlike the United States, Japan does not have a central disease-control agency. Passengers weren't confined to their rooms until Feb. 5. The day before, as officials screened them, onboard events continued, including dances, quiz games and an exercise class, one passenger said. Passengers also said that during early screening visits, Japanese health officials wore only masks, not full protective suits. The virus, SARS-CoV-2, was later diagnosed in two quarantine officers. Meanwhile, the virus spread onboard, most likely by people within their own cabins or by asymptomatic crew members interacting with passengers, experts said. "How is this quarantine going to be lifted when there is practically continuous exposure?" said Eyal Leshem, director of the Center for Travel Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center in Israel. "It doesn't make sense epidemiologically." Japan also let people off the boat piecemeal, including those over age 80 who tested negative, which experts said went against common protocols. BELOW DECK The contagion may have been fuelled below deck, where the crew of about 1,100 worked and slept in cramped quarters, sharing living spaces and bathrooms. "The terror of the coronavirus is increasing at every moment," Indian crew member Binoy Kumar Sarkar said in a Facebook video posted on Feb 7. "I request the government to take us out of here and isolate us. We should be screened and isolated." Some have said Japan should have quarantined passengers on land. "Quarantine on ship may be increasing risk of infection and creating a barrier to accessing medical care," said Esther Chernak, an associate clinical professor and director of the Center for Public Health Readiness and Communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia. A Kyodo news agency poll over the weekend said 53 percent of respondents weren't happy with how Abe had handled the situation. "The Diamond Princess has proved a bit of a blind spot for us," a lawmaker from Abe's ruling party told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. "But beyond that, there isn't a big problem for Japan with the coronavirus." Early on, the health ministry said cases on the ship would not count toward Japan's domestic tally of infections, in line with World Health Organization guidelines. But some experts said it also showed how Japan wanted to avoid the stigma of being seen as a virus hotspot. "I like to believe that public health decisions were driven by science and not influenced by politics," said Mark Kortepeter, a professor at the University of Nebraska College of Public Health. "But I am not naive, having worked in this space for decades. If that was the impetus, then it backfired." (Reporting by Elaine Lies and Rocky Swift; Additional reporting by Yoshifumi Takemoto in Tokyo and Shilpa Jamkhandikar and Promit Mukherjee in Mumbai; Editing by David Dolan and Gerry Doyle) ATLANTA, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Stan Johnson Company, one of commercial real estate's leading investment sales brokerage firms, is proud to announce the creation of a new Partner Program for its top sales professionals. This program provides an opportunity for the firm's strongest producers to be recognized and rewarded for their outstanding contributions and dedication to company growth. "It is my personal honor to award the title of Partner to so many of our organization's top sales professionals who are dedicated to providing extraordinary service and outstanding value to our clients," said Stan Johnson, company President and CEO. "Partners not only represent some of the highest production brokers at Stan Johnson Company, but also include those who will make positive contributions to our culture and brand with a focus on future growth." Ryan Butler Isaiah Harf Chad Byerly Jeff Hughes Margaret Caldwell Joey Odom David Clary Brad Pepin BJ Feller Mike Sladich Tom Fritz Craig Tomlinson Jim Gibson Asher Wenig This year's inaugural group of qualifiers includes 14 brokers across the U.S., and future Partners meeting established goals will be inducted in each of the following years. These broker Partners join the firm's existing Shareholder Partners a distinguished group that comprises leaders from both the corporate platform as well as the sales organization, and includes Managing Director Brandon Duff, Senior Vice President Amy Moyer, and Executive Managing Directors Harold Briggs and Jeff Cox, among others. "Our Partners are mentors, ambassadors, and advisors, and they possess all the valuable characteristics of knowledgeable real estate professionals," Johnson added. "I'm pleased and honored to call each of these leaders a Partner!" About Stan Johnson Company: Stan Johnson Company is one of the nation's leading commercial real estate brokerage and advisory firms that focuses on investment sales transactions involving retail, office, industrial, healthcare, and specialty properties. The firm provides acquisition, disposition, sale leaseback, capital markets, and advisory services for institutions, developers, investment funds, corporate occupiers, and private investors across the United States. With a historic focus in the single-tenant net lease sector, Stan Johnson Company is now in its fourth decade of operation and has expanded its service platform in order to better serve its valued clients. The firm has completed more than $35 billion in transactions nationwide and continues to be regarded as the Net Lease Authority as it focuses on continued growth and expansion into other industry sectors and services. To learn more about Stan Johnson Company, please visit: www.stanjohnsonco.com. Contact: David Ebeling Ebeling Communications (949) 278-7851 [email protected] SOURCE Stan Johnson Company Related Links http://www.stanjohnsonco.com LONDON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Cevitr, a UK based company, announced a partnership with J. Murphy & Sons Limited (Murphy), a leading global, specialist engineering and construction company that operates in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada to digitally empower their Shared Services Team by automating key processes for faster and accurate processing of repetitive tasks. Cevitr enables businesses to adopt a subscription based Digital Workforce using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology. To gain operational efficiency in today's highly competitive landscape, Murphy have deployed Cevitr's innovative RPA powered Digital Workforce solution, which is powered by UiPath to accelerate a number of processes within their business. By expanding the coverage to other business functions and across group entities, Murphy intends to fully harness the power of a digital workforce in building a workplace of the future. A digital transformation partnership began after Cevitr deployed a digital workforce to assist Murphy in the data migration process, as a technology demonstrator for the engagement. Migrating from a legacy system, AX based ERP, to the new Dynamics 365 system required Murphy to undertake critical activities that would allow data to be ported to the new system, within a time bound cut-over window. Cevitr trained and deployed its digital workforce to undertake this task and increased this capacity to cater for lost hours by working round the clock and over the weekend, resulting in Murphy being able to go live on the new system as planned, whilst generating significant cost and time savings. Jo, Cevitr's Digital Workmate, is now working round the clock to execute processes for Murphy within their Shared Services Centre, with the accounts payable value chain being the first business process to be automated. This has not only delivered significant time savings, increased accuracy of processing and cost savings, but has also shifted the emphasis of the Shared Services team to focus on more value-added initiatives that fosters closer relationships with all stakeholders. Additionally, the intangible benefit of greater employee satisfaction through the reduction of repetitive and boring tasks, thereby letting employees focus on more challenging tasks, is also being realised. Using Cevitr's digital workforce enables Murphy to create an elastic capacity within their Shared Services organisation; allowing the business a smoother vehicle to ride the peaks and troughs. David Neve, IT Director at Murphy, stated that "Working in partnership with Cevitr has been a real benefit to the Murphy business in reducing resource requirements in both time critical activities and day to day operations. Their professionalism and customer service have been excellent." The simplicity of utilising an RPA powered Digital Workforce in businesses, with the least amount of disruption is one of the key advantages of the Cevitr platform. Lubnah Alam, Head of Shared Services at Murphy, refers to this by affirming, "Simplifying activities has been the main focus and reducing non-value add activities that inevitably increase during a system implementation. Cevitr have provided a professional and efficient service, whilst also guiding and advising us using their own expertise. This has been a fantastic experience and Cevitr have made this very easy for us." Jaideep Mudholkar, Co-Founder and Managing Director Cevitr, said, "Our collaboration with Murphy enables Cevitr to provide a market leader with revolutionary technology through our Digital Workmate proposition. Our common goals of innovation and excellence in service create a stable environment to do business, allowing Cevitr to add value and drive faster direct and consequential benefits to Murphy through automation." For more information about Cevitr, please visit this webpage. More information on Murphy can be found here. About Cevitr Cevitr is a UK based company, offering a Digital Workforce to organisations of all sizes using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The Digital Workforce is fully trained on end customer systems and are offered on a monthly subscription basis with no upfront investment. The service is all inclusive of software licenses, development and deployment and the customer can gain the benefits of a Digital Workmate in weeks. www.cevitr.com LinkedIn Twitter About Murphy J. Murphy & Sons Limited is a leading global, specialist engineering and construction company founded in 1951 that improves lives by delivering world-class infrastructure. Operating in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Canada, Murphy provides better engineered solutions to infrastructure sectors including transportation; water; power; natural resources; and construction & property. Murphy employs more than 3,500 engineers, professional managers and skilled operatives around the world. Together, they work as 'One Murphy' by directly delivering the people, plant and expertise needed to make projects a success. www.murphygroup.com Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Media Contact: Cevitr Jenny Leeson Marketing & Communications +44-(0)-1625-426137 [email protected] SOURCE Cevitr Limited You want to determine the properties of polymers in more detail or investigate proteins and protein aggregates in their native conformations? The LenS3 Multi-Angle Light Scattering (MALS) detector is the first in history to allow the direct measurement of macromolecules with a molecular radius of less than 10 nm (down to 2 nm Rg / 200 Da). This MALS detector, which combines the advantages of low-angle (LALS), high-angle (HALS) and right-angle scattering of light (RALS), exerts its full range of capabilities in polymer analytics and protein analytics. A high signal intensity is achieved by using a green laser and a a flow cell with an extended light path. At the same time, the flow cell's construction of PEEK eliminates noise from stray light and thus ensures clear peaks even with small polymers or low-concentration solutions. The patented optics have made a new calculation methodology possible so you can start analyzing your macromolecules directly without time-consuming determination of the concentration. The direct measurement of molecular weight and molecular radius has thus become incredibly easy for synthetic polymers, polysaccharides, proteins and other biopolymers. At Tosoh Bioscience you can get all you need from a single source from (U)HPLC columns to SEC systems and detectors. TIJUANA, Mexico, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Standing in solidarity with the migrant and refugee community, over 75 civil society organizations convened in Tijuana, Mexico today to participate in Gender, Childhood, and Youth on the Move. This three-day, transnational conference brings grassroots and philanthropic leaders together across borders to advocate for the rights of migrant children and youth. Thousands of migrants have died along the US-Mexico border over the past five years, including dozens of children, according to conservative estimates by the UN Migration Agency. Many thousands more have experienced the trauma of violence, detention, and deportation along their journey, as well as discrimination and sexual abuse in custody. Gender, Childhood, and Youth on the Move provides a unique opportunity for civil society to design strategies to strengthen justice with and for migrant children, including some of the most invisible and vulnerable: girls and young women, unaccompanied children, Afro-descendent children, and children who identify as LGBTQI. Its important for young people from our region to come together now, and have these conversations about the human rights abuses that affect our communities. We are coming together here, in Tijuana, to show the reality of the border, to stand up against racist policies, and to hold our governments accountable. We are here to build community and keep fighting together, said Paulina Olvera Canez, Director of Espacio Migrante, the local shelter and community center in Tijuana hosting the conference. Grassroots leaders and youth activists from Central America, Mexico, and the United States have gathered in the city with the worlds busiest border crossing to call for increased protection and justice for young people. Participants bring together diverse expertise in shelter, legal services, psychosocial support, and community advocacy across migratory points of origin, transit, destination, and return. Stories like the ones we are hearing during this event demonstrate the humanitarian crisis we are experiencing, and the urgency with which Fondo Semillas continues to support organizations that are defending the human rights of thousands of girls and women, forced to flee their places of origin because of violence and poverty, said Tania Turner, Executive Director of Fondo Semillas, the only womens fund in Mexico. We stand with our partners to call upon regional governments to recognize that children, especially girls, migrate to escape social inequality, gender-based violence, and institutional abandonment. We must do more not only to address the reasons why children are forced to leave their homes, but also to secure their safe transit and family reunification when they must leave, said Miriam Alejandra Camas, Program Manager of the Central American Womens Fund, based in Nicaragua. Government policies that separate children from families and cause young people to be detained indefinitely and inhumanely further traumatize young people already fleeing violence in search of safety. We are proud to support and convene courageous community leaders fighting for children and families fleeing violence, poverty, and injustice. We have a responsibility to stand up for childrens rights and to protect all children from adversity and trauma, said John Hecklinger, President and CEO of Global Fund for Children, based in Washington, DC. Gender, Childhood, and Youth on the Move is co-hosted by Global Fund for Children, Fondo Semillas, the Central American Women's Fund, the Seattle International Foundation, and the International Community Foundation. It is essential that any approach to migration has a gender and youth perspective as a cross-cutting theme; otherwise, we will repeat the discrimination and exclusion that motivated migration in the first place. Spaces such as this meeting also help generate reflection and collaboration between organized civil society and donors in order to listen to and respond to the needs of migrants, from their contexts, said Perla Vazquez, Program Director of the CAMY Fund, Seattle International Foundation. Given our location in the San Diego-Tijuana region, ICF has witnessed the profound impact that immigration policies and geo-political factors have had on our border community over the past 30 years. Often, these decisions and events occur thousands of miles away, yet the negative physical, financial, and emotional impact on our neighbors, colleagues, and children and youth are long-lasting. However, these events have also demonstrated the incredible agility and dynamism of our border community and local leaders many of whom were migrants to the region themselves. Through grants and capacity-building efforts, ICF seeks to uplift the dynamic, vibrant people and initiatives that make our border community so unique and rich. We are so grateful to our co-hosts for their presence and investments here, said Anne McEnany, President & CEO of the International Community Foundation, based in San Diego. Attachments (Newser) The 621 coronavirus cases confirmed on the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan represent the most anywhere outside of China. And an infectious diseases expert at Japan's Kobe University has a good idea why. Kentaro Iwata, who worked to combat the spread of Ebola and SARS, spent a brief period aboard the cruise ship Tuesday, finding "completely inadequate" infection controls as well as passengers, crew members, and even medical professionals walking about without protective clothing, reports ABC News. "It was completely chaotic," Iwata says. "There was no distinction between the green zone, which is free of infection, and the red zone, which is potentially contaminated by the virus." The Wall Street Journal reports he was kicked off the ship after being accused of violating the terms he agreed to before stepping aboard. story continues below Iwata denies that claim, made at a Wednesday press conference where the head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases confirmed there was no distinct green zone. Still, Takaji Wakita said "isolation functioned effectively" nonetheless. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said officials were "doing everything possible" to stop COVID-19 from spreading on the ship. But Iwata fears he contracted the virus and has quarantined himself, per ABC. A two-week general quarantine for the ship ended Wednesday, with some passengers heading to train stations, per the Journal. But others, including those in close proximity to positive cases, are not yet allowed to leave. Iwata says that puts them at risk. "We have to assume every single utensil on that ship has been exposed to infection," he tells the Journal. "I was so scared." (Two passengers have already died.) Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald has accused Fine Gael and Fianna Fail of being arrogant, dismissive and self-righteous, after she failed to secure enough votes to be Taoiseach. Ms McDonald secured the most support this evening in a drawn out series of votes where she, Fine Gael's Leo Varadkar, Fianna Fail's Micheal Martin and the Green Party's Eamon Ryan all put themselves forward for Taoiseach. After a number of speeches from TDs supporting the different leaders for the positions, Dail voting got underway. Ms McDonald came out on top with 45 votes for Taoiseach, 84 against and 29 abstentions. She was followed by Mr Martin who won 41 votes, but saw 97 deputies opposing him for the role and 19 abstaining. Outgoing Taoiseach Leo Varadkar came third and received 36 votes, 107 against and 16 abstensions. Mr Ryan won 12 votes, was opposed by 115 deputies while 28 abstained. The Dail has now been adjourned until March 5, after no candidate secured enough support to be Taoiseach. Mr Varadkar is set to go to Aras an Uachtarain tonight to tender his resignation but said he would remain on in acting role running government, as will the outgoing ministers. He assured the public that a working government would continue until a new administration is agreed. There was a need to agree a government that would last the next four to five years, he told the Dail. Fine Gael was willing to talk to other parties, he added. But there were bitter words tonight between Mr Martin and Ms McDonald after the Dail finished up the vote. Mr Martin was strongly critical of Sinn Fein's past, its policies around enterprise as well as what he called were different democratic standards operated by the party. He claimed that victims of the troubles "never got justice". But Ms McDonald fired back that her party had secured the most votes for Taoiseach. The Sinn Fein leader was highly critical of Fine Gael and Fianna Fail's refusal to negotiate with her party for government. She called the two arrogant, dismissive and self-righteous. When you teach about racial inequality for a living, as I do, you have a before-and-after story. The story broadly goes that before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial inequality was legal and normative. After the Civil Rights Act, racial inequality is illegal but normative. It is a linear story for a decidedly circular history, where advances thanks to the March on Washington in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnsons Executive Order 11246 in 1965 (or affirmative action) and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 have been met with resistance. We move forward, then get pushed back, forward, back. Today it is harder than it was 60 years ago to get a bead on racial inequality because, well, it looks so much like everything else. It looks like the gentrification that displaces black people, yes, but also poor people generally. It feels like low wages when most workers wages are stagnating. It looks like debt and tainted water and poor air quality and hustling to make ends meet when almost everyone is reckoning with financial crises, climate disaster and economic insecurity. What can be said about racial inequality in the 21st century that isnt just the story of every American? The answer is not in the nature of the problem but in the nature of the response: everyone is hustling, but everyone cannot hustle the same. The hustle is an idea, a discourse and a survival strategy often glorified as economic opportunity. It is an ode to a type of capitalism that cannot secure the futures of anyone but the wealthiest. But its popularity lies in how hustling can feel like an equal-opportunity strategy. You see it espoused by the mostly black and Latino squeegee kids who jump into action to clean your car window. It is also the rallying cry for many of the black people who have earned a college degree but earn less than white workers doing similar jobs. The term originated as a code for illegal activities, but according to Lester Spence, author of Knocking the Hustle: Against the Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics, today we have all been turned into hustlers, trying to monetize our human capital for economic advancement. Story continues But black Americans have to hustle more. A white family of four living at the poverty line has about $18,000 in wealth. A black family at that threshold has negligible wealth. Everyone is hustling, but poor black Americans are literally hustling from zero. For middle-class black people, the trends arent much better. Again, its not just income but also wealth that reproduces racial inequalities, so being middle class when you are black is not nearly as secure a position as it is for other racial groups. The black middle class takes on more debt for education, earns less for their educational achievements and struggles more to repay their student loans than their white peers. Its a hard story to tell because the images are fuzzier than they once were. The legal nature of racism before the 1960s made for material pictures of inequality: whites-only signs. Red lines on neighborhood maps. Sharecroppers. Today racial inequality leaves more of an impression, albeit one deeply felt by black Americans, than it does a concrete picture of oppression and extraction. But the story of how we hustle, how hard we hustle and how differently we hustle adds form to the impression. Economic injustice isnt fairer because nearly everyone is hustling. The hustle itself is a site of racial inequality. What hustling looks like in 2020 depends on who you are. To hustle, if you are working class, is to piece together multiple jobs. If you are middle class or upper class, it is discussed as multiple revenue streams. But the goal is the same: pull together a patchwork of income in order to get ahead. On an autumn day in 2018, I drove to Durham, N.C., for a conference celebrating black capitalism. A quintessentially Southern city, marked by racial histories and racist inequalities, Durham struggled in the early 1990s to find both an identity and an economic base. By the 2000s, a renaissance was taking place, one that looked a lot like the ones in similarly situated midsize urban areas across the country. The cult of quirky regional identity is remarkable for its sameness. In Durham; Pittsburgh; Louisville, Ky.; Indianapolis; or Boise, Idaho, you can find craft breweries, dog parks, clubs where you throw axes at a wall, and farm-to-table everything but especially food trucks. The conference name, Black Wall Street: Homecoming, was a callback to the district in downtown Durham known as Black Wall Street in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one of several economic corridors in the U.S. where black wealth was consolidated during segregation. Black-owned businesses served black customers whom white businesses either would not serve or did not serve equitably. Black Wall Street in Durham was decimated the way many such corridors were in the mid20th century. Urban planners used federal funding for the cross-national highway system, forcibly displacing black residents and business owners. The government built a freeway through Black Wall Street. The audience at the conference was full of enthusiastic black men and women, mostly in their 30s, 40s and 50s, who identified as entrepreneurs. Programming was organized by the kinds of buzzwords that animate the digital economy. One does not advertise, he brands. A woman with an online marketing company does not tweet or post; she creates content. Mostly, participants wanted to get better at pitching. One conference organizer explained while infrastructure was essential to the old way of doing business, the new era of entrepreneurship is about developing processes and selling disruption. To help them thrive in this model of personal economic uplift, the conference encouraged black entrepreneurs to hustle in a way that white capital and consumers could understand. This was the art of the pitch. Just over a year later, in December 2019, a North Carolina chapter of Fight for $15a national campaign advocating a $15-an-hour federal minimum wageheld a forum called Working in Durham: A Peoples Hearing. The event brought together low-wage workers, many of them black, to talk about unsafe working conditions, wage theft and the need for unions in the workplace. Person after person shared stories of working in service-sector jobs, some of the only jobs available in the area to those without a college degree. Although workers in other states have seen their paychecks go up because of state and local increases in the minimum wage, in Durham the rate remains at the federal level of $7.25 an hour. An older black man said, You need two or three jobs just to afford housing. A mother said that even though she earned her bachelors degree, she still struggled to find work, pay her rent and afford insurance. We need more resources, she said. Not for a handout, but a help up. Many black workers outside the middle class make up what is known as the gig economy, taking on jobs that treat them like independent contractors even though they work them like employees. In more traditional service jobs, like cashier or waitress, the hustle is created by the rise of on-demand scheduling. Technology lets employers change employee schedules quickly, which makes it difficult for workers to plan their complex lives. The hustle is especially hard on black women, who bear the brunt of childcare, elder care and mutual-aid relationships with friends and neighbors. It also makes it nearly impossible to predict ones wages from paycheck to paycheck. Because the pay is so spiky and the work so unpredictable, many dabble in a stream of network opportunities, like selling diet pills or travel vouchers. While we do not think of the middle-class pitch and the low-wage hustle as the same thing, they are responding to the same reality. For black Americans, achieving upward mobility, even in thriving cities that compete for tech jobs, private capital and national recognition, is as complicated as it was in 1963. In that economy, black Americans hustled in the face of legal racial segregation and social stigma that cordoned us off from opportunities reserved for white Americans. In 2020, black Americans can legally access the major on-ramps to opportunitycolleges, workplaces, public schools, neighborhoods, transportation, electoral politicsbut despite hustling like everyone else, they do not have much to show for it. While the hustle is often valorized, black Americans have long known that its a raw deal. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is remembered for the soaring speeches and massive turnout, but its organizing platform had a laser focus on the particular forms of hustle prescribed to black Americans at the time. The most important period of economic expansion in the 20th century took place after World War II, and black workers had been deliberately excludedthey were routinely denied low-interest loans, housing in certain neighborhoods, GI Bill benefits and access to higher education. Racial segregation turned the massive public spending and economic investment into what academics have called affirmative action for white Americans. Forced to hustle amid largesse, black Americans built their own social institutions to substitute for inherited wealth. They hustled in underground economies like local lotteries, but they also hustled with multiple jobs, multigenerational households and mutual-aid societies. That is why the days most regaled speaker, Martin Luther King Jr., framed his dream in terms of a check written to black Americans that we could not cash. The March galvanized what we now perhaps too blithely think of as the Civil Rights Act. The landmark legislation not only enshrined full black citizenship in the nations governance, it also rerouted black hustle into mainstream paths of economic inclusion. Affirmative action policies opened up lucrative public-sector jobs that transformed the black middle class. Equal access to school funding and military benefits injected new capital into historically black colleges. Combined with integrated K-12 schools, those institutions set about remedying centuries of deliberately under-utilized black educational capacity. By the 1970s, there was every reason to hope that black people could trade the hustle for actual achievement. Achievement, measured by increases not just in economic fortunes but also the good housing and health afforded by those fortunes, should make the hustle unnecessary. Hustle is for surviving a rigged game. Achievement is for strategizing in a fair competition with clear rules, applied equally. But by the time I attended the Black Wall Street event in Durham, there was overwhelming evidence that the hustle is alive and well. Black workers are left to do precisely what they were doing on the eve of the March on Washington: piece together their own economic survival. Demonstrators march in Chicago for a $15-per-hour minimum wage on May 23, 2017 | Scott OlsonGetty Images This is happening almost 60 years later for two reasons. First is the retrenchment of white peoples privileged access to the means of economic mobility, like the ability to pay for high-quality college or connections to certain social networks. And second is an economy that has built a fire wall against the Marchs demands by investing heavily in the private sector and shrinking the public sector. By the 1980s it had become clear that a better job alone would not anchor black freedom. Policies that had once been explicitly about targeting poverty through massive public investment instead favored private-sector schemes. The private sector, in turn, was more committed to profits than to social well-being. It also operates, to a large degree, beyond the indirect control of voters and their elected representatives. The result is a national safety net that gets weaker every year, with rising health costs, gutted food subsidy programs, no paid parental leave, affordable housing shortages and starved civic infrastructures that now struggle to provide entire cities with clean water and clean air. At every hole in the safety net, black Americans are more likely to fall through. For the black middle-class entrepreneurs, the hustle is about the fragility of their position. The public sector still matters to black economic stability and mobility, and its erosion means black workers must increasingly look to a hostile private sector. There, jobs have shifted from production and manufacturing to professional services, and the highest-paying ones can be some of the most resistant to the kind of training that college affords black Americans. One does not train for a job in, say, consulting the way one does for engineering. The soft-skills jobs that trade in relationships are difficult ones for black workers to break into. That makes entrepreneurship attractive to professional-class black people like those at the Black Wall Street event. Pitching feels more democratic than being born into the right family. But being born into the right family is still the single most important qualification for the digital economys highest-status jobs. As a study of contemporary inequality from the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce put it, To succeed in America, its better to be born rich than smart. If there is any good news, its that collective action still works. Fight for $15 has demonstrated that a multi-racial movement for economic justice can raise the minimum wage for service and care workers, two sectors where black workers are overrepresented. In Durham, spurred by the ongoing efforts of organizers and unions, the mayor and city council established a Workers Rights Commission in 2019 tasked with writing a workers bill of rights that could raise the minimum wage and abolish the ban on collective bargaining for public employees. It is a significant win for a Southern city. The middle-class hustle is a tougher nut to crack. While the black workers who come out to protest with Fight for $15 have drawn explicit connections between historical struggle and their everyday experiences of racial inequality, the Black Wall Street entrepreneurs seemed to have a lot of language but little critical engagement with the past. Though the conference was staged in the countrys Research Triangle, an area packed with colleges and universities, there wasnt much discussion of the economic justice issues facing the black adults who will graduate into this new economy. I did not observe any panels on raising capital when you are managing historically high student loan debt, for instance, and a tour of the citys historical Black Wall Street district largely neglected the eminent domain and gentrification that destroyed the areas black economic base. Some panelists also took pains to distance themselves from ideas of black collectivity. As one conferencegoer said, We cant just be about black people. This is a diverse city. Civil rights organizers were explicit that the fates of all black Americans are linked through equal access to jobs, education and public life, but if middle-class black workers are as willing to embrace an agnostic reclamation of the Black Wall Street ethos as they appeared, they will have a hard time connecting their pitch to the hustle. And if they cannot make that connection, they are unlikely to see their hustle as linked to the larger one. All is not lost. Both hustles are embedded in a history of not only survival but overcoming. The before-and-after story of U.S. racism turns on a significant victory. The March on Washington won. Whether what they won endures or is defended or built upon, the fact is it won. Collective organizing created meaningful social change. We know how to win. When we hustle alone, we hustle hard. When we hustle together, we can end the hustle for all. McMillan Cottom, an associate professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, is the author of Thick: And Other Essays, a finalist for the National Book Award This article is part of a special project about equality in America today. Read more about The March, TIMEs virtual reality re-creation of the 1963 March on Washington and sign up for TIMEs history newsletter for updates. While some F&B brands in Vietnam have been forced out of business there are others that are prospering. A range of restaurants under the banner Mon Hue and its sister chains were shuttered in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in October. The companys website and social media channels were also switched off. Investors in Mon Hue then filed a lawsuit with the Ho Chi Minh City Peoples Court against Mr. Huy Nhat, Founder of Mon Hues parent company, the Huy Vietnam Food Processing JSC. While the lawsuit is still to play out, it brought some unwanted attention to Vietnams food and beverage (F&B) industry. Analysts said it was an example of a large restaurant chain receiving massive amounts of money from investment funds and then facing difficulties and even closure after an initial period of heated growth. No yellow-brick road Huy Vietnam operates the Mon Hue, Pho Ong Hung, Com Tho Chay, Great Banh Mi, Pho 99, and TPTea brands. It employed more than 2,500 local staff nationwide at its peak and served 47,000 safe and affordable meals every day, before more than 80 restaurants then closed their doors. Mr. Sean T Ngo, CEO and Co-founder of VF Franchise Consulting, told VET that there are probably many reasons for the failure and closure of Mon Hue restaurants, such as insufficient cash flows to grow successfully, high rental costs, intense competition, poor supply chains, and difficulties in retaining key employees. The lawsuit was initiated by a group of international private equity funds that have invested a total of over $70 million in the company since 2013, including ADV Partners, AIF Capital, F&H Fenghe, Fortress Investments, Gryphus Capital, and Welkin Capital. Ms. Nguyen Phi Van, Co-founder of World Franchise Associates, pointed out that there are two trends in investment in chains: building a sustainable business, and building a product solely to boost financial transactions. In the second, she explained, businesses will create a model and expand quickly, issuing great financial statements to invite investment funds. As the latter hope to invest their capital, they often dont pay sufficient attention to sustainable development. Their purpose is to expand and sell for a profit, and in this case the chain has collapsed, Ms. Van said. She also told VET that the failure of Mon Hue relates to financial issues. Location was also a key factor. While Mon Hue had restaurants in prime locations such as Vincom Ba Trieu, Pho Hue, Ba Trieu, and Tran Duy Hung in Hanoi, rentals for golden spots in both the capital and Ho Chi Minh City are high and rising. According to a JLL quarterly report from October, ground floor asking rents in Hanois CBD stood at $101.8 per sq m per month in the third quarter, an increase of 2.3 per cent year-on-year and 1.1 per cent quarter-on-quarter. Rentals in Ho Chi Minh Citys retail market during the quarter were $135.5 per sq m per month in the CBD and $35.8 per sq m per month in non-CBD areas. Even world-famous chain McDonalds said that finding a suitable location in the heart of Hanoi was one of the key reasons it arrived late in Vietnams capital after opening 16 outlets in Ho Chi Minh City. Before Mon Hue, the Pho 24 restaurant chain dominated Vietnams food chain business with 60 restaurants around the country and 20 overseas. It agreed to being acquired by Viet Thai Ltd., the owner of the Highlands Coffee chain, in 2011. Its restaurants are now concentrated in Ho Chi Minh City, where it has just 18, and two others at Hanois Noi Bai International Airport and Da Nang International Airport, according to its website. Mr. Ly Qui Trung, Founder of Pho 24, declined to speak with VET but told local media early this year that Pho 24 needed funds to refresh its image, brand, and marketing strategy. Market optimism Other F&B brands are facing similar issues but there are many that are thriving. Founded in 2005, Golden Gate now owns more than 20 brands and over 300 multi-style restaurants around the country and is constantly expanding. It posted revenue of some VND4 trillion ($172 million) in 2018, with an after-tax profit of VND269 billion ($11.5 million). After more than eleven years in business, Redsun-ITI has 13 major brands with more than 200 restaurants in cities and provinces nationwide and abroad. It posted revenue of VND690 billion ($29.6 million) last year. Both Golden Gate and Redsun are phenomenal companies with many different restaurant brands in their portfolios, and both continue to grow at a breakneck pace, said Mr. Ngo. Each, though, has brands that over-perform and others that under-perform. The Ministry of Industry and Trade has said that 235 foreign brands are registered in Vietnam, in F&B and in fields such as fashion, retail, education, hospitality, and services. Mr. Ngo said that to succeed, restaurants need to continue to focus on product, service, price, and promoting the brand. Understanding what consumers want and delivering it above and beyond expectations normally results in success, he added. Meanwhile, Ms. Van said large global chains always resonate because of sustainable operations and financial transactions that enable them to develop efficiently. An effective and sustainable business model is a factor for success when investing in Vietnams F&B industry, she said. The market also exhibits many positive signs attracting other brands. Market researchers Nielsen forecast that by 2020, Vietnam will have about 44 million people in its middle-class and this will increase to 95 million by 2030. Middle-class households spend from $10-100 per person a month, 30-40 per cent of which is spent on F&B. The JLL report also noted that along with fashion and lifestyle, F&B continues to see continued demand thanks to Vietnams young demographic and the rise of the middle-class. According to Statista, revenue in Vietnams F&B market in 2019 may reach $200 billion, up 34.3 per cent against 2018, and more than double to some $408 billion by 2023. Mr. Ngo believes that the F&B industry will grow by a healthy 10-15 per cent each year, driven primarily by growing disposable incomes and busier lifestyles that result in people eating out more and eating at home less. VN Economic Times Ngoc Lan Vietnam beverage industry potential appeals to foreign players Listed among leading Asian consumers of alcoholic drinks, Vietnam remains potential for foreign investors. PARIS - Julian Assanges European defence team said Thursday it will try to seek asylum in France for the Wikileaks founder, whose full hearings for extradition to the United States on spying charges start next week in London. French team member Eric Dupont-Moretti said Assanges case placed at stake the fate and the status of all journalists.(asterisk) We consider the situation is sufficiently serious that our duty is to talk about it with French President Emmanuel Macron, the lawyer said He was one of a team of lawyers lined up at a Paris news conference to explain why they view the case against Assange as unfair, citing his poor health and alleged violations of his rights while in jail in London. French members of the team said they have been working on a concrete demand for Macron to grant Assange asylum in France, where he has children and where Wikileaks was present at its founding. It is not an ordinary demand, lawyer Antoine Vey said, noting that Assange is not on French soil. Baltasar Garzon, the Spanish co-ordinator of Assanges team, reiterated his clients plan to claim that the Trump administration offered him a pardon. The alleged condition was that Assange must agree to say that Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic National Committee emails during the 2016 U.S. election campaign. Garzon insisted that Assange was pressured by the Trump administration but resisted and the order was given to demand the extradition of Julian Assange, he said. The White House has firmly denied the claim. However, Garzon said that both testimony and documentary proof of the claim will be offered to the court at the full hearing that opens Monday. Assange, 48, spent seven years in Ecuadors London embassy before being evicted in April 2019. He was arrested by British police for jumping bail in 2012. In November, Sweden dropped a sex crimes investigation against him because so much time had elapsed. Assange, who is Australian, has received backing from numerous quarters. The council of Europes commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatovic, added a voice of opposition Thursday, citing both concerns over Assanges eventual treatment in a U.S. prison and the impact on press freedoms were he to be extradited. I think this is one of the most important and significant political trials of this generation, in fact longer, senior Labour Party official John McDonnell McDonnell said in London. The father of Assange, an Australian, insisted at the Paris news conference that his son was not a criminal. I cant for the life of me understand why hes still in prison, said John Shipton. The three men who held up a CVS Pharmacy on New Years Day planned their moves meticulously. The robbers hit at 5 a.m. They wore blue surgical gloves so they wouldnt leave prints. They waved guns at employees and bound several of them with zip ties. Detectives would later review store surveillance video that showed one of the suspects casing the place the day before. And they made off with a boatload of drugs in white garbage bags more than 10,000 pills that contained the opioids hydrocodone and oxycodone, according to the Pinellas County Sheriffs Office. It had an estimated street value of about $320,000. Roy Lampkin, left, David Dobbins and Christopher Rachell are charged in connection with a caper that resulted in a CVS in Clearwater being held up by robbers. But as detectives investigated the area around the store, located at 30387 U.S. 19 N, they started noticing pill bottles, according to an arrest warrant. The robbers, it appeared, had emptied the bottles as they made their getaway, then tossed them out the window of their car. Detectives started following the pill bottles like bread crumbs, eventually leading to a house at 1045 West Ave. There, they found the same White Chrysler 200 that had been recorded on surveillance camera fleeing the scene. White cotton and a pill bottle cap lay on the ground nearby. The deputies detained the two men inside the Chrysler: Christopher Rachell Jr. and David Dobbins, both 19. They matched the descriptions of two of the robbers seen inside the store, detectives said. They found more evidence on Dobbinss cellphone. He had recorded videos of the suspects in the same room as a bed strewn with pills and clear plastic baggies. Videos also showed them handling a white garbage bag near the pills the same type of bag with which the suspects were seen fleeing, reports state. The videos helped them identify Roy Lampkin as a collaborator. The 18-year-old could be seen in the video handling a clear plastic bag that contained round white pills, reports state, and his fingerprints were found on one of the white garbage bags and on a plastic bag of opioid pills. Story continues Though the warrant does not name Lampkin as one of the suspected robbers, it says he was captured on CVSs surveillance video before the crime. He entered the building at about 3:52 a.m. on Jan. 1 and asked the pharmacist a question. He was arrested on Feb. 5 on charge of drug trafficking. Rachell and Dobbins were arrested Jan. 1. Each faces one count of armed robbery, two counts of trafficking in illegal drugs and three counts of false imprisonment. Dobbins remains in the Pinellas County jail, held in lieu of $280,000 bail. Rachell, who also faces a charge of possession of oxycodone, is being held in lieu of $282,000 bail. Lampkin faces two counts of drug trafficking. His bail is $500,000. What the leaders of India want and are determined to have is a democracy that is indigenous to their own country not English or American or French or Russian, wrote Eleanor Roosevelt. Diplomat, activist, and President Franklin D. Roosevelts wife, according to Mrs. Roosevelt, who travelled across India in the spring of 1952, the democracy India is building probably will never be exactly like ours. After all, she continued, there is no reason it should be. Few American leaders understood this at the time. President Harry S. Truman ... Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal. They do not reflect the view/s of Business Standard. The Andrews government has asked the Fair Work Commission to intervene to stop tram drivers striking during Melbourne's grand prix next month. The government will refer the tram union to the commission on Friday, although no date has been set for when the case will be heard. Big crowds catch trams to Albert Park for the grand prix each year. Credit:Jason South Trams ground to a halt for four hours on Thursday, with the Rail, Tram and Bus Union and the network's operator, Yarra Trams, still at loggerheads over a pay deal. More strikes are scheduled throughout March, some of which will directly impact the Formula One Australian Grand Prix, and the government is looking at all available avenues to stop any disruptions to the large event. A preliminary investigation showed a 2011 Freightliner was eastbound, driving in the center lane, when an object struck the windshield of the truck, a release said. The object appeared to have penetrated the windshield, which resulted in the glass shattering, according to a release. WESTPORT Police and school officials dominated the top 10 spots on the list of highest paid town employees of 2019, according to recently released data from town hall and the school districts central office. The top paid employee of the Westport police department was Cpl. Howard Simpson, who topped the list with gross wages of $271,308. This included a base salary of $91,366, $96,476 in overtime and $83,456 taken home for outside duty work. Outside duty is paid for by groups such as construction vendors, faith organizations or utility companies who need security assistance, unlike overtime pay which comes from the towns budget. By Trend Azerbaijan's Central Election Commission (CEC) has annulled the voting results from three precincts of the country's 47th Mingachevir city constituency, Trend reports with reference to the CEC. CEC member Bakhsheysh Asgarov said that offenses at a number of polling stations of the Mingachevir constituency were indicated in an appeal to the CEC. According to Asgarov, during the investigation on the matter, the CEC revealed facts that could affect the voting results and do not reflect the will of the voters. In view of this, the CEC member proposed to annul the election results from the 9th, 17th and 21st precincts of the constituency. The proposal was accepted as a result of the vote conducted at the CEC meeting on Feb. 19. The CEC also annulled the voting results of two precincts of the 90th Aghdash constituency. CEC member Gabil Orujov said that the CEC had received an appeal on offenses in the 6th and 7th precincts of the Aghdash constituency. According to the CEC member, the commission, during the investigation on the matter, revealed facts that distorted the voting results. Gabil Orujov proposed to annul the voting results received from the 6th and 7th precincts of the Aghdash constituency. The proposal was accepted after voting. The snap parliamentary elections were held in Azerbaijan on Feb. 9. -- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Fondly called Jeetu Bhaiya from Kota Factory or Gittu from Permanent Roommates, Jitendra Kumar has always struck a chord with the audiences with his stellar acting skills. As he is all set to make his big Bollywood debut with Ayushmann Khurrana in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, he revealed how it all feels like a dream. After all, he first met Ayushmann at his college during a fest. Who knew one day he will play a lead role in a Bollywood movie alongside him! As he is all set to embark upon a new journey, he remembers how it all started. Did you know he used to teach physics to support his family while he was working with TVF? "I knew I can teach physics well, so earning money from tuition was no struggle. Struggle was to earn money through acting. It was in figuring out the point when you are confident enough to leave the job that pays easy money for the job you love. Then the struggle was to get a serious acting gig to be able to completely sustain myself on it," he said. After Pitchers released in 2015, Jitendra earned enough money to pay off his bills and he never looked back. But acting wasn't his first choice. YouTube The IIT-Kharagpur graduate initially wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. When he failed to make the cut and settled for civil engineering, his heart was somewhere else. "I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. But I didn't get a good rank, so I got civil engineering. That's where I lost interest in studies. If you're not excited for the field of engineering that you have, you can't be a good engineer," the actor told PTI. YouTube "Kyun pull giraaoon main? (Why should I build a bridge that could collapse anytime?) That's more dangerous," he quipped. That's when acting happened. In Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan, a same-sex love story woven around two middle class families in small town India, he is paired with Ayushmann Khurrana. The movie that also stars Gajraj Rao and Neena Gupta is slated to be released on Feb 21. Army Chief General M M Naravane on Thursday said a roadmap has been prepared to implement the Supreme Court's judgment to grant permanent commission to women officers, asserting that the force does not discriminate against any soldier. The Supreme Court on Monday had directed that women officers in the Army be granted permanent commission and command postings. "We have made a roadmap. We will send letters to all women officers asking whether they will prefer permanent commissioning," Gen Naravane told a select group of reporters in New Delhi. "Indian Army does not discriminate (against) any soldier based on religion, caste, creed, or even gender. The outlook of the Indian Army has been throughout like this and that is why we started inducting women officers as early as in 1993," he said. Indian Army has taken the initiative to induct women in rank and file, and the first batch of 100 women soldiers is undergoing training at Corps of Military Police Centre and School, he said. "The Supreme Court's decision is a welcome one as it brings out a sense of clarity and purpose to gainfully employ officers for better efficiency of the organisation. I must assure that everybody in the Indian Army including women officers will be given equal opportunity to contribute to the nation as also progress in their careers," he said hailing the verdict as enabling. Speaking on the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, Gen Naravane said terror incidents have seen a downturn and the Army is maintaining pressure on terror groups. There is an external dimension to the decrease in cross-border terrorism, he said, in oblique reference to the ongoing Financial Action Task Force (FATF) plenary. Pakistan may have to rethink strategy as even China realised they cannot back their all-weather friend all the time, the Army chief said on the FATF plenary. A sub-group of the global terror financing watchdog FATF on Tuesday recommended continuation of Pakistan in the 'Grey List' for its failure to check terror funding. When asked on the health condition of hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, the army chief only said security forces are geared up to take care of any situation. He also said the proposed Thal Sena Bhawan will bring all Army headquarter offices under one roof thereby improving the working efficiency, while reducing the carbon footprint and logistics requirements. "It will also allow more family time for all soldiers tenating peace posting at Delhi," Gen Naravane said. Tunisia: Prime minister-elect announces list of ministers Date for confidence vote to be announced today (ANSAmed) - TUNIS, FEBRUARY 20 - Tunisian Prime Minister-elect Elyes Fakhfakh met with Tunisian President Kais Saied on Thursday and then announced his government team, composed of 29 ministers, two undersecretaries, and a special minister for large projects, distributed among party members and independents. The composition is a slightly revised and corrected version of the one presented last Saturday. Some parties had objections to that composition, particularly the Islamic Ennhadha party, the top party in Parliament with 54 seats, which is asking for a more inclusive government. On Thursday the parliamentary president's office will set the date for a confidence vote. "The various political parties have shown great class and have put the national interest first," Fakhfakh said in a brief statement. "The government will bring together a large political coalition and will be able to count both on great abilities as well as political personalities, but above all it aims to give stability to the country and will be able to give back trust and hope to Tunisians," he said. After more than three weeks of consultations to form his team with the broadest consensus possible, Fakhfakh must now surpass the minimum threshold of 109 votes to win a confidence vote in Parliament. While Ennhadha, with seven places on the team, has already said it will vote yes, the party Qalb Tounes, which has no ministers on the team, has said it will decide how it will vote following an official meeting of its leaders. The Tunisian Parliament that resulted from the elections last October is a fragmented one, and with no political power surpassing 25% of the consensus, alliances are essential.(ANSAmed). The ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) lambast the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC) for politicising the subject of illegal mining, aka 'galamsey', an anomaly which it blamed the opposition party for creating during its long tenure. During a press conference yesterday, the party said 'galamsey', which is about the country's lifeline, was being addressed through a clearly spelt out policy whose dividends were being realized. Petty Politics Yaw Buaben Asamoa, the NPP Director of Communications, who addressed the press conference, described as unfortunate the opposition NDC leadership's preference for petty politics which, as he put it, would rather deal in politics that divides us rather than the things that unite us. The NDC members, he said, characteristic of them, had reduced the major policy issues to blaming the President, screaming loudly that whatever initiative was at stake had failed and demanding the votes of the people. Clean Water Emphasising the importance of clean water against the backdrop of how illegal mining is polluting water bodies in the country, he said not winning the fight for clean water is not an option. It is not an option because clean water and clean rivers are the lifeblood of this country, especially for our farmers. Mahama & NDC Former President Mahama and the NDC, he said, were part of the problem, not the solution of the 'galamsey' challenge facing the country, adding that the major deterioration in the quality of water due to galamsey began during their term in office but they did nothing to protect the situation. Major Fix The major fix to the fallouts from illegal mining, Mr. Buaben Asamoa said, was happening now under the NPP. When the NPP took office, he noted the President made it his top priority to tackle the pollution of our water bodies and made sure everyone in this country had access to clean, healthy water. That is the promise and we are delivering on it every day gradually but surely. Mocking NDC Taking a swipe at the NDC, the NPP recalled how the former had always stood against innovations, pointing at, for instance, their opposition to the Free SHS programme, among others. It is precisely that lack of reality that led to the reckless promise of a one-time premium and the rejection of Free SHS, he added. NDC Posture The NDC members, he said, continued to bombard this beautiful country with threats of violence if the electoral process is not done according to what they dictate. While a clear and large majority of Ghanaians want a credible election with the support of a new clean register, the NDC leadership are threatening to burn the country down, if all of us do not bow to their desire to go back to a register that has been declared by the service provider as technically unsound and can be restored only with inbuilt risk at a cost higher than a new one, he said. Fairness Mr. Asamoa said whilst the NDC had the right to pick and choose what they would talk about, it was only fair that they responded to issues of deep concern to the country if they genuinely sought to rule. The NDC and the former President have refused to acknowledge the enhanced performance of the cedi, with international investment predicted to be the highest this early 2020, the NPP observed. Western Togoland The former President, the NPP said, was yet to say something about the Western Togoland issues. We are yet to hear John Mahama on the impact of the new regions. We are yet to hear John Mahama on the interoperability contract. We are yet to hear John Mahama on the disastrous and dangerous state of the Eastern Corridor road, torn apart less than five years after he received a Ford vehicle in appreciation from his favourite contractor. We are yet to hear John Mahama on his galamsey control policy. ---Daily Guide Ewan McGregor transformed into America's first celebrity fashion designer Halston while filming Ryan Murphy's new drama in Manhattan on Wednesday. The Scottish actor, 48, got into character as the prolific man, who tragically died from complications with AIDs in 1990, as he filmed scenes with Rory Culkin. He was dressed in a black leather coat which was teamed with a a black button-up top, and pinstripe navy blue flared trousers to reflect the style of the era. Face off: Ewan McGregor transformed into iconic fashion designer Halston as he got to work on set with co-star Rory Culkin in Manhattan for new Netflix show on Wednesday Ewan sported a shaggy retro do, and completed his ensemble by wearing black dress shoes and smoking a cigarette as cameras rolled. Rory, who is set to portray filmmaker Joel Schumacher in the show, looked hip in a clashing ensemble that paired a knit sweater with horizontal stripes and trousers with vertical stripes Halston, real name Roy Halston Frowick, enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame in the 70s as he became the designer of choice, and confidante, to some of the most famous women in Hollywood. The designer began his career in Chicago, and designed the pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy wore during her husband's inauguration in 1960. Transformation: The Scottish actor, 48, got into character as the prolific man, who tragically died from complications with AIDs in 1990, as he filmed scenes Star: Halston, real name Roy Halston Frowick, became the designer of choice, and confidante, to some of the most famous women in Hollywood (pictured with Bianca Jagger in 1977) Life of fame: Halston was regularly seen with starlets like Elizabeth Taylor (pictured in 1977), Liza Minnelli or Bianca Jagger on his arm when they went out to Studio 54 Moving to New York in 1966, the designer made his first ready-to-wear line, which led to him becoming one of the country's most influential fashion designers. His shirt dress designs and beaded kaftans were a hit so he became the poster child for the minimally opulent fashion of the disco-scene, and prolific artist Andy Warhol even called his work the 'the art form of the 70s'. In 1973 he signed off his fashion empire for $12 million, and the opening of Studio 54 helped boost his success as he was regularly seen with starlets like Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli or Bianca Jagger on his arm when they went out to the venue. Of his inspiration for designs, he told Vogue in 1980: 'What we did, perhaps more than anybody else in the business, was to relax fashion and to create an American point of view that wasnt there on that level before.' Career: The designed the pillbox hat that Jackie Kennedy wore during her husband's 1960 inauguration, and in 1966 he became one of the country's most influential fashion designers Iconic: His shirt dress designs and beaded kaftans were a hit, and prolific artist Andy Warhol even called his work the 'the art form of the 70s' (pictured with Liza Minnelli in 1975) Enjoying himself: In 1973 he signed off his fashion empire for $12 million, and the opening of Studio 54 helped boost his success and party lifestyle Thanks to his success Halston embarked on a life of debauchery, which saw him host sex parties, sleep with male prostitutes and serve them steak as a form of foreplay, as well as watch Moroccan sex shows that featured bestiality, according to author Steven Gaines. Gaines, who wrote the book Simply Halston that the show is based on, said of the designer's wild sex life: 'Being trash was venerated. The trashier you could be, the more you could get laid, the more drugs you could take.' The author went on to detail how Studio 54 co-owner Steve Rubell would hand out quaaludes during Halston's wild parties in his lavish New York pad, and how the designer would host man-on-man orgies alongside his on-again-off-again partner Victor Hugo. Will it be on the show? The author detailed how Halston would host man-on-man orgies in his lavish New York pad alongside his on-again-off-again partner Victor Hugo Exciting: The new Netflix show, created by American Horror Story's Ryan Murphy Warhol even took photos of the sex parties from the side, while publicist R. Couri Hay claimed that 'Victor had the keys to the safe with the cocaine.' Going on to detail his affair with Halston when he was 17-years-old, Hay revealed: 'He looked at me like I was a really yummy ice cream cone. It took a year before I succumbed and slept with him.' However, Halston's life of excess soon took its toll, as he tested positive for AIDS in 1988 and tragically died in 1990, in San Francisco. The new Netflix show, created by American Horror Story's Ryan Murphy, is a limited series, and he took to Instagram earlier this week to share a first look teaser. Fashionable: The film follows Halston in various different stages of his life, and given his look on set it appeared that Ewan was shooting scenes in 1971 (Halston pictured right that year) Relaxed: Ewan got into character with ease on set, as he was seen preparing to film a scene Crossing paths: In the intense scenes, Halston and Joel Schumacher appeared to face off through a window of a department store In the video, Ewan transformed into Halston, and portrayed the designer during various different stages of his life and sported multiple hairstyles. His character was surrounded by various models, muses and mannequins who were all showcasing his designs. Alongside the video, Ryan penned: 'After a long 20 years of twists and turns, the limited series HALSTON starring the fantastic Ewan McGregor began production today. 'I am so proud of our director and leader Dan Minahan, and Christine Vachon of Killer Films. I am thrilled to be producing this great and meaningful show with them and Alexis Martin Woodall and Pamela Koffler. Exciting: Ryan took to Instagram earlier this week to share a first look teaser of the upcoming program, which started production on Tuesday Evolution: Ewan transformed into Halston, and portrayed the designer during various different stages of his life and sported multiple hairstyles Committed to addressing climate change SIU Carbondale Chancellor John M. Dunn signs the Second Nature Climate Commitment to address climate change through research and action on campus. Seated with Dunn are: from left, Geory Kurtzhals, SIUs sustainability director, and right, Dylan Gibson, a graduate student studying geography and environmental resources. SIU Carbondale makes climate commitment CARBONDALE, Ill., Southern Illinois University Carbondale reaffirmed the universitys longstanding commitment to sustainability when Chancellor John M. Dunn signed the Second Nature Climate Commitment on February 20, 2020. More than 800 college and university leaders across the country have signed the commitment to address climate change through research and action on campus. Participating institutions commit to developing a campus plan that reduces greenhouse gasses, deploys alternative energy sources, creates energy efficiencies or includes other strategies that reduce their carbon footprints. The signed commitment states that colleges and universities must exercise leadership in their communities and throughout society by providing the knowledge, research, practice, and informed graduates to create a positive and sustainable future. Dunn said the Second Nature Climate Commitment extends SIUs ongoing commitment to sustainability. The university was the first in Illinois to sign the 1999 Talloires Declaration, an action plan for incorporating sustainability and environmental literacy at colleges and universities worldwide. SIU signed on to the Illinois Sustainable University Compact in 2007 and, two years later, implemented a student-driven green fee to support sustainability initiatives across campus. Since then, SIU has been recognized as a Sierra Magazine Cool School and included in the Princeton Reviews Guide to Green Colleges. It has also earned designation as a bicycle-friendly campus and recognition from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Our students have led the way, encouraging the university to be proactive on sustainability issues, Dunn said. Im proud of their commitment and proud that the university is continuing to move forward. This signing is the first step in developing a Climate Action Plan that will help us to outline our own solutions to the climate change crisis. Dylan Gibson, one of the students who proposed the universitys participation in the Second Nature Climate Commitment, said students understand the impact of climate change. "SIU students recognize the climate crisis as one of the defining challenges of our time, said Gibson, a graduate student studying geography and environmental resources. The Second Nature Climate Commitment is an opportunity for the university to begin to act in accordance with what is necessary to protect our community and society at large from its effects." Geory Kurtzhals, SIUs sustainability director, said the universitys reputation for sustainability will help attract students. She cited the 2019 College Hopes and Worries survey conducted by the Princeton Review, which indicated that 66% of prospective students who responded said a universitys commitment to green issues would influence their college choice. The concerns of our students mirror those of individuals and communities all around the world, she said. Second Nature is a non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating action on climate change through higher education. In 2006, Second Nature launched its signature program, the Climate Leadership Network, which was built on rigorous climate action commitments made by higher educations presidents and chancellors. The climate commitment requires the university to create an internal task force to guide the development of a plan within two months of signing. A joint university-community task force will be appointed and a campus greenhouse gas inventory will be completed within a year, and a resilience assessment evaluating university and community capacity for change will be completed within two years. The climate action plan must be completed within three years, and participating institutions complete annual, public reports on progress. Tim Carter, president of Second Nature, congratulated the university on its commitment. In doing so, Southern Illinois University Carbondale will accelerate climate action and fulfill higher educations role as a key agent of change for society, Carter said. Second Nature and the members of the Climate Leadership Network look forward to working alongside Southern Illinois University in its efforts to advance innovative and urgently needed climate solutions on their campus and in their community. Credit: CC0 Public Domain Euthanasia is legal in only three European countries while others allow terminally ill people to refuse life-maintaining treatment or to have help to die. As lawmakers in Portugal begin debating draft laws that could decriminalise the practice, here is a round-up of euthanasia regulations elsewhere in Europe. Fully legal - The Netherlands has legalised active and direct euthanasia since April 2002. Requested administration of a drug in lethal doses is authorised if patients make the request while lucid. They must also be experiencing unbearable suffering from a condition diagnosed as incurable by at least two doctors. The Netherlands has also authorised euthanasia for children younger than 12 under strict conditions. - Belgium lifted restrictions on euthanasia in September 2002 for patients facing constant, unbearable and untreatable physical or psychological suffering. They must be aged 18 or over and request termination of life in a voluntary, deliberated and repeated manner free from coercion. In February 2014, Belgium became the first country to authorise children to request euthanasia if they suffer a terminal disease and understand the consequences of the act. - In Luxembourg, a text legalising euthanasia in certain terminal cases was approved in March 2009. It excludes minors. Other ways of assisted death - Euthanasia is illegal in Spain but the law allows a gravely sick person who is in control of their mental faculties to refuse treatment. The Socialists in mid-February 2020 won a first step in their bid to decriminalise euthanasia by winning support from lawmakers to discuss a bill on the practice. - Italy's Constitutional Court ruled in September 2019 it was not always a crime to help someone in "intolerable suffering" commit suicide. Parliament is set to debate a change in the law banning the practice. - Switzerland is one of the rare countries that allows assisted suicide with patients administering a lethal dose of medication themselves. It does not allow active, direct euthanasia by a third party but tolerates the provision of substances to relieve suffering, even if death is a possible side-effect. The halting of medical procedures that maintain life, called passive euthanasia, is also tolerated. - In France, a 2005 law legalises passive euthanasia as a "right to die". A 2016 law allows doctors to couple this with "deep and continuous sedation" for terminally ill patients, while keeping euthanasia and assisted suicide illegal. - Sweden authorised passive euthanasia in 2010. - Britain has allowed medical personnel to halt life-preserving treatment in certain cases since 2002. Prosecution of those who have helped a close relative die, after clearly expressing the desire to end their lives, has receded since 2010. - In Austria and Germany passive euthanasia is permitted if requested by the patient. - Since 1992 Denmark has allowed people to file written refusal of excessive treatment in dire situations, with the document held in a centralised register. - In Norway, passive euthanasia is permitted if requested by the patient or by a relative, if the patient is unconscious. - In Hungary and the Czech Republic, people with incurable diseases can refuse treatment. Explore further The state of euthanasia in Europe 2020 AFP By Trend Ruslan Mirsayapov, who left the post of the head of the State Committee of the Republic of Bashkortostan (Russia) on Foreign Economic Relations in February, which he has held since 2017, has been appointed to a new position. Mirsayapov was appointed trade representative of the Russian Federation in Azerbaijan upon the order of the Russian government, Trend reports referring to kommersant.ru. He was born in November 1977 in Ufa. Mirsayapov graduated from Bashkir State University (English faculty) and from Bashkir State Agrarian University (Economics and Management). Mirsayapov began his career in 1998 at the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Trade of the Republic of Bashkortostan as a leading specialist in the Protocol and Translation Department and then in the International Cooperation Department. In 19992010, he worked in the administration of Ufa. He completed his career at the city hall as the head of the department of foreign economic relations of the economy administration. In 2010, he headed the committee on foreign economic relations, then - the department of external and interregional relations of the presidential administration of the Republic of Bashkortostan. In 2013-2014, he headed the Autonomous Non-profit Organization "Office-Group for Support of Projects on Creating the Conditions for Holding SCO and BRICS Events in Ufa". --- Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz Bloomberg supporters have not hidden their belief that only he has the potential to stop Sanders and that, in a general election, he has the resources and the positioning to defeat Trump. As the debate showed, the other candidates see him right now as an intruder of uncertain Democratic Party lineage (much like Trump with the Republicans in 2016) and resent the unprecedented amounts of his own money he has poured into the campaign. MONTICELLO, Ind. (WLFI) Indiana Beach was not the only theme park closed by Apex Parks this week. Fantasy Island, in Grand Island, near Buffalo, New York also closed abruptly Tuesday. It had been open for nearly 60 years. As it did with Indiana Beach, Apex Parks blamed "financial difficulties" for the closure. On Wednesday, Fantasy Island's Marketing Director released a statement about the closing. With the exception of exchanging the words "Indiana Beach" for "Fantasy Island," the statement is nearly exactly the same as the one released about the Monticello closure. CBS affiliate WIVB in Buffalo was sent the following statement from the Fantasy Island marketing director: Despite significant effort and a great deal of investment in infrastructure, rides and new themed areas, we have not seen an improvement in operating results, Mandell said. As such, we made the difficult decision to cease operations. This was not a decision entered into lightly. Team members are being assisted by their supervisors and the company is working to minimize impact to those affected. Guests may visit www.fantasyislandny.com for answers to commonly asked questions. That's compared to the one sent to News 18 Wednesday: Despite significant effort and a great deal of investment in infrastructure and rides, we have not seen an improvement in operating results. As such, we made the difficult decision to cease operations. This was not a decision entered into lightly. Team members are being assisted by their supervisors and the company is working to minimize impact to those affected. Guests may visit www.indianabeach.com for answers to commonly asked questions. News 18 broke the news Tuesday after White County Economic Development Director Randy Mitchell said a search for buyers by Apex ended unsuccessfully. Indiana Beach still has 27 employees, 15 in maintenance and 12 in administrative roles. The future of their employment is uncertain. We are also waiting on Apex Parks to address the status of season ticket holders. Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (17) NCP chief Sharad Pawar on Wednesday demanded the Centre to form a trust for building a mosque in Ayodhya similar to the trust to oversee the construction of Ram temple. Speaking at an event here, Pawar said: "You can form a trust for a temple then why can't you set up a trust for the mosque. The country belongs to everyone". A five-judge bench of the Supreme Court had in November ruled unanimously in favour of Ram Lalla. It said the entire disputed land spread over 2.7-acre will be handed over to a trust formed by the government, which will monitor the construction of Ram temple at the site. The court had asked the government to give 5-acre land to Sunni Waqf Board in Ayodhya for the construction of a mosque in Ayodhya. On February 5, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the formation of 'Shri Ram Janambhoomi Tirath Kshetra', which would oversee the construction of Ram Temple in Ayodhya, nearly three months after the Supreme Court ruling in the decades-old case. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Lightweight, forged aluminum wheels from acclaimed manufacturer BBS (18 lb. total unsprung weight reduction) Further weight reduction of approximately 28 pounds accomplished via reduced sound deadening materials and removal of features such as the rear wiper, tonneau cover, and rear heater ducts Specially tuned dampers Recalibrated steering for maximum control and feedback Paying homage to past Type R Limited Edition models, the 2021 Civic Type R Limited Edition will come in one model-exclusive color: Phoenix Yellow. Additional model-exclusive treatment includes contrasting gloss black paint on the roof, outside mirror caps, and intake vent on the hood, along with a dark chrome Civic badge on the rear hatch. The new Type R Limited Edition shares the 2020 Civic Type R mechanical and design updates. In addition, all Limited Edition models will feature an individually numbered serial plate denoting the vehicle's original country of sale. Like the standard Type R, the Limited Edition also receives the Honda Sensing suite of safety and driver-assistive technologies as standard equipment, including Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) with Forward Collsion Warning, Road Depature Mitigation with Lane Departure Warning, Lane Keeping Assist, and Adaptive Cruise Control. Under the hood, the 2021 Civic Type R draws power from the same race-bred 2.0-liter direct-injected and turbocharged 4-cylinder engine with VTEC valvetrain, putting out a peak 306-horseopwer and 295 lb.-ft. of torque (both SAE net), with power to the front wheels delivered through a close-ratio 6-speed manual transmission and limited-slip differential. As with the "standard" Type R, drivers can choose between three driving modes Comfort, Sport and +R that vary damping force, steering assist and throttle mapping. The new-for-2020 Active Sound Control modifies interior sound in concert with chosen drive mode. Manufacturer's Suggested Pricing for the 2021 Civic Type R Limited Edition will be made available closer to its launch. About Honda Honda offers a full line of reliable, fuel-efficient and fun-to-drive vehicles with advanced safety technologies sold through over 1,000 independent U.S. Honda dealers. The Honda lineup includes the Fit, Civic, Insight, Accord and Clarity series passenger cars, along with the HR-V, CR-V, Passport and Pilot sport utility vehicles, the Ridgeline pickup and the Odyssey minivan. Honda has been producing automobiles in America for more than 35 years and currently operates 19 major manufacturing facilities in North America. In 2019, more than 90 percent of all Honda brand vehicles sold in the U.S. were made in North America, using domestic and globally sourced parts. For More Information Additional media information including detailed pricing features and high-resolution photography of all 2019 Honda models is available at hondanews.com. Consumer information is available at automobiles.honda.com. To join the Honda community on Facebook, visit facebook.com/honda. SOURCE American Honda Motor Co., Inc. Related Links http://hondanews.com Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 17:43:31|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Patients of COVID-19 will have their treatment payments covered by medical insurance and fiscal funds, according to China's National Healthcare Security Administration (NHSA). Patients both confirmed and suspected of being infected with the virus shall receive treatment before settlement, Xiong Xianjun, an official with the NHSA, said at a press conference Thursday in Beijing. The payment will be covered by basic medical insurance, major disease insurance and medical assistance while the rest will be subsidized by fiscal funds, said Xiong. In addition, medical insurances have temporarily covered medicines and medical services involved in the COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment plan formulated by the National Health Commission, Xiong added. New Delhi, Feb 20 : The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a curative petition filed by victims' goup of the 1997 Uphaar cinema fire tragedy case. After this judgement, it is final now, the Ansal brothers would not go to jail. The brothers had escaped further jail term after the court's direction in 2015 to shell out Rs 60 crore in penalty. A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde, and comprising Justices N.V. Ramana and Arun Mishra, in-chamber considered the curative plea by the Association for Victims of Uphaar Tragedy (AVUT)and dismissed it. The court said: "We have gone through the curative petitions and the relevant documents. In our opinion, no case is made out.... Hence, the curative petition is dismissed." The AVUT, through its president Neelam Krishnamoorthy, had sought review of the verdict. The association filed the curative petition in the top court seeking more jail time for the brothers for negligence, leading to the horrific fire which killed 59 people. This incident later came to be known as the Uphaar tragedy. The apex court had in August 2015 allowed the Ansals to walk free and asked them to pay a fine of Rs 30 crore each. In February 2017, the top court had through a 2:1 majority judgement gave relief to 78-year-old Sushil Ansal, citing his "advanced age-related complications" by awarding him the jail term which he had already served. However, the court had asked his younger brother Gopal Ansal to serve the remaining one year jail term. On June 13, 1997, halfway through the screening of Hindi film "Border", a fire broke out in the Uphaar cinema, located in Green Park in south Delhi, killing 59 people in one of the worst tragedies. Los Angeles uses tech to wipe out 66,000 old Pot Convictions Los Angeles County prosecutors are joining other district attorneys to use technology to wipe out or reduce as many as 66,000 old marijuana convictions years after California voters broadly legalized the drug. The county is working with the Code for America nonprofit tech organization, which uses computer algorithms to find eligible cases that are otherwise hard to identify in decades-old court documents. The group has offered its Clear My Record technology free to all 58 state district attorneys. The dismissal of tens of thousands of old cannabis-related convictions in Los Angeles County will bring much-needed relief to communities of color that disproportionately suffered the unjust consequences of our nations drug laws, District Attorney Jackie Lacey said in a statement. Lacey planned a Thursday news conference to announce the plan. ADVERTISEMENT Prosecutors this week asked a Superior Court judge to dismiss 62,000 felony cannabis convictions for cases that date back to 1961. The district attorneys office also sought the dismissal of approximately 4,000 misdemeanor cannabis possession cases. Of those getting relief under the plan, approximately 32% are African American, 20% are white, 45% are Latino, and 3% are other or unknown, officials said. California voters approved eliminating some pot-related crimes and wiping out past criminal convictions or reducing felonies to misdemeanors when they legalized marijuana in 2016. But there was no easy way to identify an estimated 200,000 cases statewide. Convicts had to file petitions on their own to get their records changed or hire lawyers for help with the process. With the latest action, Code for America will have helped dismiss more than 85,000 marijuana convictions in five counties including LA, San Francisco, Sacramento, San Joaquin and Contra Costa, officials said. This is a clear demonstration that automatic record clearance is possible at scale and can help to right the wrongs of the failed war on drugs, Evonne Silva, Code for Americas Senior Program Director of Criminal Justice, said in a statement. ADVERTISEMENT The computer program not only identifies eligible cases, but automatically fills out forms to file with the courts. It can analyze conviction eligibility for about 10,000 people per minute, instead of requiring county employees to dig through individual records. District attorneys have until July to decide whether to dismiss sentences or fight reducing the convictions. Prosecutors in Baltimore, Seattle, Chicago and other cities have said they also would clear eligible marijuana convictions. NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Pomerantz LLP announces that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Sasol Limited ("Sasol" or the "Company") (NYSE: SSL) and certain of its officers. The class action, filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and indexed under 20-cv-01008, is on behalf of a class consisting of all persons and entities other than Defendants who purchased or otherwise acquired Sasol securities between March 10, 2015 and January 13, 2020, both dates inclusive (the "Class Period"), seeking to recover damages caused by Defendants' violations of the federal securities laws and to pursue remedies under Sections 10(b) and 20(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (the "Exchange Act") and Rule 10b-5 promulgated thereunder, against the Company and certain of its top officials. If you are a shareholder who purchased Sasol securities during the class period, you have until April 6, 2020 to ask the Court to appoint you as Lead Plaintiff for the class. A copy of the Complaint can be obtained at www.pomerantzlaw.com. To discuss this action, contact Robert S. Willoughby at [email protected] or 888.476.6529 (or 888.4-POMLAW), toll-free, Ext. 9980. Those who inquire by e-mail are encouraged to include their mailing address, telephone number, and the number of shares purchased. [Click here for information about joining the class action] Sasol was founded in 1950 and is headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa. Sasol operates as an integrated chemical and energy company in South Africa. The Company operates through Mining, Exploration and Production International, Energy, Base Chemicals, and Performance Chemicals segments. On October 27, 2014, Sasol announced the construction of an $8.1 billion ethane cracker and derivatives complex in Lake Charles, Louisiana, dubbed the Lake Charles Chemicals Project ("LCCP"). According to the Company, the LCCP includes seven manufacturing units, some of which are in continued development, including the low-density polyethylene ("LDPE") facility and Ziegler alcohol, ethoxylates and Guerbet alcohol facilities, among others. The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company's business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Sasol had conducted insufficient due diligence into, and failed to account for multiple issues with, the LCCP, as well as the true cost of the project; (ii) construction and operation of the LCCP was consequently plagued by control weaknesses, delays, rising costs, and technical issues; (iii) these issues were exacerbated by Sasol's top-level management, who engaged in improper and unethical behavior with respect to financial reporting for the LCCP and the project's oversight; (iv) all the foregoing was reasonably likely to render the LCCP significantly more expensive than disclosed and negatively impact the Company's financial results; and (v) as a result, the Company's public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times. On June 6, 2016, Sasol reported "that the expected total capital expenditure for the [LCCP] could increase up to US$11 billion, including site infrastructure and utility improvements"; a slower rate of capital "resulted in an extended project schedule and contributed to further project cost increases"; "[t]he expected returns for the project have reduced due to changes in long-term price assumptions and the higher capital estimates"; and "[t]he increase in the estimated LCCP capital cost and extended schedule will reduce the expected project returns by approximately the same amount as the Company's lower long-term price assumptions." Following these disclosures, Sasol's American depositary receipt ("ADR") price fell $3.53 per share, or 10.99%, to close at $28.60 per share on June 6, 2016. On May 22, 2019, during pre-market hours, Sasol disclosed that "the cost estimate for the LCCP has been revised to a range of $12,6 to $12,9 billion which includes a contingency of $300 million." Sasol cited a $530 million change in the project's cost forecast because of a "[c]orrection for duplication of investment allowances of approximately $230 million"; a "[c]orrection for certain contracts and variation orders managed by Sasol, outside the primary engineering, procurement and construction contract, of approximately $180 million"; and forecast improvements that were "not expected to be realised and adjustments for potential insurance claims and procurement back-charges of approximately $120 million." Following these disclosures, Sasol's ADR price fell $4.50 per share, or 14.93%, to close at $25.64 per share on May 22, 2019. Later, on August 16, 2019, during pre-market hours, Sasol issued a press release disclosing that it was delaying the announcement of its 2019 financial results because of "possible LCCP control weaknesses." On this news, Sasol's ADR price fell $0.74 per share, or 4.02%, to close at $17.67 per share on August 16, 2019. Then, on October 28, 2019, Sasol disclosed that its review of the LCCP control weaknesses had brought to light "errors, omissions, and inaccuracies in the [LCCP] cost estimate," and a number of unethical and improper reporting activities that took place at the highest level of management. Sasol also announced the resignation of, inter alia, its Joint Presidents and Chief Executive Officers ("CEOs"), effective November 1, 2019, and Senior Vice Presidents and others previously in charge of the LCCP. Finally, on January 14, 2020, Sasol issued a press release confirming that on January 13, 2020, the Company "experienced an explosion and fire at its LCCP low-density polyethylene (LDPE) unit." Sasol stated that "[t]he unit was in the final stages of commissioning and startup when the incident occurred" and "has been shut down and an investigation is underway to determine the cause of the incident, the extent of the damage and resulting impact on the LDPE unit's [beneficial operation] schedule." Following these disclosures, Sasol's ADR price fell $1.70 per share, or 7.84%, over the following two trading days, closing at $19.99 per share on January 15, 2020. The Pomerantz Firm, with offices in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Paris, is acknowledged as one of the premier firms in the areas of corporate, securities, and antitrust class litigation. Founded by the late Abraham L. Pomerantz, known as the dean of the class action bar, the Pomerantz Firm pioneered the field of securities class actions. Today, more than 80 years later, the Pomerantz Firm continues in the tradition he established, fighting for the rights of the victims of securities fraud, breaches of fiduciary duty, and corporate misconduct. The Firm has recovered numerous multimillion-dollar damages awards on behalf of class members. See www.pomerantzlaw.com CONTACT: Robert S. Willoughby Pomerantz LLP [email protected] SOURCE Pomerantz LLP Related Links http://www.pomerantzlaw.com Gratiot County is looking to hire a new emergency management coordinator, but the person who fills the position will have some new duties added to their job description. The County Board of Commissioners has unanimously approved a recommendation from the Gratiot County Central Dispatch Authority and the Local Emergency Planning Committee to make the job full-time. In the past the emergency management coordinator worked just 30 hours per week. The previous coordinator, Ashley Brenner, resigned after just eight months on the job. Former EM coordinator Dan Morden, who is now the countys Central Dispatch director, has been performing the duties on an interim basis. Its hoped that making the job 40 hours per week with full benefits will attract more qualified candidates who would stick around longer. In a letter to county commissioners, Sheriff Mike Morris explained the proposed job changes. With the departure of our most recent Emergency Manager, I have reevaluated the requirements, duties and qualifications of the position, he wrote. I would like to add miscellaneous Sheriffs Department duties to the existing Emergency Management functions and post this as a full-time position. The emergency Management functions will continue mostly as they have in the past and comprise 75 percent of the position. This position updates response plans, completes reporting requirements, educates the community, and much more. Homeland Security grants fund 34 percent of this position, the remainder is built into the separate Emergency Management budget. Morris also noted he would be seeking an individual who is a certified police officer to fill the vacancy. The new coordinator will spend 25 percent of their time on duties related to the sheriffs department, he added. Those would include assisting in ordinance enforcement, prisoner transports, paper service, and as a court bailiff, among other duties the sheriff may assign, Morris said. The revised position will pay $21.17 an hour, the same as road patrol deputies. It previously paid $19 an hour. The annual salary would be about $44,000. Benefits, such as retirement, health insurance, overtime and holiday pay, would total about $31,500 a year making the cost of the position $75,594. The previous wage and benefit package for a part-time EM coordinator was $32,212. Morris stated in his letter that the move to full-time will increase the countys annual contribution from the general fund from $21,260 to $56,318, a hike of $35,058 per year. READ MORE: By PTI PUDUCHERRY: Chief Minister of Puducherry V Narayanasamy on Wednesday told Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to India Walter J Linder that the people here are quiet, calm and peace-loving. The Ambassador made a courtesy call on the Chief Minister at the territorial assembly. The Ambassador was accompanied by the German Consul General to India (Chennai) Karina Christina Maria Stoll. German Ambassador to India, His Excellency Walter J. Lindner @AmbLindnerIndia, & German Consul General, Ms. Karin Christina Maria @GermanyChennai made courtesy call this evening at Legislative Assembly #Puducherry . @GermanyinIndia pic.twitter.com/WkHChWG0zo V.Narayanasamy (@VNarayanasami) February 19, 2020 An official source said the Chief Minister apprised the Ambassador of the various welfare schemes the territorial government had been implementing. "We take care of the old people, differently abled people and the widows by providing monthly assistance to them," the Chief Minister told the Ambassador, the source said. Narayanasamy also told the envoy that the "people of Union Territory of Puducherry are calm, quiet and peace- loving." He also told him that the government has been providing educational assistance to students doing medical courses in the Union Territory. Tourism is also being nurtured here and the beach was spic and span, the Chief Minister informed Lindner. The Ambassador and the Consul General of Germany had earlier called on Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi at her office. PATNA The picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi savouring Bihari delicacy litti-chokha at New Delhis Hunar Haat on Wednesday has set the bell ringing for Bihar assembly polls scheduled later this year. And, it has also sparked an intense political debate in the state. While ruling NDA heaped praise on the PM for giving Bihars dish its due, the picture of PM sitting on a cot and having litti-chokha did not go well with the opposition. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav said it would have been better if the PM had paid attention to the issues of people of Bihar. He tweeted, Thank you respected PM for liking famous Bihari delicacy! Since Bihar CM cant ask, I would like to draw your kind attention towards Bihars legitimate share pending since quite long: Special Status, Funds of special package, Flood relief fund, Funds of Ayushman Bharat. He went to add, The person who makes litti had to migrate due to unemployment. What about Biharis who are fighting for the special status for state. Yadav is currently on Berojgar Yatra. HAM-S leader and former Bihar CM Jitan Ram Manjhi wondered if it was a signal for Bihar elections. The PM does everything with a message in mind, he said. Political experts also agree with Manjhi. As far as eating litti-chokha is concerned, only Bihar elections are left this year and he wants to connect. How much this helps him, only time will tell, said political analyst D M Diwakar, formerly with AN Sinha Institute for Social Studies. The NDA leaders, however, mocked at the opposition. Its causing stomach ache to many. It was a pleasant coincidence that when the state government was discussing ways and means to increase farmers income and reiterating its vow to make at least one Bihari delicacy in every plate of an Indian, PM by savouring litti-chokha had raised the prestige of farmers of the state, tweeted Bihars deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi. Bihars JD (U) minister Sanjay Jha tweeted, Dear @narendramodi Sir ~ So heartening to see you relish the #littichokha at Hunar Haat at India Gate.For millions in Bihar, this dish is synonymous with simplicity, humility and earthiness! Its part of our great culinary tradition, and of our pride. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Wednesday thanked President Donald Trump for commuting his sentence, saying he is 'tough and outspoken but also has a kind heart.' 'We want to express our most profound and everlasting gratitude to President Trump. How do you properly thank someone who has given you back the freedom that was stolen from you, he doesn't have to do this,' Blagojevich said in a press conference outside his Chicago home with his wife and two daughters at his side. 'He's a Republican president, I was Democratic governor and doing this does nothing to help his politics.' He called Trump a 'problem-solver' and referred to himself as a 'Trump-ocrat.' Blagojevich was released from federal prison Tuesday after serving eight years of a 14-year sentence for pay-for-play charges after attempting to sell a US Senate seat. Trump had been weighing the move since at least since 2018. Shortly after Blagojevich spoke on Wednesday, the President defended the former 'Celebrity Apprentice' contestant on Twitter, writing that he 'did not sell the Senate seat' and 'paid a big price.' In explaining his decision on Tuesday, Trump said the eight years Blagojevich served in prison was 'a long time' and suggested the television appeals of Blagojevich's wife Patti helped cement his decision. Trump also linked Blagojevich's prosecution to a longtime foe, former FBI Director James Comey, a close friend of former US attorney in Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald, who led the prosecution against Blagojevich. 'It was a prosecution by the same people -- Comey, Fitzpatrick -- the same group,' Trump said, misstating the Illinois US attorney's surname. In total, Trump granted clemency to 11 convicted criminals on Tuesday. During his term as governor, Blagojevich was charged with corruption and impeached by the state legislature in 2009. His charges included trying to solicit money for an appointment to former President Barack Obama's Senate seat after he won the presidency. He was also accused of shakedowns involving a children's hospital, a racetrack owner and a building executive. In 2010, he announced his innocence on 'Celebrity Apprentice,' from which he was eventually fired. He began his 14-year sentence in 2012. The commutation of his sentence has drawn bipartisan criticism, including from Illinois Republican Reps. Adam Kinzinger, Mike Bost, Darin LaHood, John Shimkus and Rodney Davis, who said they were 'disappointed' by the move. 'Blagojevich is the face of public corruption in Illinois, and not once has he shown any remorse for his clear and documented record of egregious crimes that undermined the trust placed in him by voters,' the congressmen said in a statement Tuesday. 'As our state continues to grapple with political corruption, we shouldn't let those who breached the public trust off the hook. History will not judge Rod Blagojevich well.' Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois said in a statement Blagojevich 'betrayed the people of Illinois.' This story has been updated to include comment from Trump and background information. There has been an increase in deaths and disability due to chronic respiratory (lung) diseases over the past three decades, finds an analysis of data from 195 countries published by The BMJ today. The poorest regions of the world had the greatest disease burden. Ageing and risk factors including smoking, environmental pollution, and body weight also play a key role, say the researchers. Chronic respiratory diseases pose a major public health problem, with an estimated 3.9 million deaths in 2017, accounting for 7% of all deaths worldwide. Chronic lung disease (COPD) and asthma are the most common conditions, but others such as pneumoconiosis (lung disease due to dust inhalation), interstitial lung disease and pulmonary sarcoidosis (due to lung scarring and inflammation) are also global public health concerns. Previous analyses of death and loss of health due to chronic respiratory diseases were based on limited data or confined to local areas. To try and plug this knowledge gap, researchers in China used data from the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017 to describe trends in mortality and disability adjusted life years (DALYs) - a combined measure of quantity and quality of lifedue to chronic respiratory diseases, by age and sex, across the world during 1990-2017. Between 1990 and 2017, the number of deaths due to chronic respiratory diseases increased by 18%, from 3.32 million in 1990 to 3.91 million in 2017. The number of deaths increased with age and rose sharply in those aged 70 and older, a burden that is likely to increase as the worldwide population ages, suggest the authors. During the 27 year study period, rates of death and disability ranked according to age (known as the age standardised mortality rate) decreased, particularly in men. Overall, social deprivation was the most important factor affecting rates of death and disability, with the highest rates seen in the poorest regions of the world. Lower mortality was seen in more affluent countries, reflecting better access to health services and improved treatments. Smoking was the leading risk factor for deaths and disability due to COPD and asthma. In 2017, smoking accounted for 1.4 million deaths and 33 million DALYs, particularly in poorer regions, indicating an urgent need to improve tobacco control in developing countries, say the authors. Pollution from airborne particulate matter was the next most important risk factor for COPD, with one million deaths and 25 million DALYs. A high body mass index has also accounted for the most deaths from asthma since 2013, particularly in women, and has contributed the most to DALYs since 2003, add the authors. "As the prevalence of obesity continues to increase at a worrying rate worldwide, weight loss should be included in the management of obese patients with asthma," they write. The researchers point to some study limitations, such as differences in disease definitions and rates of misdiagnosis across countries. Nevertheless, they say this study showed that the number of global deaths and DALYs from chronic respiratory diseases increased from 1990 to 2017, while the age standardised mortality rate and age standardised DALY rate decreased, with a more profound decline in males. Regions with a low socio-demographic index had the greatest burden of disease, they add. The estimated contribution of risk factors (such as smoking, environmental pollution, and a high body mass index) to mortality and DALYs "supports the need for urgent efforts to reduce exposure to them," they conclude. More information: Trends and risk factors of mortality and disability adjusted life years for chronic respiratory diseases from 1990 to 2017: systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017BMJ (2020). Journal information: British Medical Journal (BMJ) Trends and risk factors of mortality and disability adjusted life years for chronic respiratory diseases from 1990 to 2017: systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017(2020). www.bmj.com/content/368/bmj.m234 The Bombay High Court has said it will pass its order on Friday on an appeal filed by three senior women doctors, accused of abetting the suicide of their junior colleague Payal Tadvi, seeking permission to complete their post graduation at the civic-run BYL NairHospital here. In August last year, while granting bail to the three doctors, Hema Ahuja, Bhakti Meher and Ankita Khandelwal, the high court directed them to not enter the BYL Nair Hospital, where Tadvi committed suicide in her hostel room. The court had also suspended the medical license of the three accused till the end of trial in the case. Aabad Ponda, the counsel for the three accused, told a single bench of Justice Sadhana Jadhav on Thursday that the three doctors have to complete their final year of post- graduation in gynaecology, hence they need permission to enter the hospital. Special public prosecutor Raja Thakare opposed the appeal, saying several case witnesses were still working in the hospital. Ponda said the court could direct the hospital to transfer the three doctors to another unit of the hospital's gynaecology department so that they do not interact with the witnesses. Justice Jadhav noted that while the court was aware of the seriousness of the case, it would also not be correct to stop someone's education. "It is true that the victim has lost her life and right to education, but at the same time we cannot stop the accused persons from pursuing their education," she said. "Our society is not the one to go for 'an eye for an eye'. They (accused) should also not face harassment," the court noted. The bench, however, asked if it would be right for the accused persons to go back to the same college. "The social impact of this case was so much... similarly we don't even want the accused to also face wrath. No one at the hospital is going to welcome them with open arms. They will face some reaction from the hospital staff," Justice Jadhav said. The court said it was also concerned about the fact that the three accused doctors "lacked sensitivity", which led to the incident of their junior committing suicide. "If they are going to be medical practitioners, then they need to be sensitive...not just towards patients but also towards their juniors and other hospital staff," Justice Jadhav said. The judge directed the hospital's gynaecology department head to remain present in the court on Friday, to say if the accused persons can be transferred to another unit. Payal Tadvi, a second-year postgraduate medical student attached to BYL Nair Hospital, committed suicide in her hostel room in the hospital premises on May 22, 2019. In her suicide note, Tadvi held the three senior women doctors responsible for her harassing her. On May 29, 2019, the police arrested the three accused, all third-year postgraduate students from the same hospital, for allegedly making casteist slurs and abetting Tadvi's suicide. The victim's family alleged that the accused ragged Tadvi and hurled casteist abuses at her, forcingherto take her life. The three accused have been booked under IPC Sections 306 (abetment to suicide) and 201 (destruction of evidence ), and provisions of the Maharashtra Prohibition of Ragging Act and the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) SEATTLE, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- VBO Nation today announced the launch of a petition to protect the rights of Freelancers and Virtual Business Owners (VBOs) are under attack across the country. It started with California's AB5 legislation which effectively made freelancing illegal starting on Jan. 1, 2020. Companies that hire freelancers have reportedly blacklisted future hires in the state of California as a result of AB5. Similar national legislation referred to as the PRO Act (HR 2474) recently passed the U.S. House of Representatives and moved on to the Senate. VBO Nation In response, VBO Nation, an emerging voice and advocate for freelancers and Virtual Business Owners (VBOs), launched a petition today to stop new legislation from devastating the careers of freelancers and independent workers across the country. "As an advocate and unified voice for freelancers, we have no choice but to aggressively defend the rights of independent workers," said Tom Poole, founder of VBO Nation. While viewed by some as legislation focused on helping Uber and Lyft drivers, the crushing impact of these laws has had a crippling effect on the millions of individuals that have chosen to become freelancers/VBOs. The proposed national legislation (HR 2474) has the potential to affect 57 million freelancers who contribute more than a trillion dollars to the U.S. economy. According to Poole, "We are working with freelancers, corporations, special interest groups, and elected officials across the country to bring an end to this disastrous legislation. Its potential impact on millions of independent workers who are contributing trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy is staggering and irresponsible." Access to the petition can be found at vbonation.com/petition/ Contact Information: VBO Nation is available for comment. Please direct requests to Tom Poole, Founder, and CEO of VBO Nation, at [email protected]/(425) 780-6837. About VBO Nation Founded in 2018, VBO Nation was established to support and advocate for the nation's 57 million freelancers and VBOs (Virtual Business Owners). The Company was founded, built, and is managed 100% by Virtual Business Owners. Our 7-point charter is to protect and enhance the lives of independent workers through professional development, advocacy, support, online learning, and member benefits. VBO Nation seeks to provide members a platform to communicate professional issues and concerns with their peers. VBO Nation is emerging as a leading voice in representing freelancers and VBOs interests and serving as a unified voice. Visit www.vbonation.com for more details. SOURCE VBO Nation Related Links https://www.vbonation.com Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 20) At a tender age of eight, Julia Cunanan has gone through some tough roadblocks in her young life. Diagnosed with Dravet Syndrome a severe type of epilepsy when she was just three months old, Julia has suffered from constant seizures and delay in cognitive development. Her mother, Dr. Donnabel Cunanan, recalled the ordeal her family had to face for the childs treatment. We tried seven anti-epileptic drugs, there was a time when we had five at the same time. Sobrang hirap (it was really hard), Cunanan, who also serves as the spokesperson for the Philippine Cannabis Compassion Society, told CNN Philippines The Source on Thursday. Dravet Syndrome, a lifelong disorder which causes prolonged seizure and fever, usually onsets at age 1. The United States Food and Drug Administration has approved two medications for Dravet the Stiripentol and Epidiolex, which contains the cannabis component cannabidiol (CBD). The Dangerous Drugs Board (DDB) recently approved the use of cannabidiol for compassionate use in the Philippines a development welcomed by Cunanans group. This means that Epidiolex will soon be allowed in the local market. However, some parents have voiced out their concerns over this, as the medicine is not that cheap. A one-year prescription of Epidiolex may cost around $25,000 to $30,000 (roughly 1.2 million to 1.5 million), DDB noted. Thats why Cunanan has called for a cheaper available alternative and urged authorities to maybe consider a local production of the cannabis-driven product. We believe na walang ibang way, kung hindi to locally produce it eventually. Hindi naman namin sinasabi na agad-agad, ngayon na natin siya ipo-produce. But if we did not produce it locally, there's no way na ma-afford po namin ito, Cunanan said. [Translation: We believe theres no way but to locally produce it eventually. Were not saying we should do it right now. But if we did not produce it locally, theres no way we can afford it.] Even if i-subsidize siya ng government, mahal pa rin. 50 percent discount? Ang mahal pa rin. [Translation: Even if the government subsidized it, its still expensive. 50 percent discount, it will still be expensive.] The local drug board, for its part, said officials may consider this option in future discussions but stressed that local manufacturing may list a couple of disadvantages for now. But definitely right now, we cannot allow 'yung manufacturing dito, kasi (the manufacturing here because) it will entail 'yung cultivation, DDB chair Catalino Cuy said. Cuy likewise presented the alternative of purchasing the medicine in bulk, so it may be imported at a relatively cheaper cost. Cannabidiol is one of the active ingredients of cannabis (marijuana), known to be derived from the hemp plant. DDB and international health officials earlier clarified that the product is not cannabis per se, and is not considered as the psychoactive component on marijuana. Final approval in April? While DDB has approved the use of CBD for compassionate use, the development will still have to be confirmed in health officials board meeting next month. Cuy said the government may craft the proposed regulations implementing rules in April. Importation of Epidiolex will be allowed soon after. However, he stressed that those seeking to purchase the medicine from other countries would still need to secure the necessary permits from DDB and the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency (PDEA). A bill seeking to legalize the use of medical marijuana in the country has been filed in the 18th Congress, after a similar measure failed to hurdle the Senate in the previous legislature. The proposed Philippine Compassionate Medical Cannabis Act seeks to legalize and regulate the medical use of cannabis or marijuana, which is known to have therapeutic purposes in the treatment of chronic or debilitating medical conditions such as arthritis, epilepsy and multiple sclerosis, among others. Under the proposal, only doctors licensed by the PDEA can prescribe the use of medical marijuana for qualified patients. The ingredients of cannabis that would be used for medical purposes will only be available in accredited hospitals, and shall not be sold over the counter. DDB, however, earlier said the recent approval of CBD will not necessarily increase the chances of medical marijuana bills passage. PrideStaff's logo We're thrilled that our offices have once again been ranked among the largest temporary personnel and staffing agencies in South Florida, and we're motivated to make 2020 even more successful for everyone we have the privilege of serving. PrideStaff, a national, franchised staffing organization, is pleased to announce that their three South Florida offices in West Palm Beach, Miami West and Fort Lauderdale were collectively named to the South Florida Business Journal's list of largest Temporary Personnel & Staffing Agencies for 2020. As in years past, the 2020 list includes 25 staffing and employment agencies serving the Miami, Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach metro areas; rankings were based on 2019 South Florida billings. Their South Florida offices have earned a top-25 spot eight times in recent years, signaling the staffing franchise's continued health in a fiercely competitive market. When interviewed, Sherie Duttenhofer, Owner/Strategic-Partner of PrideStaff West Palm Beach, served as the spokesperson for all three offices. "On behalf of Jonathan Hall, Owner/Strategic-Partner of our Miami West office, and Robert and Carmen Calamia, Co-Owners/Strategic-Partners of our Fort Lauderdale office, I'd like to thank all of our clients, candidates and associates for this honor," Duttenhofer said. "We wouldn't make this list year after year without the great employers and talented people we serve. "PrideStaff's owner/operator franchise model provides the keys to our long-standing success: national resources, local market connections, and staffing experts who make exceptional matches by getting to know each job seeker and client," continued Duttenhofer. "We're thrilled that our offices have once again been ranked among the largest temporary personnel and staffing agencies in South Florida, and we're motivated to make 2020 even more successful for everyone we have the privilege of serving." About PrideStaff PrideStaff was founded in the 1970s as 100% company-owned units and began staffing franchising in 1995. They operate over 80 offices in North America to serve over 5,000 clients and are headquartered in Fresno, CA. With over 40 years in the staffing business, PrideStaff offers the resources and expertise of a national firm with the spirit, dedication and personal service of smaller, entrepreneurial firms. PrideStaff is the only nationwide, commercial staffing firm in the U.S. and Canada with over $100 million in annual revenue to earn ClearlyRateds prestigious Best of Staffing Diamond Award seven years in a row highlighting exceptional client and talent service quality. For more information on our services or for staffing franchise information, visit http://www.pridestaff.com. The Dene National Chief is declaring his support for the Wet'suet'en hereditary chiefs. "They are the traditional chiefs through their clan system," Norman Yakeleya told reporters in Yellowknife on Wednesday. "They have every right to protect their territory and they have every right to assert their traditional laws and ceremonies." Across Canada, Indignenous nations and activists have come out in support of the Wet'suet'en hereditary chiefs, who oppose the Coastal GasLink pipeline project that would run through their territory in British Columbia. Demonstrations ramped up earlier this month after the RCMP raided camps blocking construction on traditional Wet'suwet'en territory while enforcing an injunction order. The camps include the Unist'ot'en Healing Centre. The hereditary chiefs want the RCMP to leave, and Yakeleya does as well. 'Shame on them' "They call up the police force. Shame on them. Shame on them. Why are they doing that to the first original people of Canada?" said Yakeleya. "I support the hereditary chiefs 110 per cent." The $6-billion, 670-kilometre pipeline was approved by the B.C. government, and five of the six Wet'suwet'en band councils have agreed to it. But the authority of the band councils comes from the Indian Act, say the hereditary chiefs, while they themselves are following laws that predate colonization. Yakeleya said the hereditary chiefs should get the "time and space to work with the elected chiefs and council but they're the boss." Yakeleya's news conference on Wednesday came amid demonstrations across Canada. Rail blockades have held up the shipment of goods and the travel of passengers. CN Rail and Via Rail have announced layoffs. Michael Hugall/CBC "Aboriginal people can, if they really want, bring Canada to a standstill," said Yakeleya. "What people now are saying in the news here there's no food on their shelves, running low on fuel, propane hey, welcome to our world. This is what's happening in our small communities." Story continues Calls for 'peaceful' protest In Yellowknife, supporters of the hereditary chiefs have strung banners up around the city and rallied outside the office of Northwest Territories Liberal MP Michael McLeod. The national chief said the Dene Nation supports "peaceful, productive, calm, protest." He also said the Northwest Territories is not immune to the more extreme police and protest actions taking place elsewhere in Canada. Yakeleya said if the government doesn't listen to Indigenous nations on Teck Resources' Frontier oilsands mine, proposed for northern Alberta, it could become "our Wet'suet'en." (Newser) A New Hampshire town's board of selectmen voted this week to shut down its one-man police departmentand the police chief reacted to the news by stripping down to his skivvies and walking out into a snowstorm. Per CNN, Croydon's three-person board unanimously decided Tuesday to give Richard Lee, who'd served as police chief since 2000, his walking papers, opting instead to pay state police to cover the town's policing needs. Lee says they told him after the vote he'd need to turn in his badge and uniform immediately, and he took the word "immediately" literally. "I gave them my uniform shirt," he recounts, per the AP. "I gave them my turtleneck, I gave them my ballistic vest. ... I ... took off my boots, took off my pants, put those in the chair ... put my boots back on, and walked out the door." He walked almost a mile in just boots, hat, and undies before his wife picked him up. story continues below The selectboard's chair, Russell Edwards, tells WPTZ the decision was a "well thought out" one made for economic reasons. But Lee tells the Valley News he was blindsided by the vote, noting the meeting's agenda simply listed "police department" as an item to discuss. The Union Leader notes Lee was also the town's sole prosecutor, and that it's not clear how criminal cases on the docket will now go forward. Lee, who says he's consulting with an attorney on his options, adds the board tried to oust him last year as well, but citizens rallied to keep him in his job. Even if that happens again, he's now washing his hands of a career in law enforcement. Meanwhile, local Rick Sampson is baffled as to how it's gotten to this point. "What kind of a town lets their chief of police walk out in a snowstorm in his underwear?" he says, per the Union Leader. (Read more strange stuff stories.) Lyricist-writer Javed Akhtar has said Shekhar Kapur should not be offended for not being consulted about the new version of Mr India as he, too, had disregarded the original script for the iconic film. Salim-Javed originally wrote the film that finally featured Anil Kapoor, Sridevi and Amrish Puri in lead roles. Javed told Asian Age, Today Shekhar Kapur is offended because no one has consulted him about this new project. Why should they? They may or may not be morally bound to inform the people involved with the original film, but they are not legally bound to do so. And where was his sense of creative outrage when he had disregarded the bound script of Mr India that we had given to producer Boney Kapoor and Shekhar? Also read: Mirchi Awards 2020 full winners list: Kalank bags major wins as Deepika Padukone makes a statement Shekhar chose to do his own thing back then. Today, when other people are doing the same, he is upset? he added. Filmmaker Ali Abbas Zafar recently announced that he is set to make a trilogy based on the classic film, Mr India, in collaboration with the production company Zee Studios. Asked if the makers should have sought his permission, Shekhar told Hindustan Times in an interview, Not if its a different film or a remake. But if they are picking the same/similar characters, then they definitely should have. A director has moral rights over his/her creation, especially in a film like Mr India. According to the Asian Age report, Shekhar had earlier said about not sticking to the script by Salim-Javed, I never read that script. I am a hundred percent sure that what we made finally was very different from what Salim-Javed had written originally. I never saw that original Salim-Javed script, which I believe had been conceived for Mr Amitabh Bachchan. As for what you saw on screen in Mr India, the scenes were written as we were filming. There was a constant improvisation on the sets. Do you know, Mogambo was written after we started shooting? We knew there was going to be a goofy villain whod have to go beyond Daga and Teja, but we didnt know who or what it would be. Javed Akhtar was struggling to create a new kind of villain. Mogambo was born as we were filming, just like idea of Sridevi going into the villains den dressed as Charlie Chaplin. Javed also insisted the idea of recreating Mr India characters is not so impossible. He told the daily, Thats not so impossible. Every James Bond film has its own heroine and villain. As I said, it all depends on what they do with the character. Follow @htshowbiz for more Google Earth is arguably the best product Google has ever created because it allows anyone to explore our planet (and beyond) with ease. However, you may not know that Google also has an app called Earth View that contains some of the best curated images you can find on the app. Google recently announced that it has updated this collection with over 1,000 new images (for 2,500 in total) and introduced new search tools to find that perfect wallpaper background. Earth View images are "taken" as screen grabs by virtual photographers who essentially fly around Google Earth looking for cool shots. In order to find potential images from 36 million square miles of satellite shots, the company built a set of tools in collaboration with Germany's Ubilabs. The software also helps them maintain very fine virtual camera control and "optimize the color profile for the particular landscape and export the final image in ultra high resolution," wrote Google Earth product manager Gopal Shah. So what makes the cut of 2,500 image for Earth View? According to Shah, who originally started the offshoot app as a passion project, it's a combination of patterns, colors and abstraction. "A good Earth View image is not obvious at first, so you look at it and have to ask yourself, 'what is this?'" he said in video that accompanied the launch (below). As we've noted before, Google Earth images come from a variety of sources, but particularly the very high-resolution Landsat 8 satellites processed with the Earth engine. Google also uses aerial photographs and creates three-dimensional terrain maps using digital elevation data from NASA's Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. Interestingly, Google has copyrighted Google Earth images (allowing non-commercial personal usage), while imaging from similar sources on NASA's Worldwind is in the public domain. That said, Google Earth is a lot more user friendly. Earth View was first adopted by Android phone users looking for screen wallpapers, and is still an extraordinary resource for that purpose, if you're looking. The web app interface is still pretty rudimentary, but Google has now introduced a color map to let you search by region and your favorite hue. The Google team noted that the new version lets you go to nearly any place on Earth "with drastically changed improvements in colors and resolution." Shah also noted that Google Earth itself is "not a product like any other Google product, we don't follow a strict rule, we just want people to use it and be inspired by it. So I hope that when people are experiencing Earth View, it just brings a moment of zen to their day." Georgia's former Interior and Prime Minister Vano Merabishvili to leave prison today - GeorgianJournal A local restaurateur is rehabilitating a pair of historic buildings downtown and adding apartments and retail. Lisa Wong, whose restaurants include Rosarios and Acenar, bought the buildings at 114 Main Plaza about seven years ago. She plans to repair the facades and walls, replace some of the windows and make other renovations to the vacant structures and put in two apartments, a rooftop terrace and ground-floor retail. Wong, who is also part of a team that won a decade-long, $100 million contract in 2017 to run the citys river barges, said the retail tenant is still being determined. Ive had the buildings for quite some time (and) had some time to figure out what the right direction for them would be, she said. There was a lot of historic significance to both those buildings, and I wanted to make sure they were done respectfully and correctly. On ExpressNews.com: Owner of former Lone Star Brewery complex exploring options The site was selected in 1731 for the Casas Reales, or the seat of government, according a plaque posted by the State Historical Survey Committee. Official proclamations were read there, and visitors included Moses Austin and Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. It was constructed in 1742 and rebuilt in 1779. In 1840, the Council House Fight between Texan leaders and Comanche chiefs happened there. The structure also served as municipal headquarters under Spanish, Mexican, Republic of Texas and American regimes, the committee noted. Referred to in some documents as the Ramsay and Ford buildings, the structures were once home to a saddle shop set up by John Ramsay and Newton Ford in the 1800s, according to historical archives provided by the Conservation Society of San Antonio. The buildings later housed a bookstore operated by the Daughters of St. Paul order for more than 50 years. They closed it in 2009 after determining they couldnt recover from the economic hit they took with the renovation of Main Plaza. Wongs project will likely cost more than $5 million, a price tag that includes what she paid for the buildings, she said. On ExpressNews.com: Commissioners OK designs for eight-story project near La Villita Council members approved an agreement Thursday allowing Wong to use up to $1.1 million from the Houston Street Tax Increment Reinvestment Zone for the restoration work and paving, lighting and landscaping. Under these districts, the taxes on any uptick in property values are set aside to finance public improvements in the area, and developers are reimbursed from the fund as they make the upgrades. Council members also OKd a license agreement for patio space near the buildings. In addition, Wong is seeking historic tax credits for the project. Work on the buildings is expected to start in March and could take up to a year. Im excited about the project, she said. It will be an incredible addition to Main Plaza. Ford, Powell & Carson developed the plans, which were approved by the Historic and Design Review Commission last year. madison.iszler@express-news.net As the COVID-19 epidemic pummels Vietnams tourism industry, authorities are stepping up collaborations with travel companies to promote the Southeast Asian Country as a safe, virus-free travel destination. Vietnam set a target of welcoming 20.5 million international visitors and supporting 90 million domestic travelers in 2020, numbers it expected would generate VND830 trillion (US$35.6 billion) in tourism revenue, according to the Vietnam National Administration of Tourism (VNAT). But hopes of hitting those numbers were shattered by COVID-19, the novel coronavirus disease which first hit the central Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019 and has since claimed 2,126 lives and infected over 75,700 people around the world, according to the South China Morning Post. Vietnams shared border with China and its 16 confirmed cases of the viral infection have lowered its standing, at least for the time being, as a hot travel destination. Of the 16 confirmed cases in the country, 13 are Vietnamese citizens, one is a Vietnamese American, and two are Chinese. Twelve of the infected patients had been successfully treated and discharged from the hospital as of Thursday morning. Tourists visit the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon in Ho Chi Minh City, February 17, 2020. Photo: Quang Dinh / Tuoi Tre Fears of catching COVID-19 have had both international and domestic tourists put their travel plans on hold, leading the tourist industry to forecast losses of $5.9-7.7 billion over the next three months, VNAT deputy general director Ngo Hoai Chung said at a recent seminar held to discuss the local tourist industrys response to the virus outbreak. The number of Chinese tourists in particular, the largest demographic of foreign visitors to Vietnam, is forecast to fall by 90-100 percent, equal to 1.7-1.9 million arrivals from China, Chung said, adding that visitors from other international markets will likely drop by 50-70 percent, equivalent to 2-2.8 million people, and domestic tourists will plummet by 50-70 percent, equal to 10.9-15.3 million people. In addition, the lodging and accommodation sector is forecast to suffer $1.5-1.8 billion in losses while restaurants will likely lose $1.3-1.7 billion. In an effort to dispel negative perceptions of traveling to Vietnam amid the COVID-19 epidemic, VNAT has prepared a number of solutions for monitoring tourism development. The organizations current plans include focusing on major markets with direct flights to Vietnam, aside from mainland China, such as South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and other Southeast Asian countries. It also plans to focus on attracting visitors from India, the United States, and Canada. VNAT is also aiming to expand further into the Western and Northern European markets by submitting a proposal to the prime minister to issue unilateral visa exemptions to countries in the two regions, as well as Canada, and abolish visa fees for all international visitors in 2020. Tourists visit the Hue Imperial Citadel in the central Vietnamese province of Thua Thien-Hue, February 16, 2020. Photo: Thien Dieu / Tuoi Tre Moreover, VNAT will offer familiarization trips and press trips to travel agents in potential feeder markets to boost their connections with local hotels, tourism organizations, and transport companies. The tourism administration will also invest further in its marketing campaigns and promotions on television, social media, and major media platforms to give assurance that Vietnam is a safe travel destination. Various industry stakeholders have also stepped up to join VNAT. Nguyen Quoc Ky, general director of leading travel firm Vietravel, suggested that VNAT initiate a campaign, called I am safe, to provide advice and clarification for tourists on COVID-19-free destinations in Vietnam. The campaign proposal is also meant to emphasize that tour operators and relevant authorities in the country are taking necessary steps and precautions to safeguard the well-being of travelers. The I am safe campaign is like a commitment in ensuring the safety of people and tourists visiting our country, Ky told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper. Vietnam was lauded by the WHO for its rapid response to the COVID-19 epidemic in a statement released by the organization recently. While the U.N. health agency spoke highly of Vietnams measures to fight the virus, it also urged the Southeast Asian country to stay on high alert and be ready to respond should more infections be detected. Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam! New statistics show the US dropped more than 7,400 bombs on Afghanistan last year, more than any year since 2013. And while there are signs of hope of a deal with the Taliban, it is too late for families already caught up in the crossfire. Al Jazeeras Zein Basravi reports. A Brazilian senator was shot Wednesday as he tried to intervene in a strike by military police demanding higher salaries in the northeastern state of Ceara, prompting authorities to deploy federal forces. Sen. Cid Gomes, a former governor of the state, received a shot in the chest and was taken to a nearby hospital. A statement from the hospital released in the evening said the senator was in stable condition and breathing without medical help. A video circulating on television showed Gomes trying to drive a backhoe through the gate of a police barrack, behind which balaclava-clad police officers were protesting. It also shows the moment when the vehicles windows were being shot out. It wasnt immediately clear where the gunfire came from. Shortly before heading to the protest, Gomes had posted a video on Twitter sharing his anger and calling for people to help him end the strike. At the protest, Gomes was seen with a bullhorn. You have five minutes to leave. Not one more, he warned from behind the metal gate that separated his group from the masked officers. One man standing amid the protesters could be heard yelling at him: You dont have the authority to do this! before a brief physical altercation. Minutes later, Gomes attempted to ram the backhoe through the barricade and was hit at least one bullet. An unknown number of officers began a strike Tuesday, dissatisfied with the negotiations with the state to raise their pay. In Brazil, the military police are in charge of patrolling the streets, among other duties, and it is illegal for them to strike. Throughout the day, small acts of vandalism have occurred across the state. Masked men invaded several police barracks, smashing police window-shields and puncturing tires. In one instance, men drove off with patrol cars and parked them in line blocking nearby streets. In the city of Sobral, where the 56-year-old former governor was injured, men wearing balaclavas on-board police vehicles forced businesses to shut their doors for the day, online news portal G1 reported. The Public Security Secretary said in a press conference around mid-day, hours before Sen. Gomes was shot, that authorities would not tolerate the illegal strike. The state secretary said some 260 officers were already under investigation, and that any striking policeman would be banned from receiving its salary and possibly fired. Justice and Public Minister Sergio Moro said in a statement Wednesday night it would deploy federal forces to help maintain order. The federal police and federal highway police have also been sent to Sobral to ensure the security of Gomes. The Brazil Forum of Public Security, an independent organization that tracks national crime statistics, condemned the violence. However legitimate the public security officers salary demands are, it is unacceptable that bad policemen spread fear and panic among the population, a statement read. In 2017, hundreds of police went on strike in Brazils Espirito Santo state and were indicted. The standoff produced a wave of violence, looting and burning of buses. Schools were closed, and medical services and public transportation interrupted. To stem the tumult, the federal government deployed more than 3,000 troops from the military and the national guard. In 2011, during the last Ceara police protests, many were also arrested. If they show their faces, theyre fired or arrested, said Manuela Barroso, a spokesperson for a military police association. Today the situation is different, Barroso said, voicing fears that the strike could lead to looting and clashes in an already violent state. Back then, the city was not as dangerous as it is today. (Pic Credit: Pixabay) Stuff reported: For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. The company, Crypto AG, got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for US troops during World War II. Flush with cash, it became a dominant maker of encryption devices for decades, navigating waves of technology from mechanical gears to electronic circuits and, finally, silicon chips and software. The Swiss firm made millions of dollars selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was secretly owned by the CIA in a highly classified partnership with West German intelligence. These spy agencies rigged the companys devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. Bengaluru, Feb 20 : Amid the coronavirus outbreak, business software solutions major SAP India on Thursday shut all its offices in the country for sanitisation after two of its employees were tested positive for Swine Flu (H1N1). SAP India's offices in Bengaluru, Gurgaon and Mumbai were temporarily closed and all the workers have been asked to work from home till the office premises are sanitised. "Two SAP India employees based in Bangalore (RMZ Ecoworld office) have tested positive for the H1N1 virus. Detailed contact tracing that the infected colleagues may have come into contact with is underway," the company said in a statement shared with IANS. The health of our employees and their families is of utmost priority, as a precautionary measure, all the SAP India Offices across Bangalore, Gurgaon and Mumbai have been closed for extensive sanitization, and all SAP employees based in these locations have been asked to work from home till further notice," the company elaborated. Symptoms of swine flu, caused by the H1N1 virus, are like those of any seasonal flu and include fever, cough, runny nose, sore throat, body aches chills and fatigue. WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- A fintech panel discussing new research on robo-advice and its implications on financial planning practice will take the spotlight at the fourth annual Academic Research Colloquium, February 20-22. The panel will be led by Dr. David Musto, Ronald O. Perelman Professor in Finance at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Musto also served as guest editor of the fintech special issue in the Financial Planning Review, a double-blind, peer-reviewed academic journal from CFP Board's Center for Financial Planning. Other panelists include Jason McCarley of Oregon State University; Vanessa Perry of George Washington University; and Martin Seay, CFP of Kansas State University. The panel, along with 30 paper presentations from authors around the world are among the highlights of the colloquium, which is hosted by the Center in cooperation with the International Financial Planning Standards Board and FP Canada. "Our aim is to provide fresh insights for scholars and practitioners and expand the academic foundation of financial planning," said CFP Board CEO Kevin R. Keller, CAE. "The emerging scholarly research presented at the colloquium is essential to ensure CFP professionals have the knowledge, skills and ability necessary to succeed and better serve their clients." The colloquium will also include a panel on the future of financial planning research hosted by the Financial Planning Review. The panel offers a look at how research can help shape the next ten years of financial planning practice. "The Financial Planning Review is becoming the leading primary source for data that impacts the financial planning profession and practitioners," said Charles R. Chaffin, Ed.D., director of academic initiatives for the Center for Financial Planning and executive editor of the Financial Planning Review. "We're excited about discovering new directions for how research impacts practice going forward." This year's colloquium has a paper acceptance rate of under 25 percent; invited speakers; interviews for open financial planning faculty positions; and a special focus on poster/concurrent sessions for doctoral students within financial planning programs as well as related research areas. Practitioner sessions, devoted exclusively to exploring the implications of research to financial planning practice, will be led by prominent scholar-practitionersindividuals who have extensive financial planning practice experience and can apply those to relevant, impactful research. CFP professionals attending these sessions will be eligible to receive CFP Board CE credit provided by the Financial Planning Association. Register to attend. #ARC2020 The colloquium is made possible with the support from the Center's Lead Founding Sponsor, TD Ameritrade Institutional, and Founding Sponsors Northwestern Mutual, Envestnet and Charles Schwab Foundation, in partnership with Schwab Advisor Services. About CFP Board Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc. is the professional body for personal financial planners in the U.S. CFP Board sets standards for financial planning and administers the prestigious CFP certification one of the most respected certifications in financial services so that the public has access to and benefits from competent and ethical financial planning. CFP Board, along with its Center for Financial Planning, is committed to increasing the public's awareness of CFP certification and access to a diverse, ethical and competent financial planning workforce. Widely recognized by firms and consumer groups as the standard for financial planning, CFP certification is held by more than 86,000 people in the United States. About the CFP Board Center for Financial Planning The CFP Board Center for Financial Planning seeks to create a more diverse and sustainable financial planning profession so that every American has access to competent and ethical financial planning advice. The Center brings together CFP professionals, firms, educators, researchers and experts to address profession-wide challenges in the areas of diversity and workforce development, and to build an academic home that offers opportunities for conducting and publishing new research that adds to the financial planning body of knowledge. More about the Center and its initiatives can be found at www.CenterforFinancialPlanning.org. SOURCE Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, Inc. Related Links http://www.cfp.net The Tribune reported on Dec. 18, 2019 that 2nd City Ink was not registered with the Illinois Department of Public Health, as required by state law. IDPH sent 2nd City Ink a cease-and-desist letter the day after the Tribune story was posted online. Walker also had to deal with the city. She applied for a Chicago regulated business license on Dec. 19, 2019, according to city data posted online. India on Thursday countered criticism from Beijing over Home Minister Amit Shahs visit to Arunachal Pradesh, asserting that it did not stand to reason and understanding to object to the visit of an Indian leader to a state of India. China had registered its objection to Amit Shahs visit to Arunachal Pradesh earlier in the day, claiming that India had violated territorial sovereignty and sabotaged political mutual trust with India. Foreign ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar responded to the dart, asserting that the Indian position on Arunachal Pradesh was clear and consistent. ALSO WATCH | Article 371 wont be removed: Amit Shah assures Arunachal Pradesh Arunachal Pradesh is an integral and inalienable part of India. Indian leaders routinely travel to the state of Arunachal Pradesh as they do to any other state of India, the external affairs ministry spokesperson said on Thursday. Hurling darts at New Delhi is a routine exercise in Beijing when dignitaries visit Arunachal Pradesh. China claims Arunachal is part of the geographical territory of south Tibet or the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), which has a long mountainous border with China. Thursdays reaction from China was on a visit to Arunachal Pradesh by Home Minister Amit Shah who was in the state to commemorate the 34th Statehood Day and launch developmental projects. There were similar objections from China last year when other leaders including Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Rajnath Singh traveled to the state. India and China have a dispute over borders stretching from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh and it is yet to be resolved after many rounds of talks. Last year, customs authorities in a northeastern Chinese city had destroyed nearly 30,000 world maps that showed Arunachal Pradesh as a part of India and Taiwan as a separate country. It was said to be the largest such exercise in recent years and was carried out to protect Chinas territorial integrity. The ongoing acts of solidarity between the Wetsuweten Nation and its allies among other First Nations as well as non-Indigenous Canadians over a pipeline running through unceded Aboriginal territory is threatening the status quo so much that they are quickly being vilified as thuggish. In addition to that unity across diverse groups of people, Canadian leaders and the institutions that uphold them are amplifying the differences of opinion within the Wetsuweten to delegitimize the railway disruptions by demonstrators across Canada by positing them as the actions of a corrupt, radical few. When societies are unequal, solidarity at the base ends up seeking accountability from people at the top. Its easy to see why unity no matter how hard won, no matter how fragile is frightening to those who hold power. That fear has been on display these past few days when leader after leader took aim at the demonstrations that have shut down arterial rail lines transporting people and goods across the land. Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who has repeatedly called the democratic protests illegal, stood up in the House of Commons on Tuesday to advocate for a forceful removal of land defenders and their supporters. Will our country be one of the rule of law or will our country be one of the rule of the mob? he asked. Peaceful civil disobedience is mob rule now. Thats what I imagine Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos would have said as he surveyed the masses in a People Power revolution in the mid-1980s protesting his rule before he was toppled. Scheer went on: Standing between our country and prosperity is a small group of radical activists many of whom have little to no connections to First Nations communities They are appropriating an Indigenous agenda which they are wilfully misrepresenting. This (the pipeline) is a fantastic opportunity for the Wetsuweten people. This sudden concern for Indigenous peoples is an interesting twist from Scheer, the man without the support of the vast numbers of First Nations in his Saskatchewan riding of Regina-QuAppelle. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who said Patience may be in short supply and that makes it more valuable than ever, did the right thing ignoring Scheer at an all-leaders meeting he called Tuesday. Scheer didnt deserve to be at the grown-ups table; he cant argue for civility and dialogue when hes unwilling to do either. But Scheer was positively patient compared to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, who one week ago already thought it was about time the police stopped the protests. This is obviously a dress rehearsal for future pipeline protests Kenney told reporters, something Scheer echoed in the House. By Tuesday evening, pre-social-media politician, and contender for Scheers position, Peter MacKay decided he couldnt be left out of this important conversation. He released a video where he stiffly read off a screen and condemned the pipeline opponents as a small gang of professional protesters and thugs holding innocent Canadians hostage. He laid the us-versus-them framework but still called the protesters a threat to our national unity. Professional protesters is lazy shorthand for suspicious without the burden of fact-checking to back up the assertion. Who is paying them? How many of them are being paid? How much? Why? How do we know this without resorting to conspiracy theories? But assertions that dont pass basic sniff tests are being swirled around and amplified in hopes of creating such a stink that nobody investigates them. It has ever been thus. In a recent piece, three settler scholars two historians and a geographer categorized some of these political reactions as strategies belonging to a settler playbook. They list these strategies as: distorting and dismissing the past, doublespeak and deceit, paternalism, invoking the rule of law and, of course, divide and conquer. The scholars Sarah Rotz, Daniel Ruck and Sean Carleton point to how B.C. Premier John Horgan attempts to exploit internal differences within the Wetsuweten nation to justify his governments already-existing support of the project. It is convenient for him and others to ignore how the long history of settler colonialism has shaped and fomented such divisions. There never has been a society without divisions. Democracies attempt to turn this into an advantage by creating ruling and opposition parties on the premise that critical disagreements provide for checks and balances. And while its usually politically correct to glorify ideas of unity and mutual respect among its masses, divide and rule has always been the colonial way of operating. It never has been in Canadas interest to give real respect to the original inhabitants of the land. It has always been in Canadas interest to sow divisions within, all the better to accelerate racist ideas of assimilation. This time around, though, the way its going, these acts of solidarity might just be able to make the blatant bullies back off. We can hope. Read more about: Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 22:42:30|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close Medical team members pose for a group photo before leaving for Hubei Province at Binhai International Airport in Tianjin, north China, Feb. 20, 2020. The 11th batch of medical team comprised of 172 medical personnel from Tianjin set off on Thursday to aid the coronavirus control efforts in Hubei. Previously a total of 1,073 medical workers from Tianjin have assisted Hubei in the anti-virus fight. (Xinhua/Li Ran) Hollywood star Ben Affleck has revealed why he walked out of the upcoming DC superhero biggie, "The Batman", despite having played the caped crusader in films like "Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice", "Suicide Squad" and "Justice League". In a new interview, Affleck said his decision was driven by the fear that playing out the role would mess up his commitment to staying sober after several rehab stints for his battle with alcoholism, reports aceshowbiz.com. "I showed somebody 'The Batman' script. They said, 'I think the script is good. I also think you'll drink yourself to death if you go through what you just went though again'," said Affleck. At one point, there were reports that the actor would not only act in the upcoming Batman film, but also write and direct it, reports the New York Times. Affleck gave up the idea of scripting and directing the project in 2017, and Matt Reeves took over the reigns. Subsequently, Robert Pattinson was cast as Batman and his alter ego Bruce Wayne. During the interview with the New York Times, Affleck, opening up on his long battle with alcoholism, credits fellow Hollywood stars Bradley Cooper and Robert Downey Jr. for helping him overcome alcoholism. "One of the things about recovery that I think people sometimes overlook is the fact that it inculcates certain values. Be honest. Be accountable. Help other people. Apologise when you're wrong," he said. MIAMI, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Board of Directors of Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE: RCL) today declared a quarterly dividend of $0.78 per common share payable on April 6, 2020, to shareholders of record at the close of business on March 6, 2020. Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. (NYSE: RCL) is a global cruise vacation company that controls and operates four global brands: Royal Caribbean International, Celebrity Cruises, Azamara and Silversea Cruises. We are also a 50% joint venture owner of the German brand TUI Cruises and a 49% shareholder in the Spanish brand Pullmantur Cruceros. Together these brands operate a combined total of 61 ships with an additional 17 on order as of December 31, 2019. They operate diverse itineraries around the world that call on all seven continents. Additional information can be found on www.royalcaribbean.com, www.celebritycruises.com, www.azamara.com, www.silversea.com, www.tuicruises.com, www.pullmantur.es, or www.rclinvestor.com. SOURCE Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd. Related Links http://www.rclcorporate.com Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 21:39:04|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close NINGBO, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Authorities have launched an insurance program in an eastern Chinese city to compensate small and micro enterprises that halt production due to infectious diseases such as COVID-19. The insurance period is six months in the city of Ningbo, Zhejiang Province. If a company there stops production due to infectious diseases during this period, it can apply for compensation of 3,500 yuan (499 U.S. dollars) per day, but the maximum total compensation is 100,000 yuan. A total of 5,000 small and micro enterprises will be the first to benefit from the program. The insurance premium is 2,000 yuan for each company, and the government will subsidize half of it. Enterprises can also receive compensation for shutdowns caused by epidemics in surrounding areas. Were there better options than putting them on a plane for an additional 14-day quarantine at two U.S. military locations? Would it have been smarter to keep them quarantined on shore in Japan? Some passengers smartly refused to board the plane, worrying that the risk was too high. Then there was the warm welcome that Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen gave to the 2,257 passengers aboard a Holland America cruise ship after other countries had refused to let it dock. Instead of insisting on a quarantine once he granted entry, the prime minister let hundreds of passengers disperse without being tested. Each time an infection is reported, medical personnel are supposed to find out exactly where the patient has been and with whom he or she has been in contact. Those people all need to be tested. Multiply that process by the 73,332 confirmed cases as of Tuesday including 804 in 25 countries outside of China and that helps explain the massive job ahead when containment efforts fall apart. The temporary (albeit extreme) discomfort of a few is better than risking a far greater mass exposure. Two Dallas nurses learned the hard way during the 2014 U.S. ebola outbreak what disasters befall medical personnel who arent trained to follow proper quarantine procedures. With 15 infections of coronavirus confirmed around the United States, including two cases in Illinois, the time for preparation and training is now. China has revoked the press credentials of three journalists with the Wall Street Journal after the newspaper declined to apologise for a column with a headline calling China the "real sick man of Asia," the foreign ministry said on Wednesday. Australian journalist Philip Wen has been given five days to leave China. Credit:John Woudstra Spokesman Geng Shuang said Beijing made "stern representations" to the paper over the February 3 column, which China criticised as racist and denigrating its efforts to combat a coronavirus epidemic, but the paper had failed to apologise or investigate those responsible. "The Chinese people do not welcome media that publish racist statements and maliciously attack China," Geng told a daily briefing. "In light of this, China has decided to revoke the press cards of the three Wall Street Journal correspondents in Beijing, starting today." An eight-year-old boy who contracted coronavirus has been released from isolation in the Gold Coast University Hospital after recovering and being cleared of the disease. The boy was part of a tour group from China which arrived in Australia in late January before one of the adults became sick and the group of nine were put into isolation. He was confirmed as having the disease on February 4 and was placed into separate isolation, being cared for by his father who did not contract the disease. The boy was one of five positive cases who were isolated at Gold Coast University hospital Credit:Robert Shakespeare Queensland health minister Steven Miles announced on Thursday morning in State Parliament that the boy and his parents had now been released from hospital. Prison officials discretion and the Sixth Amendment: These are the two issues lawyers have said are at the heart of their case for inmates from a Lancaster correctional facility who are suing over allegations they had their legal materials taken away and access to attorneys limited. Closing arguments were heard Wednesday afternoon in Suffolk Superior Court in Boston in the case of three incarcerated men at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison in the state. The plaintiffs included Carl Larocque and Tamik Kirkland as well as Robert Silva-Prentice, who appeared at this weeks hearing and accused a special operations tactical team at the facility of beating and tasing him without cause. Two attorneys representing the three inmates argued prisoners right to counsel, guaranteed under the Sixth Amendment, and the alleged ability of correction officials to operate with little oversight in maintaining prison safety are at the crux of their case. The right to counsel is really the basis of our argument Victoria Kelleher, one of the inmates lawyers, told reporters after Wednesdays hearing. People do have a right to counsel, a right to effective representation, and we cant possibly do our jobs if we cant see and speak to our clients. Silva-Prentice is one of several inmates at Souza-Baranowski who have claimed they were assaulted by prison staff in the wake of a Jan. 10 attack on four correction officers. Stephen Kenneway, superintendent of the facility, said the assault on the guards was planned and gang-related. He also alleged prison staff have received threats of murder, rape and hostage-taking since the facility was locked down after the attack. It was during the roughly three-week lockdown that, inmates alleged, a tactical team stationed at the facility beat the incarcerated men, used dogs to intimidate them and deployed pepper spray and tasers on the prisoners inside their cells, according to state legislators who visited the facility in recent weeks. The public officials also claimed there were health and hygiene problems at the prison. The inmate telephone system was turned off after Jan. 10 for two weeks, and attorney visits were suspended. Non-contact communications between lawyers and prisoners, meaning visits where the two parties are separated by plexiglass and talk through a vent, were reinstated on Jan. 17. Full visitation were returned by Feb. 3, the Massachusetts Department of Correction said in court filings earlier this month. Inmates scheduled court trips, ability to send and receive mail and use online email services were not impacted, the facilitys superintendent said. Silva-Prentice and other inmates claimed, though, there were serious lag times in the facilitys email system, CorrLinks. Their ability to reach out to their lawyers was also limited during that time, and, Silva-Prentice alleged, he was not able to freely speak with his appellate lawyer during non-contact visits. The unchecked denial of constitutional rights is an exaggerated response, said Rebecca Jacobstein, an attorney at the Committee for Public Counsel Services, who gave closing arguments on behalf of the plaintiffs Wednesday. Attorney Lisa Kavanaugh, director of CPCSs Innocence Program, which aims to exonerate wrongfully convicted felons, was a witness at the hearing Wednesday and talked about how she was unable to get in touch with her client, Raymond Champagne, during the lockdown. Up until Jan. 10, she was talking with the Souza-Baranowski inmate once a week. Kavanaugh claimed she was not able to make contact with Champagne until later that month and was not alerted by prison officials that access to the phone system was suspended. It took her seven days to receive an email from the prisoner after he sent it to her, she alleged. His experience was consistent with the other incarcerated men who testified, the attorney alleged. Until Friday, I had no idea what was going to happen with Mr. Champagnes case, Kavanaugh said, adding, though, that the man had been exonerated and was in attendance at the hearing. We had much to discuss. Souza-Baranowskis tactical team started a prison-wide search for drugs, weapons and other contraband on Jan. 21. They removed all inmates properties, including their legal paperwork and much of their clothing, leaving them only with a T-shirt, pair of underwear and shower shoes, according to Ricardo Arias, another inmate who testified Wednesday. All the belongings were stored in a closed area of the prison and returned three days later, said Pat DePalo, assistant deputy commissioner of field services at DOC. They told us we could only have our boxers and T-shirts, said Silva-Prentice. I felt dehumanized. It was just degrading. The prisoner also claimed in court Wednesday that he had five to six volumes of legal materials that were organized by date prior to the tactical teams search. When he got them back, the papers were completely jumbled and in disarray, Silva-Prentice alleged. Daryl Glazer, the lawyer representing the defendants in the case, said prison officials were well within their rights to limit visitation rights at the facility and temporarily remove inmates belonging. She claimed no irreparable harm was done and that the plaintiffs concerns were moot as all services at Souza-Baranowski have gone back to normal. The attorney added that the three prisoners did not present any evidence of harm and that the facilitys superintendent noticed credible threats at the prison after the Jan. 10 attack. Correctional policies give Kenneway discretion in suspending telephone access and attorney visits, Glazer alleged. I do reserve the right to fix things if theyre broken, Kenneway said during the hearing. Larocque is serving a 15- to 20-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of his best friend. Kirkland is serving a life sentence for first-degree murder in connection with the 2011 Springfield barbershop shooting that killed customer Sheldon Innocent and culminated in a shootout with police. Silva-Prentice was convicted in 2018 of second-degree murder for the shooting death of 17-year-old Yanuel Viloria in Roxbury in 2017. Got a news tip or want to contact MassLive about this story? Email newstips@masslive.com or message us on Facebook orTwitter. You can also call our news tips line at 413-776-1364. Related Content: Looming, however, was the inevitable drop. For all the wealth and all the leadership the state shows in fighting climate change, Mr. Newsom said, California cannot ignore that it is also home to a housing crisis that has led to hundreds of thousands of people living on the streets or in their cars. Lets call it what it is, the governor said. A disgrace. Mr. Newsom took the rare step of devoting almost all of his address to housing and homelessness. (He didnt mention, for instance, high-speed rail or the slow-moving war over the future of PG&E, the states biggest utility.) But Raphael Sonenshein, the executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at Cal State Los Angeles, told me he found that locking into one issue was an effective approach for Mr. Newsom, whos been accused in the past of trying to do too much. It allowed him to use his detail skill and focus it, Mr. Sonenshein said. Whether the policies get carried out or not is something else. Heres what else stood out in the speech: Mr. Newsom wove in a history lesson about the roots of the housing crisis. This included a direct acknowledgment of the role of racism in shaping the state as we know it. SACRAMENTO, Calif., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Kaiser Permanente is committing $32 million to help the Sacramento area address homelessness and housing insecurity. This announcement is the latest move by the nation's largest nonprofit, integrated health system to alleviate the epidemic of homelessness across the communities it serves. Sacramento County has the third-highest per capita homelessness rate in California, after San Francisco and Los Angeles counties. Homelessness in Sacramento has increased an estimated 19% since 2017, and 70% of those experiencing homelessness in Sacramento County are unsheltered one of the highest such rates in California. "Housing insecurity has a negative impact on health and will require an all-hands-on-deck approach to solving this problem," said Greg Adams, Chairman and CEO of Kaiser Permanente. "Our mission to improve the health of our members and their communities demands that Kaiser Permanente continues to lead, support and catalyze others to address the public health issue of homelessness and housing insecurity." Working in collaboration with Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, county leaders and other key stakeholders, Kaiser Permanente is implementing a strategic approach to: Invest up to $25 million to preserve and create affordable and supportive housing. The first investment of these funds will preserve 172 affordable units in three Section 8 properties in Sacramento and Rancho Cordova . to preserve and create affordable and supportive housing. The first investment of these funds will preserve 172 affordable units in three Section 8 properties in and . Commit $2 million to leverage our national partnership with Community Solutions and its Built for Zero initiative to support systems change working with cities, counties and other key stakeholders. to leverage our national partnership with Community Solutions and its Built for Zero initiative to support systems change working with cities, counties and other key stakeholders. Invest $5 million in operating costs to expand emergency shelter capacity in Sacramento . This is in addition to the $6 million previously given to address immediate needs of people experiencing homelessness in Sacramento . "Kaiser Permanente has stepped up big time for our community, and I thank them. The biggest challenge threatening Sacramento's ongoing renaissance is the growing number of people living outside in unsafe conditions combined with our severe shortage of affordable housing," said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. "Kaiser Permanente's unprecedented contribution to our efforts will allow us to house hundreds of people in a service-rich environment where they can reclaim their lives and get help transitioning to permanent housing." The $25 million impact investment commitment is part of Kaiser Permanente's $200 million Thriving Communities Fund announced in 2018. The commitment will initially draw on existing funds Kaiser Permanente has created with Enterprise Community Partners to preserve and increase the number of affordable and supportive housing units available in Sacramento. "We are excited to bring a multi-pronged approach to help ease housing insecurity in Sacramento, solving for the community's most pressing needs," said Bechara Choucair, MD, chief health officer for Kaiser Permanente. "In particular, the ability to preserve 172 units of affordable housing will allow hundreds of people and families to stay stably housed, boosting their ability to achieve and maintain good physical, mental and social health." About Kaiser Permanente Kaiser Permanente is committed to helping shape the future of health care. We are recognized as one of America's leading health care providers and not-for-profit health plans. Founded in 1945, Kaiser Permanente has a mission to provide high-quality, affordable health care services and to improve the health of our members and the communities we serve. We currently serve 12.2 million members in eight states and the District of Columbia. Care for members and patients is focused on their total health and guided by their personal Permanente Medical Group physicians, specialists and team of caregivers. Our expert and caring medical teams are empowered and supported by industry-leading technology advances and tools for health promotion, disease prevention, state-of-the-art care delivery and world-class chronic disease management. Kaiser Permanente is dedicated to care innovations, clinical research, health education and the support of community health. For more information, contact: Hilary Costa, [email protected] (510) 406-6654 SOURCE Kaiser Permanente Related Links http://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org By Julia Cheever Bay City News SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A federal judge on Wednesday ordered a further competency evaluation of up to 45 days in a U.S. prison facility for an undocumented Mexican citizen accused of illegally possessing the gun that killed a woman on a San Francisco pier in 2015. U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria said the evaluation could result in Jose Inez Garcia Zarate taking medication that would enable him to be competent to stand trial. A recent three-hour evaluation by a psychiatrist concluded that Zarate is currently incompetent, but could be made able to undergo a trial if given medication, according to descriptions of that evaluation given by Chhabria and Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Cheng at a hearing in Chhabria's San Francisco courtroom. Zarate faces federal charges of being an undocumented immigrant and an ex-felon in possession of the gun from which a ricocheting bullet struck and killed Kate Steinle on Pier 14 on July 1, 2015. He contends that the shooting was an accident, that he didn't know a wrapped object he found under his chair was a gun and that he threw it in the water as soon as it fired. He was acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges in San Francisco Superior Court in 2017. Chhabria delayed Zarate's federal trial and ordered the recent three-hour evaluation after concluding that Zarate didn't seem to understand the federal charges. A longer 30- to 45-day evaluation would provide an opportunity for Zarate to be prescribed medication and then be observed, Cheng said. Defense attorney Erica Treeby and Cheng both agreed to the plan, which Chhabria ordered after briefly closing his courtroom for a private discussion with Zarate. Lead defense attorney Tony Serra has previously said he believes Zarate is competent and wants him to be able to go to trial because the alternative could be being held in a prison medical facility for long-term treatment. Serra has said he expects an acquittal. The judge said at Wednesday's hearing that Zarate was formerly given medication while being held at Alameda County's Glenn Dyer Jail in Oakland, but "it appears inexplicably that they stopped treating him" when Zarate was moved to the county's Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. Chhabria said it will be up to the medical evaluators to decide whether to prescribe medication for Zarate, but if the medication is prescribed and Zarate takes it, he may be able to go to trial. Under federal law, the continued evaluation can last no more than 45 days. It would take place at a U.S. Bureau of Prisons facility in Seattle, Los Angeles or San Diego. Chhabria also noted during the hearing that in an evaluation in a previous case a few years ago, Zarate was found to be competent to stand trial after being given medication. The previous assessment was ordered by a federal judge in Texas in 2009, according to an order Chhabria issued last month. In that case, a medical evaluator diagnosed Zarate with schizophrenia and concluded he was competent to stand trial because he was properly medicated at the time, Chhabria said in the document. Copyright 2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The European Commission released long-awaited position papers Wednesday on several key digital issues, including how to treat the continent's digital data and how best to regulate artificial intelligence. Why it matters: Europe has traditionally trailed the U.S. in creating giant tech companies that gobble up consumer data, but it has led in issuing rules and policies to govern such practices. The European Data Strategy and the AI recommendations have themes will be familiar. As has long been the case, the EU is hoping to offer broader protection to its citizens while also fostering a more competitive European tech ecosystem. What they're saying: Not surprisingly, many trade groups released statements praising the goals of the proposals, while urging restraint in regulation. Guido Lobrano, ITI's VP for European policy: "For Europe to fully realize its tech leadership potential, it should take a collaborative approach to regulation and avoid prescriptive policies that could stifle innovation in emerging areas like artificial intelligence." ITI's VP for European policy: "For Europe to fully realize its tech leadership potential, it should take a collaborative approach to regulation and avoid prescriptive policies that could stifle innovation in emerging areas like artificial intelligence." Thomas Boue, director general of BSA The Software Alliance: "Today's strategies help set a clear path forward for companies, governments, and citizens to benefit from responsible, software-powered technologies across Europe. ... The upcoming broad consultations will be key to building trust and ensuring that new rules on data-driven technologies are transparent, fair, and fit for purpose." Meanwhile: Cornell business professor Thomas Jungbauer argues the proposals aren't what's needed to help Europe catch up. "Network effects and technological factors are responsible for many of the markets in the tech and sharing economy to be 'winner-takes-most' scenarios, that is markets in which a big firm dominates with other smaller players serving niche needs." What's next: The tech giants all have a new decision to make: How to treat the data of users in the U.K., post-Brexit. Reuters reports that Google is likely to move U.K. customers to U.S. rules, thereby avoiding Europe's stricter data protections and heavier consequences for violations. Go deeper: An international push for AI ethics Dr. Keith Corl was working in a Las Vegas emergency room when a patient arrived with chest pain. The patient, wearing his street clothes, had a two-minute exam in the triage area with a doctor, who ordered an X-ray and several other tests. But later, in the treatment area, when Corl met the man and lifted his shirt, it was clear the patient had shingles. Corl didnt need any tests to diagnose the viral infection that causes a rash and searing pain. All those tests? They turned out to be unnecessary and left the patient with over $1,000 in extra charges. The excessive testing, Corl said, stemmed from a model of emergency care that forces doctors to practice fast and loose medicine. Patients get a battery of tests before a doctor even has time to hear their story or give them a proper exam. Were just shotgunning, Corl said. The shingles case is one of hundreds of examples that have led to his exasperation and burnout with emergency medicine. Whats driving the burnout, he argued, is something deepera sense of moral injury. Corl, a 42-year-old assistant professor of medicine at Brown University, is among a growing number of physicians, nurses, social workers, and other clinicians who are using the phrase moral injury to describe their inner struggles at work. The term comes from war: It was first used to explain why military veterans were not responding to standard treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder. Moral injury, as defined by researchers from veterans hospitals, refers to the emotional, physical and spiritual harm people feel after perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations. Drs. Wendy Dean and Simon Talbot, a psychiatrist, and a surgeon were the first to apply the term to health care. Both wrestled with symptoms of burnout themselves. They concluded that moral injury better described the root cause of their anguish: They knew how best to care for their patients but were blocked from doing so by systemic barriers related to the business side of health care. That idea resonates with clinicians across the country: Since they penned an op-ed in Stat in 2018, Dean and Talbot have been flooded with emails, comments, calls, and invitations to speak on the topic. Burnout has long been identified as a major problem facing medicine: 4 in 10 physicians report feelings of burnout, according to a 2019 Medscape report. And the physician suicide rate is more than double that of the general population. Dean said she and Talbot have given two dozen talks on moral injury. The response from each place has been consistent and surprising: This is the language weve been looking for for the last 20 years. Dean said that response has come from clinicians across disciplines, who wrestle with what they consider barriers to quality care: insurance preauthorization, trouble making patient referrals, endless clicking on electronic health records. Those barriers can be particularly intense in emergency medicine. Corl said he has been especially frustrated by a model of emergency medicine called provider-in-triage. It aims to improve efficiency but, he said, prioritizes speed at the cost of quality care. In this system, a patient who shows up to an ER is seen by a doctor in a triage area for a rapid exam lasting less than two minutes. In theory, a doctor in triage can more quickly identify patients ailments and get a head start on solving them. The patient is usually wearing street clothes and sitting in a chair. These brief encounters may be good for business: They reduce the door to doc timehow long it takes to see a doctorthat hospitals sometimes boast about on billboards and websites. They enable hospitals to charge a facility fee much earlier, the minute a patient sees a doctor. And they reduce the number of people who leave the ER without being seen, which is another quality measure. But the real priority is speed and money and not our patients care, Corl said. That makes it tough for doctors who know they could be doing better for their patients. Dean said people often frame burnout as a personal failing. Doctors get the message: If you did more yoga, if you ate more salmon salad, if you went for a longer run, it would help. But, she argued, burnout is a symptom of deeper systemic problems beyond clinicians control. Emergency physician Dr. Angela Jarman sees similar challenges in California, including ER overcrowding and bureaucratic hurdles to discharging patients. As a result, she said, she must treat patients in the hallways, with noise, bright lights and a lack of privacya recipe for hospital-acquired delirium. Hallway medicine is such a [big] part of emergency medicine these days, said Jarman, 35, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at UC-Davis. Patients are literally stuck in the hallway. Everyones walking by. I know it must be embarrassing and dehumanizing. For example, when an older patient breaks an arm and cannot be released to their own care at home, they may stay in the ER for days as they await evaluation from a physical therapist and approval to transfer to rehab or a nursing home, she said. Meanwhile, the patient gets bumped into a bed in the hallway to make room for new patients who keep streaming in the door. Being responsible for discharging patients who are stuck in the hallway is so frustrating, Jarman said. Thats not what Im good at. Thats not what Im trained to do. Jarman said many emergency physicians she knows work part-time to curtail burnout. I love emergency medicine, but a lot of what we do these days is not emergency medicine, she said. I definitely dont think Ill make it 30 years. Also at UC-Davis, Dr. Nick Sawyer, an assistant professor of emergency medicine, has been working with medical students to analyze systemic problems. Among those theyve identified: patients stuck in the ER for up to 1,000 hours while awaiting transfer to a psychiatric facility; patients who are not initially suicidal, but become suicidal while awaiting mental health care; patients who rely on the ER for primary care. Sawyer, 38, said he has suffered moral injury from treating patients like this one: A Latina had a large kidney stone and a huge amount of pain but could not get surgery because the stone was not infected and therefore her case wasnt deemed an emergency by her insurance plan. The health system is not set up to help patients. Its set up to make money, he said. The best way to approach this problem, he said, is to help future generations of doctors understand how decisions made at the systems level impact how we care about patients so they can stand up for whats right. Whether these experiences amount to moral injury is open for discussion. Cynda Rushton, a nurse and professor of clinical ethics at Johns Hopkins University, who has studied the related notion of moral distress for 25 years, said there isnt a base of research, as there is for moral distress, to measure moral injury among clinicians. But what both of these terms signify, Rushton said, is a sense of suffering that clinicians are experiencing in their roles now, in ways that they havent in the past. Dean grew interested in moral injury from personal experience: After a decade of treating patients as a psychiatrist, she stopped because of financial pressures. She said she wanted to treat her patients in longer visits, offering both psychotherapy and medication management, but that became more difficult. Insurers would rather pay her for only a 15-minute session to manage medications and let a lower-paid therapist handle the therapy. Dean and Talbot created a nonprofit advocacy group called Moral Injury of Healthcare, which promotes public awareness and aims to bring clinicians together to discuss the topic. Their work is attracting praise from a range of clinicians: In Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Mary Franco, who is now 65, retired early from her job as a nurse practitioner after a large corporation bought out the private practice she worked in. She said she saw a dramatic shift in the culture there, where revenue became all-important. The company cut in half the time for each patients annual exam, she said, down to 20 minutes. She spent much of that time clicking through electronic health records, she said, instead of looking the patient in the face. I felt I short-shifted them. In southern Maine, social worker Jamie Leavitt said moral injury led her to take a mental health break from work last year. She said she loves social work, but I couldnt offer the care I wanted to because of time restrictions. One of her tasks was to connect patients with mental health services, but because of insurance restrictions and a lack of quality care providers, she said, often my job was impossible to do. In Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, Dr. Tate Kauffman left primary care for urgent care because he found himself spending half of each visit doing administrative tasks unrelated to a patients ailmentand spending nights and weekends slogging through paperwork required by insurers. There was a grieving process, leaving primary care, he said. Its not that I dont like the job. I dont like what the job has become today. Corl said he was so fed up with the provider-in-triage model of emergency medicine that he moved his ER clinical work to smaller, community hospitals that dont use that method. He said many people frame burnout as a character weakness, sending doctors messages like, Gee, Keith, youve just got to try harder and soldier on. But Corl said the term moral injury correctly identifies that the problem lies with the system. The system is flawed, he said. Its grinding us. Its grinding good docs and providers out of existence. COEUR D'ALENE, ID / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 / New Jersey Mining Company (OTCQB:NJMC)(CSE:NJMC) ("NJMC" or the "Company") is pleased to announce that it has acquired a strategic land package of approximately 368 acres of patented mining claims having both surface and mineral rights, and situated one mile (1.6 kilometers) west of its Golden Chest Mine. NJMC's VP of Exploration, Rob Morgan commented, "This land acquisition strategically connects New Jersey's east and west holdings and is the culmination of a lengthy three-year base-building process in which we planned for success and consolidated the Murray Gold Belt (MGB). Along with the adjacent NJMC properties, this private land package provides an exclusive and exciting opportunity for gold exploration as it is underlain by favorable host rocks and is bisected by a gold-mineralizing fault. Additionally, our experience permitting, designing, constructing - and operating the New Jersey Mill on a daily basis - leads us to believe this property may contain terrain suitable for future tailings impoundment and/or a new mill for the Golden Chest Mine or other infrastructure related to mineral processing in the Murray area." Figure 1 shows land ownership within the Murray Gold Belt; note the large positions held by NJMC and Hecla. The Alder Gulch land was originally patented in the 1880's due to its gold potential and has changed hands only a couple of times since Idaho statehood in 1890. It was held in the same family for nearly 100 years. Since the 1960's at least three campaigns of mineral exploration by major companies have taken place in the Murray Gold Belt. Some of these majors included Newmont, Cominco, Kennecott, ASARCO and Hecla, however none of these companies had access to the closely held Alder Gulch land - thus the land remained largely unexplored for more than a century. NJMC VP Rob Morgan added, "Our initial review of local geologic features suggests several promising prospects that support the gold potential of this land package. One such prospect is located on the Evans claim where a hydrothermally altered intrusive sill barely outcrops through the gravel cover. The sill contains disseminated pyrite and galena with numerous quartz vein stringers mineralized with chalcopyrite, galena and tellurides. Anomalous mineralization is found not only in the veins and veinlets, but also in the intrusive wallrock and in the surrounding sedimentary Prichard Formation host rocks." The presence of gold-tellurium mineralization is interesting as NJMC has experience with that type of mineralization from its work on the Toboggan Project (A select sample from this sill assayed 4.75 gpt gold, 15.65 gpt silver, 2.2 % lead and 7.96 ppm tellurium). NJMC believes that the occurrence of tellurium with gold in this sill is important because it indicates a potentially large alkalic intrusive is responsible for the gold mineralization. Another prospect known as the Gold Lady has exposed banded veins that assay from 3.00 to 10.45 gpt gold, similar to those seen at the Golden Chest Mine. The assays above are from select grab samples and are not necessarily representative of the mineralization hosted on the property. Figure 1. Land Ownership in the Murray Gold Belt In addition to ownership challenges, historic exploration for gold vein lode deposits on the Alder Gulch land has been hampered due to a majority of the property's bedrock being covered by a veneer of river gravels from an ancient stream. This old stream channel of auriferous gravels, and the original justification for granting of the patent, crosses the Alder Gulch land from the northeast to the southwest. Vein systems and north-south trending faults, like the aforementioned Murray Peak Fault, extend under this ancient stream channel from both sides. Mineralization on the NJMC-controlled Buckskin patented claims appears to extend south under the gravels of the newly purchased lands based on historical and recent observations. Similarly, the gold-telluride bearing sill on the Evans extends north and disappears under gravel cover. The application of modern geophysical exploration methods, especially magnetics, should reveal more information on the rocks and fault structures beneath the gravels and help target future drill programs. Qualified person NJMC's Vice President of Exploration, Robert John Morgan, PG, PLS is a qualified person as such term is defined in National Instrument 43-101 and has reviewed and approved the technical information and data included in this press release. No PEA, PF or FS has been completed to verify the economic viability or technical feasibility regarding any new construction of future tailings impoundment, a new mill or other infrastructure related to mineral processing in the Murray area. In order to raise the funds required to complete the acquisition, the Company has issued secured convertible promissory notes (the "Notes") with an aggregate principal amount of US$885,000.00. The outstanding principal amount of the Notes will bear interest at an annual rate of 8.0% for a term of three years. The principal amount of the Notes will be convertible at the option of the investors for common shares of the Company at a price of US$0.18 for per common share prior to the maturity date of the Notes. Interest only payments shall be made on the Notes payable and the Company may prepay the Notes in whole or in part without written consent of the investors. Other Corporate Activities The Company is seeking to amend the terms of 375,000 warrants issued in connection with a private placement completed in December 2018 such that the exercise price of the warrants will be expressed in US currency at US$$0.18. Management and the Board have determined that for purposes of US GAAP it is preferable for the Company to have the exercise prices for its warrants to be expressed in US dollars. About New Jersey Mining Company New Jersey Mining Company is headquartered in North Idaho, where it is producing gold at its Golden Chest Mine. Gold was first discovered in the Murray Gold Belt in 1882, but by 1888 mining declined as the center of activity and demand for labor shifted to the Silver Valley following the discovery of the Bunker Hill, Sunshine, Lucky Friday, and other iconic regional mines. The rebirth of the long-forgotten Murray Gold Belt has been led by NJMC, as evidenced by production from open-pit and underground operations at the Golden Chest Mine, its extensive land package and superior knowledge of the district gained from current development and production, and ongoing exploration activities. NJMC has established a high-quality, early to advanced-stage asset base in three historic mining districts of Idaho and Montana, which includes the currently producing Golden Chest Mine. The Company's objective is to use its considerable in-house skill sets to build a portfolio of mining and milling operations, with a longer-term vision of becoming a mid-tier producer. Management is shareholder focused and owns more than 15-percent of NJMC stock. The Company's common stock trades on the OTC-QB and the CSE Market under the symbol "NJMC." For more information on New Jersey Mining Company go to www.newjerseymining.com or call: Monique Hayes, Corporate Secretary/Investor Relations Email: monique@newjerseymining.com (208) 625-9001 Forward Looking Statements This release contains "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, as amended that are intended to be covered by the safe harbor created by such sections. Such statements are based on good faith assumptions that New Jersey Mining Company believes are reasonable, but which are subject to a wide range of uncertainties and business risks that could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors include, among others, the Company's ability to identify additional resource or construct a mill near the Golden Chest Mine, the risk that the mine plan changes due to rising costs or other operational details, an increased risk associated with production activities occurring without completion of a feasibility study of mineral reserves demonstrating economic and technical viability, the risks and hazards inherent in the mining business (including risks inherent in developing mining projects, environmental hazards, industrial accidents, weather or geologically related conditions), changes in the market prices of gold and silver and the potential impact on revenues from changes in the market price of gold and cash costs, a sustained lower price environment, as well as other uncertainties and risk factors. Actual results, developments and timetables could vary significantly from the estimates presented. Readers are cautioned not to put undue reliance on forward-looking statements. NJMC disclaims any intent or obligation to update publicly such forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. SOURCE: New Jersey Mining Company View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/577129/New-Jersey-Mining-Company-Expands-its-Land-Position--Consolidates-Holdings-in-the-Murray-Gold-Belt Coming into Wednesdays Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas, idiot pundits were mainly concerned with how Michael Bloombergs first performance would reflect on Michael Bloomberg. Stupid! It turns out the big story, Bloomberg-wise, was how well everyone else would come off while they dunked repeatedly and remorselessly on him over the course of exposing his candidacy as the vanity project of a low-charisma onetime Republican with a history of red-flag positions and behavior. It started almost immediately, as Elizabeth Warren jumped into a discussion of electability with a prepackaged zinger that, unlike almost all prepackaged debate zingers, actually drew some blood: Advertisement So Id like to talk about who were running against, a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. And, no, Im not talking about Donald Trump. Im talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women, and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop and frisk. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement (Heres what she was talking about.) Amy Klobuchar popped up soon after to note that Bloombergs campaign had given a memo to Axios Wednesday morningi.e., before hed appeared in front of a national audience as a candidate for a single secondthat suggested she, Pete Buttigieg, and Biden should drop out of the race: Advertisement Advertisement I actually welcomed Mayor Bloomberg to the stage. I thought that he shouldnt be hiding behind his TV ads, and so I was all ready for this big day. And then I looked at the memo from his campaign staff this morning, and it said that he actually thought that three of us should get out of the way. That is what his campaign saidbecause we should pave the way for him to become the nominee. Klobuchar steered the story into a riff about not letting men tell her what to do, which was fine, but substantial damage was done just by stating the premise of the leaked memo out loud and letting the arrogance sink in. After some discussion of Bloombergs (as-yet-unreleased) tax returns and his crude comments about stop-and-frisk policingduring which he didnt need any help from other candidates to look ill at easeNBC moderator Hallie Jackson asked Warren for comment on the nondisclosure agreements that Bloomberg (the company) has signed with women who have accused male co-workers (including Bloomberg the person) of fostering a hostile, sexist work environment. What followed was a political evisceration: Advertisement Advertisement JACKSON: Sen. Warren, youve been critical of Mayor Bloomberg on this issue. WARREN: Yes, I have. And I hope you heard what his defense was. Ive been nice to some women. That just doesnt cut it. The mayor has to stand on his record. And what we need to know is exactly whats lurking out there. He has gotten some number of women, dozens, who knows, to sign nondisclosure agreements both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace. So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements so we can hear their side of the story? BLOOMBERG: We have very few nondisclosure agreements. WARREN: How many is that? BLOOMBERG: Let me finish. WARREN: How many is that? BLOOMBERG: None of them accuse me of doing anything, other than maybe they didnt like a joke I told. And let me justand let metheres agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet and thats up to them. They signed those agreements, and well live with it. BIDEN: Come on. WARREN: So, wait, when you say it is up toI just want to be clear. Some is how many? And and when youand when you say they signed them and they wanted them, if they wish now to speak out and tell their side of the story about what it is they allege, thats now OK with you? Youre releasing them on television tonight? Is that right? BLOOMBERG: Senator WARREN: Is that right, tonight? BLOOMBERG: Senator, the company and somebody else, in this casea man or a woman or it could be more than that, they decided when they made an agreement they wanted to keep it quiet for everybodys interests. WARREN: Im sorry. No, the question is BLOOMBERG: I heard your question. WARREN: are the women bound by being muzzled by you and you could release them from that immediately? Because, understand, this is not just a question of the mayors character. This is also a question about electability. We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against. Thats not what we do as Democrats. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement A few minutes later, Bernie Sanders took his turn: You know, we talk about electability, and everybody up here wants to beat Trump, and we talk about stop and frisk, and we talked about the workplace that Mayor Bloomberg has established and the problems there. But maybe we should also ask how Mayor Bloomberg in 2004 supported George W. Bush for president, put money into Republican candidates for the United States Senate when some of usJoe and I and otherswere fighting for Democrats to control the United States Senate. Maybe we can talk about a billionaire saying that we should not raise the minimum wage, or that we should cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. If thats a way to beat Donald Trump, wow, I would be very surprised. Advertisement After a subsequent discussion of Bloombergs wealth during which he said he had worked very hard for his multi-multibillion-dollar fortune, Sanders noted to him, to oohs and aahs and oh snaps from the audience, that maybe your workers played some role in that as well. It was a very hard night for Bloomberg, and a big part of why it was so hard is that the other Democrats were so sharp and confident in their criticisms of him. They werent flustered by his dismissive speaking style or shaken by his poll standing and spending power, and they all seemed to find it easy to articulate (even during heated back-and-forths) why his record and personality were objectionable. Advertisement Advertisement This should be good news for Democrats for two reasons. One is that, despite the intraparty sniping and snarking that is taking place in this primary, Bloombergs competitors demonstrated that they do, in fact, share common values that animate them more than their differences do, and can snap quickly into a unified front. The other is that, in an environment in which Democratic voters have become obsessed with finding a nominee who can stand up to Trump, all five of the non-Bloomberg candidates onstage stood up to someone who shares a few of Trumps most unsavory traits and came out as clear winners. Residents of the village of Novi Sanzhary in Ukraine's Poltava region are standing in front of the bridge over the Vorskla River so as to prevent vehicles with Ukrainians who arrived from China from driving to the local medical center of the National Guard of Ukraine, according to the Poltavshchyna online news site. "About 200 local residents are standing in front of the Vorskla Bridge to block access to the sanatorium for vehicles with Ukrainians evacuated from China. Protesters on both sides were surrounded by police units, the National Guard and patrol police officers. A local resident says the vehicles will be allowed to pass if [Ukrainian President] Volodymyr Zelensky accommodates his own children near the sanatorium," the report reads. According to Hennadii Suprun, the head of the Novi Sanzhary District Council, the authorities involved 3,500 law enforcement officers to unblock roads. In the morning, locals blocked the entrances to the district center, but National Guard officers were able to break through the barrier. Locals are waiting for buses with evacuees to arrive from Kharkiv airport. The Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine said that the personnel of the medical center had been taken out of the facility, so they will have no contact with people evacuated from Wuhan. The government noted that all evacuees, crew and accompanying persons would be accommodated in individual rooms with proper living conditions. The waste will be disposed of in a special way and will not come into the general sewer system. The sewage drains will be decontaminated. A plane carrying Ukrainians and foreigners arrived in Ukraine from China on February 20. Foreign passengers include citizens of Argentina, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Montenegro, Panama, and Israel. The Ukrainian Interior Ministry said that Ukrainians and foreigners evacuated from China would be placed in quarantine in the Novi Sanzhary medical center. Residents of the village of Novi Sanzhary and neighboring settlements have been blocking roads since night, protesting against the placement of evacuees from China. Clashes erupted between protesters and police this morning. According to the latest data, 2,128 people died from the coronavirus infection as of February 20. The number of coronavirus cases in mainland China reached 75,727 people. A total of 16,526 people recovered and were discharged from hospitals. op Taxpayers in Kansas City, Missouri, have a chance between now and March 3 to influence how the city spends their money. Mayor Quinton Lucas released his proposed budget last week. The budget prioritizes fighting violent crime, increasing the city's stock of affordable housing and fixing potholes, but it falls roughly $3 million short of another of the mayor's priorities: eliminating bus fares. The Mass Action Committee as part of its engagements with relevant stakeholders on the need for a new register, held a public forum on the 18 th of February, 2020 at the College of Surgeons and Physicians. The forum was attended by individuals and organizations including the Ghana Union of Traders Association, National Union of Ghana Students, Citizen Ghana Movement among others. The lead speaker was Dr. Vladimir Antwi-Danso (Dean of academic affairs; Ghana Armed Forces Command and Staff College). His presentation highlighted the dangers of undermining constitutionalism and institutionalism. He further noted that there is a great deal of indiscipline in the Ghanaian society which is now being transferred into the electoral process. A development he emphasizes, can result in instability. Participants, believing that protecting and deepening our democracy is a shared responsibility, expressed a wide array of views on the Electoral Commissions decision to compile a new register. Participants, recognizing the provisions of Article 45, reaffirmed the independence of the Electoral Commission in the discharge of their duties. They also acknowledged that, the current Biometric Verification Management System (BVMS) is fraught with many technical challenges, some of which it would appear, are irredeemable. In view of paragraph 5 above (i.e. technical viability concerns of the (BVMS), participants were unanimous in emphasizing the urgent need for a new voter register. Participants called on every Ghanaian to lend the EC their support in every way they can, to enable them carry out this exercise without any let nor hindrance. They further admonished that, the conduct of political leadership must be guided by the need to preserve the peace and deepen Ghanas democracy. Participants expressed concerns about inflammatory language, incitement and or threat of violence in any shape or form, relative to the electoral processes. And that, such must be exposed and condemned in the strongest terms possible. The forum also called on all eligible Ghanaians to endeavor to register when the process begins on the 18th of April, 2020. Participants, however, stressed that civil vigilance and not vigilantism is the surest way to safeguard the integrity of the registration process. To this end, all stakeholders especially political parties are encouraged to be more vigilant during the registration period. They further admonished individuals and political parties to eschew the practice of encouraging and or helping ineligible voters to register. The forum agreed that we should consolidate our democracy and not stay stagnant. In this respect, the forum supported the introduction of facial recognition into the biometric registration. 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 Egypt Wednesday began construction of a concrete wall along border with Gaza to thwart illegal trafficking from inside the enclave controlled by the Hamas movement. Egyptian cranes and workers launched the construction along the lines of an old, lower barrier that stretches three kilometers (two miles) from Gazas southeastern tip at Karem Shalom to the Rafah crossing with Egypt. The structure, according to Hamas, is to control the border and prevent any illegal activity there, including any cross-border trafficking. Egypt, through the Rafah crossing, is the only window for Palestinians in Gaza on the world. Cairo began recently opening the crossing point after it closed it to combat smuggling activities taking place in tunnels built beneath border which stretches approximately 12 kilometers. The construction of the wall comes amid improving relations between Qatar-sponsored Hamas and Cairo. Egypt has been over long period mediator between enclave ruler and Israel for peace. Both sides have fought three wars since 2008, two years after the Islamist movement won Palestinian elections. "The program continues to progress on budget and within our planned acquisition timeline," said Col. Eric Ropella, PMA-274 presidential helicopter program manager. "The award of LRIP Lot II reinforces the importance of this Marine Corps no-fail mission especially as we move into the next phase of government testing this year." Helicopter on Track to Meet Milestones The VH-92A test aircraft at Patuxent River, Maryland, have proven their production readiness by undergoing rigorous U.S. government testing and operational assessments, including more than 1,000 flight test hours establishing the aircraft's technical maturity and readiness of its mission systems. Sikorsky has transferred five VH-92A helicopters into government test with the sixth completing modification and entering into government test this spring. The VH-92A program is on track to enter Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) later this year. "Now that we are ramping up production, the VH-92A program is gaining momentum," said Dave Banquer, Sikorsky VH-92A program director. "This second contract award demonstrates the confidence the U.S. Marine Corps has in Sikorsky's proven ability to deliver and support the next generation Presidential helicopter." Production of VH-92A Helicopters Underway All six of the production aircraft from the first Low Rate Initial Production contract are undergoing modifications at Sikorsky's Stratford, Connecticut plant and are on schedule to begin deliveries in 2021. Sikorsky and the U.S. Navy integrate mature mission and communication systems into the aircraft. This aircraft provides communication capability to perform the duties of Commander in Chief, Head of State and Chief Executive. The VH-92A aircraft will provide safe, reliable and capable transportation for the President and Vice President. This program ensures long term affordability and maintainability by utilizing the FAA certified S-92 aircraft which has industry leading reliability and availability. The S-92 fleet surpassed 1.5 million flight hours in 2019 and averages 14,400 hours of safe flight per month. "The men and women of Sikorsky treasure our legacy of building and providing helicopter transportation for every President and Commander in Chief since Dwight D. Eisenhower," said Banquer. "We are proud to continue that legacy with the VH-92A helicopter." For additional information, visit our website: www.lockheedmartin.com/sikorsky. VH-92A is a registered trademark of the Department of the Navy. About Lockheed Martin Headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, Lockheed Martin is a global security and aerospace company that employs approximately 110,000 people worldwide and is principally engaged in the research, design, development, manufacture, integration and sustainment of advanced technology systems, products and services. SOURCE Lockheed Martin Corporation Related Links http://www.lmsg.lmco.com/gsa Dozens of people clashed with police Thursday outside a hospital in central Ukraine over government plans to quarantine evacuees from coronavirus-hit China in the facility. Six buses with the evacuees arrived at the medical center, accompanied by law enforcement officers, a video published by Ukrainian media showed. The policemen had to disperse the protesters to unblock a road that leads to the hospital and to create a cordon for the vehicles. The demonstrators lit several bonfires and broke at least three bus windows, while some of the evacuees waved Ukrainian flags and some hid their faces behind the curtains. Prime Minister Oleksiy Goncharuk said on Twitter he was "urgently" heading to the site of the protests in the town of Novi Sanzhary in the central Poltava region in a bid to calm tensions. Earlier on Thursday, Kiev repatriated dozens of nationals and foreigners from China as President Volodymyr Zelensky urged his compatriots to show solidarity and remember that "we are all human". But many in Novi Sanzhary -- the town of some 10,000 inhabitans, where officials plan to keep the evacuees in isolation for 14 days -- said they feared the virus could spread across town. Dozens of protesters blocked a road near a local hospital even before officials confirmed the site would hold evacuees. Authorities ramped up security, deploying hundreds of armed police and an armoured personnel carrier, local resident Maksym Mykhailyk told AFP. As they sought to clear the way for buses carrying the evacuees, some protesters put up resistance and a brief scuffle broke out, regional police said. Interior Minister Arsen Avakov arrived at the scene in a bid to calm tension but more scuffles broke out in the evening. "We will stand against it," a woman shouted in a video published by Ukrainian media. "We are not talking about infected people, we are talking about healthy people," Avakov told the protesters. "So far," a protester replied. Ukraine has no confirmed cases of the new coronavirus, which has killed more than 2,000 people and infected over 74,000 in China and hundreds more in over 25 countries. - 'We are all Ukrainians' - A plane carrying 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign nationals from the Chinese city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly coronavirus outbreak, arrived earlier Thursday in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kharkiv. Ukraine's interior ministry said all evacuees would be kept for two weeks at the Novi Sanzhary medical facility in the neighbouring Poltava region. The returnees were expected to arrive at the medical centre later Thursday. Ukraine's health ministry has said none of the passengers was sick. Avakov said the evacuees had been checked by Chinese and Ukrainian doctors and showed no symptoms. "Let's be a little more noble and generous people," he implored. Three Ukrainians and a resident of Kazakhstan were left behind in China because they had fever, Ukraine's diplomatic mission said. Zelensky sought to allay fears, saying "unprecedented" measures have been taken to prevent the spread of the virus across Ukraine. He also urged Ukrainians to refrain from staging protests. "Most of the passengers are people under 30. They are almost like children to many of us," Zelensky said, adding there was no imminent danger from the novel virus. "But there is another danger that I would like to mention. The danger of forgetting that we are all human and we are all Ukrainians," he said. "Each of us. Including those who ended up in Wuhan during the epidemic." Many Ukrainians took to social media to say that they were ashamed of their compatriots' behaviour. On Wednesday, several dozen demonstrators also blocked roads near a hospital in the western town of Vynnyky after rumours spread the site could hold some of the evacuees. A plane carrying 45 Ukrainians and 27 foreign nationals from Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly coronavirus outbreak, arrived in Kharkiv on Thursday (Newser) Fans of The Office know all about the famous teapot Jim gave to Pam for Christmas in season two. They also know he included a card with his true feelings for Pam inside the teapot, only to remove it before she sees it. In a big moment in the final season, Pam finally gets a chance to read the card, though viewers do not. So what was on the actual card? In the latest episode of her podcast Office Ladies with co-star Angela Kinsey, actress Jenna Fischer sheds some light, reports Mashable. It turns out that actor John Krasinski, who played Jim, wrote a personal note to Fischer about their time together on the show, per BuzzFeed. story continues below "I'm going to say something that I've never said beforeI also feel like I'm maybe going to cry," Fischer says on the podcast. "I'm the only one who knows [what was written in the note] and John knows." Fischer thinks showrunner Greg Daniels told Krasinski to write the genuine notefrom John to Jenna, not from Jim to Pam. "So I'm on camera and I open up this note that John's written me and I just start crying, I just start bawling," she recounts. "The first take was probably not usable," she adds. "It was the sweetest note, and you know on camera Pam says, 'I'll never say what it said but just know it was perfect?' Well, I'll never say exactly what John wrote, but I will say just know it was perfect." (Michael Scott's spy thriller is now available for viewing.) Supporters of the Wet'suwet'en who are against the LNG pipeline, block a CN Rail line just west of Edmonton on Feb. 19, 2020. (Jason Franson/Canadian Press) Federal Minister Pledges to Meet Chiefs in BC Over Natural Gas Pipeline OTTAWAPublic Safety Minister Bill Blair says the RCMP in British Columbia has offered to move its officers to a town away from the area where traditional leaders of the Wetsuweten First Nation have been opposing a pipeline project on their territory. Blair said on Parliament Hill on the morning of Feb. 20, he believes this move meets the conditions set by the Wetsuweten hereditary chiefs and that barricades set up in solidarity with that nation should come down. I believe the time has come now for the barricades to come down, Blair said before a cabinet meeting. We have met the condition that those who are on the barricades had said was important to them before they would change their posture, and that work has been done, and I think quite appropriately. Public Safety Minister Bill Blair speaks at a news conference in Parliament Hill on the morning of Feb. 20, 2020. (Courtesy of The Canadian Press) The Wetsuwetens hereditary chiefs oppose the Coastal GasLink project that would bring natural gas to a liquefaction facility and export terminal on the B.C. coast. Nationwide protests and blockades followed a move by RCMP to enforce a court injunction earlier this month against the hereditary chiefs and their supporters, who had been obstructing an access road to the companys work site. The hereditary chiefs have demanded the RCMP leave their traditional land and have refused to meet with federal or provincial officials until this was done. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is under increasing pressure to end the blockades, with Conservatives calling for the government to use force, while the Liberal government insists negotiations are the only way to a lasting solution. Saul Brown, a Wetsuweten supporter, speaks to protestors outside the Business Development Bank of Canada at 1515 Douglas Street as part of a protest against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, Feb. 14, 2020. (Kevin Light/Reuters) Blair said the decision to move officers away from their outpost on the traditional Wetsuweten territory to the nearby town of Houston was a decision made by the RCMP in B.C. and added that he agrees it was the right move. Im very proud of the work that was done by the leadership of the RCMP. Their commitment to peaceful resolution of these complex issues is, I think, quite commendable and Canadians should be very proud of the work that they do, he said. Its moving towards a less confrontational and a more peaceable arrangement entirely appropriate to the circumstances, and Im very hopeful that will satisfy the concerns that were raised. A gunman killed nine people in two apparently racially motivated shootings at shisha bars in the German town of Hanau, police said. The suspect then killed himself, according to officers, after also killing his mother at his home. Investigators believed a racist motive was behind the attack, said Peter Beuth, the interior minister for the state of Hessen. Angela Merkel said the circumstances of the attack needed to be fully investigated, and the shootings had exposed the poison of racism in German society. She pledged to stand up against those who sought to divide the country. Nine people died in the attacks on the two bars on Wednesday night. Five others had life-threatening injuries, police said. Some of those killed were of Turkish origin, a spokesman for the Turkish presidency said. We expect German authorities to show maximum effort to enlighten this case. Racism is a collective cancer, Ibrahim Kaln tweeted. The killer was named by police as 43-year-old Tobias R. His surname was not given, in line with German practice. German media named him as Tobias Rathjen. Screengrab shows suspect Tobias R, 43, taken from an account purportedly belonging to him, which has now been removed from the site. Photograph: Getty Images He shot himself and his 72-year-old mother at home, police said. They also confirmed he possessed a hunting licence. The Bild newspaper said the gunman had expressed extreme rightwing views in a letter of confession he left behind. A video in which he explained his motives is believed to be part of the investigation. The Guardian could not confirm the details of his confession. The video was taken down from social media sites on Thursday morning, police said. After the murders, a huge hunt was launched for the perpetrator involving dozens of armed police and a helicopter hovering above the commuter town 15 miles (25km) east of Frankfurt. Related: Hanau attack gunman railed against ethnic minorities online Police tweeted at about 5am local time that special police force officers had stormed the home of the alleged suspect and found him dead along with another body. Story continues There are currently no indications of other perpetrators, police said in a statement. Officers sealed off and searched the terrace house in Hanaus Kesselstadt district, near the scene of one of the shootings, after following up witness statements on a getaway car. According to local media, eight or nine shots were fired at the Midnight shisha bar on Heumarkt in the centre of the town at about 10pm. A dark vehicle was seen leaving the scene. Soon afterwards, shots were fired at a second shisha bar the Arena Bar and Cafe in Kurt-Schumacher-Platz in the western Kesselstadt district. Police denied initial reports of a third incident in the district of Lamboy. They urged any witnesses with mobile phone footage to upload it to a police website, and appealed to them not to post the evidence on social media. Michael Malkmus,a spokesman for Hessen police force, said local people helped the police track down the alleged perpetrator after seeing his car parked on the street. We came to the building after calls from people who had seen a vehicle. We IDd his number plate and matched it to his home. We sealed the area and then entered the home. Neighbours reported hearing a huge bang as police used explosives to break down the door at 3am. Federal prosecutors said on Thursday they were taking charge of investigating the shooting amid reports that the suspect may have had a far-right motive. Merkel pledged that everything will be done to investigate the circumstances of these terrible murders. She added: Racism is a poison. Hatred is a poison. This hatred exists in our society and its is responsible for far too many crimes. Hanaus federal MP, Katja Leikert, called the attack a horrific scenario in a tweet in which she offered her heartfelt condolences to the victims. The mayor of the town, Claus Kaminsky, said it was the worst evening imaginable. Hanau has a population of about 100,000. Last Friday one person was shot dead and four were injured outside a Berlin music venue. The shooting occurred near the Tempodrome, which was hosting a Turkish comedy show. The motives behind the Berlin attack have remained unclear. Witnesses to the Hanau attack described how the gunman randomly fired shots into the bars. One witness, Kenan Kocak, said he was waiting to hear whether his uncle, who had been in the bar, had survived. I do not know whether he has pulled through, he told the TV station NTV. Its very sad in particular that young people a young lad, and a young girl about 20, 25 years old have died. I was there with them yesterday. Someone who worked there was also taken to hospital. It looks very bad. One man in his early 30s said he received a call from a friend who had been in one of the bars. He left a message to tell me he had been hit, the man, who was not identified, told NTV. I called him back immediately. He told me he was in an ambulance. He had a bullet in his shoulder. Another witness who knew some of the victims said: These are people we have known for years. Its like in a film. That its happened is unimaginable. That there are people out there who are so heartless, shooting others who have done nothing wrong. Other witnesses spoke of finding empty bullet casings strewn on the ground outside one of the cafes. Donald Trump launched a fresh assault on the prosecution of Roger Stone minutes after the judge began sentencing the veteran dirty trickster for lying to Congress. The president defied his attorney general Bill Barr's plea to 'stop tweeting' to accuse the prosecution of being unfair and launch a spree of attacks against his enemies. '"They say Roger Stone lied to Congress." OH, I see, but so did Comey (and he also leaked classified information, for which almost everyone, other than Crooked Hillary Clinton, goes to jail for a long time), and so did Andy McCabe, who also lied to the FBI! FAIRNESS?' the president tweeted. Trump has repeatedly accused Comey of lying to Congress, over the opening of the counter-intelligence investigation into members of his campaign over their alleged links to Russia. Trump's tweets have plunged his own attorney general, Bill Barr, into a crisis over the rule of law, with the president declaring himself the 'chief law enforcement officer,' and demanding Barr 'clean house.' The tweet was issued just over an hour after Stone arrived in court in Washington D.C. to be sentenced - and as Department of Justice attorneys called the prosecution 'righteous,' apparently in a gesture of defiance at Trump. Stone was joined by a vast entourage led by his wife Nydia as he walked into the federal court, where his legal team has been bolstered by a Mafia lawyer who helped keep John Gotti Jr., son of the Teflon don, out of prison. Pro-Stone demonstrators brought a 'pardon Roger stone' banner which they held behind him when he arrived while counter-protesters tried to hurriedly erect an inflatable effigy of Donald Trump as a rat as Stone arrived - and some shouted 'traitor.' He's here: Roger Stone was accompanied by his wife Nydia and an almost 20-strong entourage as he arrived at federal court in Washington D.C. to be sentenced In front of the protest: Roger and Nydia Stone walked past the inflatable Trump rat as they made their way into court Grin and bear it: Roger Stone kept a fixed smile as he headed into court with his wife Nydia on his arm Raised a smile: Roger Stone's wife Nydia reacted positively to a group of supporters' banner calling for Donald Trump to issue the dirty trickster with a pardon Arm-in-arm: Roger Stone wore a navy blue double-breasted topcoat with contrasting collar, blue cutaway collared shirt and sober gray tie, topped off with a black trilby as he arrived in court with Nydia, his second wife In he goes: Roger Stone took off his trilby to enter court, where he will be sentenced Acknowledgment: Roger Stone gave a salute to supporters outside court Tailored: Roger Stone revealed he is wearing a double-breasted dark gray chalk stripe suit under his navy blue double-breasted overcoat as he got out of his car before going into court Stone's sentencing got off to a rocky start when U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said that anyone in the court who did not have a medical reason to wear sunglasses should remove them. Stone had arrived in round sunglasses. She started the hearing without making any reference to the massive political storm over the case - and instead plunged into the details of his convictions. However she made clear that she is not considering leniency for him. And prosecutors then ignored their own boss, the attorney general Bill Barr, to say that an earlier call for a nine-year sentence still applied. Barr overruled that but when John Crabb, the assistant U.S. attorney put in charge of the case after all the other prosecutors quit, appeared in court, he said that the call applied. He also called the prosecution 'righteous,' and said the Department of Justice was committed to working 'without fear or favor or political influence.' That appeared to be a direct rebuke of the president- and was followed by Crabb saying the prosecution wanted a substantial sentence for Stone. Berman Jackson tussled with both sides over the details of their sentencing recommendations, and said that she believed that attempts to brush off the dirty trickster's conduct as 'banter' and 'Stone being Stone' were wrong - a sign that he is unlikely to escape a prison sentence. Stone himself declined to speak on his own behalf. But the longtime Trump ally and political dirty trickster is unlikely to see the inside of a federal prison cell - at least for now. Stone swerved the immediate threat of incarceration this week when Berman Jackson said she would postpone punishment while she decides whether the veteran GOP schemer deserves a retrial. Stone was convicted last fall of lying to lawmakers over his efforts to procure stolen Democratic Party emails from WikiLeaks to boost Donald Trump's chances of becoming President. Demand: Supporters of the disgraced dirty trickster unfurled a 'pardon Roger Stone' banner outside court, echoing a demand which Donald Trump says he has not considered Counter-protest: Anti-Trump activists put up an inflatable effigy of the president as a rat in time for Roger Stone's arrival Publicity opportunity: The Stone spectacle has also been a magnet for a local tour company whose placard made a return to the entrance to court for the sentencing Ready for the walk: Nydia Stone grasped her husband's arm as they prepared to walk into court Lightning rod: Federal judge Amy Berman Jackson will sentence Roger Stone in a case which has caused a crisis to engulf Bill Barr who pleaded with Donald Trump to let him do his job and stop the tweeting about his Department of Justice I'm in charge: Donald Trump claimed in response to Bill Barr's plea to stop tweeting that as president he is the nation's top law enforcement official But his lawyers filed a sealed motion last week alleging 'juror misconduct' after it emerged that the forewoman had posted anti-Trump messages on social media and re-tweeted commentary about Stone's arrest. Judge Jackson vowed to press on with Thursday's sentencing regardless, despite repeated Twitter attacks from President Trump who has slammed the prosecution of 67-year-old Stone as unfair and 'tainted'. ROGER STONE DID A LOT WRONG: WHAT HE WAS CONVICTED OF Roger Stone was found guilty on all charges of: 1. Obstruction of justice, lying to Congress and witness tampering by trying to get Randy Credico to lie to Congress 2. Lying to Congress that he did not have emails or texts about Julian Assange 3. Lying when he claimed his references to being in touch with Assange were actually about a 'go-between' - Randy Credico 4. Lying that he didn't ask his 'go-between' to communicate with Assange 5. Lying that he didn't text or email the 'go-between' about WikiLeaks 6. Lying that he had never discussed conversation with his 'go-between' with anyone in the Trump campaign Advertisement As he took his seat in court, he had his new attorney, Seth Ginsberg, at his side. Ginsberg is best known for representing Gotti - the former head of the Gambino crime family and son of notorious 'Teflon Don' John J. Gotti - who faced four trials in five years before he was cleared of racketeering in 2008. Gotti could have faced 70 years behind bars but walked free when a third jury decided that, while he was likely behind the abduction and shooting of talk-show host Curtis Sliwa, the government had not proved a pattern of crimes, a necessary step to finding him guilty. Also in Stone's entourage which packed into the court room was Randy Short, his 'spiritual advisor' who is a Washington D.C. pastor, who has compared homosexuality to pedophilia and gay rights campaigners to Hitler. Stone's last appearance in front of Berman Jackson was when he was found guilty; since then his case has become a political crisis. But it remains to be seen whether her punishment will be anywhere near as harsh as the seven to nine years originally requested by prosecutors before Barr triggered a political firestorm by ripping up their recommendation. The original prosecution team of Aaron Zelinsky, Jonathan Kravis, Adam Jed and Michael Marando are not likely to be in court today after they resigned en masse over Barr's intervention. Stone is subject to a gag order for repeatedly taking aim at Judge Jackson in the lead up to last year's proceedings, including mocking up a photo of her in rifle crosshairs. But his proxies - including Trump - show no sign of shutting up. The President exposed Barr to accusations of political interference last week by publicly praising the Attorney General's decision to overrule his own prosecutors. Barr denied intervening on Trump's behalf but so far more than 2,000 former justice department employees have signed a petition calling on him to resign. When he asked Trump to curb his explosive Twitter criticisms so he could get on with his job, the President flatly refused. 'These were Mueller prosecutors, and the whole Mueller investigation was illegally set up based on a phony and now fully discredited Fake Dossier, lying and forging documents to the FISA Court, and many other things,' Trump wrote Tuesday, bringing up a series of oft-repeated grievances about Robert Mueller's Russia probe. And then he said that he - not Barr - was the nation's chief law enforcement officer. Barr was later reported to be considering resigning; his spokeswoman denied that he was resigning, but did not deny that he was considering his position. Stone's decades-long career on the shadier margins of US politics appeared to be over last November after he was found guilty of five counts of making false statements to Congress and single counts of obstructing a congressional proceeding and witness tampering. Jurors agreed the smooth-talking agent provocateur, who briefly served on Trump's 2016 Presidential campaign,told a series of 'whoppers' when he testified before members of House Intelligence Committee investigating Russian collusion in the 2016 election. Stone lied about the identity of his 'back channel' to WikiLeaks and lied again when he denied asking its founder, Julian Assange, for the plundered trove of messages. He also concealed numerous texts, emails and telephone conversations in which he discussed WikiLeaks with then candidate-Trump and senior campaign figures including former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, ex Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort andformer campaign official Rick Gates. All about Assange: Roger Stone lied about the identity of his 'back channel' to WikiLeaks and lied again when he denied asking its founder, Julian Assange, for the plundered trove of messages Back channels: Stone had fraudulently told lawmakers that Randy Credico (left), a left-wing radio comedian, was his 'back channel' to WikiLeaks when it was actually the conspiracy theorist and author Jerome Corsi (right) Center of case: Roger Stone also took aim at Randy Credico's therapy dog Bianca, a 13-year-old Coton de Tulear, writing in an text message: 'I'm going to take that dog away from you.' The net result of Stone lying to lawmakers 'over and over and over again' was that the House Intelligence Committee was impeded in its inquiries and its final report into Russian election inference was inaccurate because it didn't mention Stone's true intermediary, his trial heard. The tampering charge referred to his effort to bully the comedian and radio host Randy Credico into pleading the Fifth so he would avoid contradicting Stone's sworn September 26, 2017 testimony. Former Richard Nixon-aide Stone had fraudulently told lawmakers that Credico was his 'back channel' to WikiLeaks when it was actually the conspiracy theorist and author Jerome Corsi. When Credico threatened to contradict his testimony, Stone branded him a 'c**sucker', a 'rat' and urged the rattled comic to do a 'Frank Pentangeli', referencing a character in Godfather Part II who lies to a congressional committee to help the Corleone family before committing suicide. He also took aim at Credico's therapy dog Bianca, a 13-year-old Coton de Tulear, writing in an text message: 'I'm going to take that dog away from you.' Prosecutors recommended earlier that Stone serve seven to nine years behind bars, citing his threats to harm someone and his interference with the administration of justice as aggravating factors. Barr later cast aside their request however, saying the proposed punishment was 'excessive and unwarranted' and leaving it up to the court to decide Stone's jail sentence. Credico was among those who argued against incarceration, saying in a January letter to Judge Jackson: 'I never in any way felt that Stone himself posed a direct physical threat to me or to my dog.' Tomeka Hart, a former Memphis City Schools Board President, stoked the flames further when she outed herself last Wednesday as the jury forewoman in a Facebook post voicing support for the overruled prosecutors. 'I have kept my silence for months. Initially, it was for my safety. Then, I decided to remain silent out of fear of politicizing the matter,' Hart wrote. 'But I can't keep quiet any longer. I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial. 'It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice. 'For that, I wanted to speak up for them and ask you to join me in thanking them for their service.' A review of Hart's social media posts showed that she had frequently denounced Trump, including calling the President and his supporters racists. Furthermore, Hart had unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat in 2012 and participated in anti-Trump rallies and protests. She had also re-tweeted a post by pundit Bakari Sellers dismissing Stone's claims that the FBI used excessive force when they arrested him at his Fort Lauderdale, Florida home in January 2019. Sellers had listed black victims of 'police force', including Sandra Bland, Walter Scott and Eric Gardner, scoffing: 'But Roger Stone!!! Think about that.' After serving on the Stone jury and finding him guilty, Hart took to social media again to gleefully post emojis of hearts and fist pumps. The longtime GOP operative's lawyers have already made one failed attempt to secure a re-trial, arguing in an unrelated motion that a different juror was biased. They argued the juror, an IRS employee who worked with the Justice Department on criminal tax cases and admitted reading news articles about Stone's arrest, should have been struck from the panel. The juror denied having any opinions about Stone when asked about it by Judge Jackson during proceedings. She ruled last week that there were approximately 1,400 lawyers at the IRS and that the defense had failed to demonstrate the 'sort of inherent bias' that would exclude one of their rank from being impartial. There is much interest in offshore investments these days, and also many questions, and rightly so. Where to invest your hard-earned money is a decision not to be taken lightly. At Coronation weve been investing globally for over two decades and have both the experience and the funds that will enable you to access global markets, at the level of risk that suits your specific financial situation. Have you missed the bus? Its true that over the last decade global equities returned 17% p.a. versus 11% from local equities. But this doesnt mean that you should rush to take your portfolio 100% offshore. Consider that in the preceding decade, 2000 2010, it was local equities that delivered 16% p.a. versus 2% from global equities. So, its important to avoid basing your decisions on past performance and prevailing sentiment. Stick to good investment principles We believe that offshore exposure is not a trend to follow, but part and parcel of a well-diversified investment portfolio its not about when should you invest offshore, rather ask, how does diversifying your portfolio offshore support your investment goals. But, making these decisions on your own is complex, so ask your financial adviser about Coronations selection of multi-asset class funds with professionally allocated offshore exposure based on our extensive research and long-term, valuation-based investment philosophy. Indirect offshore funds The Coronation Balanced Plus and Coronation Market Plus funds offer investors with a long-term investment horizon a hassle-free way to gain a high proportion of international exposure (up to 30% and 40%, respectively). While the Coronation Global Managed and Coronation Optimum Growth funds, can allocate all or most of their assets to international investments. These funds are domiciled in South Africa and do not impact on your offshore foreign exchange allowance. Direct offshore funds For investors who want to externalise their rands and have a minimum investment amount of $15,000, Coronation offers a range of US dollar-denominated funds that are domiciled in Ireland. They offer you the same exposure as our rand-denominated international funds, but with the added benefit of currency and jurisdictional diversification. If you want to invest more than your annual R1 million general offshore allowance, you will require South African Revenue Services clearance. To find out more about investing offshore with Coronation, search or Siri Coronation Offshore. The information contained in this article is not based on the individual financial needs of any specific investor. To find out more, speak to your financial adviser. Coronation is an authorised financial services provider. Little brown bats hibernating in an abandoned copper mine in Michigans Upper Peninsula. Credit: John DePue A new study from University of Michigan biologists presents the first genetic evidence of resistance in some bats to white-nose syndrome, a deadly fungal disease that has decimated some North American bat populations. The study involved northern Michigan populations of the little brown bat, one of the most common bats in eastern North America prior to the arrival of white-nose syndrome in 2006. Since then, some populations of the small, insect-eating bat have experienced declines of more than 90%. U-M researchers collected tissue samples from wild little brown bats that survived the disease, as well as individuals killed by the fungal pathogen. They compared the genetic makeup of the two groups and found differences in genes associated with regulating arousal from hibernation, the breakdown of fats and echolocation. "Because we found differences in genes associated with regulating hibernation and breakdown of fats, it could be that bats that are genetically predisposed to be a little bit fatter or to sleep more deeply are less susceptible to the disease," said U-M's Giorgia Auteri, first author of a paper scheduled for publication Feb. 20 in the journal Scientific Reports. "Changes at these genes are suggestive of evolutionary adaptation, given that white-nose syndrome causes bats to arouse with unusual frequency from winter hibernation, contributing to premature depletion of fat reserves," said Auteri, a doctoral student in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology who conducted the study for her dissertation. The other author of the Scientific Reports paper is U-M biologist Lacey Knowles, Auteri's faculty adviser. While the study was smallinvolving tissue samples from 25 little brown bats killed by white-nose syndrome and nine bats that survived the diseasethe authors say their sample size is large enough to detect genetic changes driven by natural selection. A larger follow-up study is underway, expanding both the number of bats and the areas affected by the disease, to develop a fuller picture of adaptive change that may be key to the species' survival. The fungal pathogen that causes white-nose syndrome was inadvertently introduced in the northeastern United States in 2006 and is currently spreading across the continent. Thirteen species of North American bats are currently affected, with some populations experiencing losses of 90-100%. The disease is named for a distinctive fungal growth around the muzzles and on the wings of hibernating bats. The U-M team's study area is Michigan's northern Lower Peninsula and Upper Peninsula. White-nose syndrome fungus was first detected there in 2014, and its arrival allowed the researchers to study the pathogen's initial evolutionary impact. For the study, the U-M researchers collected tissue samples from dead little brown bats found in or near hibernation sites during the winter. The hibernation sites were concentrated in the western Upper Peninsula and primarily consisted of abandoned iron and copper mines. During the summer, they also collected small tissue samples from survivors that emerged successfully from hibernation despite exposure to the disease. Surviving bats had healing wing lesions or scars from the fungus. In the laboratory, DNA was extracted from the tissues and sequenced, and the sequences were mapped to a previously generated reference genome for the species. A genome scan was conducted to test for evidence of evolutionary changes in response to white-nose syndrome. The researchers found significant differences in three genes associated with arousal from hibernation (GABARB1), breakdown of fats (cGMP-PK1) and echolocation (FOXP2), as well as a fourth gene (PLA2G7) that regulates the release of histamines from mast cells. "The function of one gene we identified hints that summer activities such as hunting via echolocation may be an important determinant of which individuals survive the winter infection period," Auteri said. "This suggests that conservation of summer foraging habitatnot just winter hibernation sitesmay promote population recovery in bats affected by white-nose syndrome." The observed genetic differences are suggestive of very rapidthough not unprecedentedevolutionary adaptation driven by natural selection, according to Auteri and Knowles. "This apparent adaptation occurred very quickly, involves genes with a variety of functions which likely act across seasons in order to contribute to survivorship, and has taken place despite an observable reduction in genetic diversity associated with population declines," said Knowles, a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and a curator at the U-M Museum of Zoology. Auteri and Knowles said it's too soon to say how the evolutionary changes they uncovered are likely to affect the little brown bat's prospects. After all, these bats have suffered dramatic population declines, and low population sizes inherently make a species more vulnerable to further perturbations. "But we're finding the hint that there could be these genetic changes that are occurring that might provide some type of survival in the future," Knowles said. "So as these variants increase, there's some hope that these bats are not all going to die from the disease itself." Because little brown bats only have one pup per year, recovery of the species would likely take a long time, according to Auteri and Knowles. Due to population losses, little brown bats have been listed as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and by the federal government of Canada, with a similar decision by the U.S. government pending. Explore further Virus that can drive bats to madness spreads through NC's abandoned gold mines More information: Giorgia G. Auteri et al. Decimated little brown bats show potential for adaptive change, Scientific Reports (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-59797-4 , Journal information: Scientific Reports Giorgia G. Auteri et al. Decimated little brown bats show potential for adaptive change,(2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-59797-4 , www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-59797-4 In the gallery above, see at which level of sea-level rise Bay Area landmarks go underwater. Scientific research has repeatedly shown that amid a changing climate, rising ocean waters would inundate coastal lands in the future and that includes the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Exactly when areas around the bay's edge will go underwater is uncertain, but studies suggest that by 2050, the region could experience 12 to 36 inches of sea level rise. "At 12 inches, we see impacts, and once we hit 24 to 36 inches, I think thats where well feel that life as a whole is different," said Dana Brechwald, manager of the Adapting to Rising Tides Program at the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission. "Thats when transportation infrastructure could flood. At 24 inches, for example, huge swaths of the North Bay Are flooded. Parts of Alviso in San Jose starts flooding. There are flood projects underway in those areas, so this is worst-case scenario. "We may fix it all before then and remove high risk areas, but if we don't, life will change." Brechwald's organization has created an online mapping tool known as the Bay Shoreline Flood Explorer that allows you to see the impacts of rising oceans if precautions aren't taken. You can see how much of the shoreline is inundated at 12 to 144 inches of rise, as well as the impacts of storm surges and exceptionally high tides that can temporarily cause water levels to rise. The sea-level-rise projections are based on data from the FEMA San Francisco Bay Coastal Study and State of California Sea Level Rise Guidance. The tool doesn't take into account other factors such as ground water rise, wave run-up and flooding on rivers, creeks and streams. "We think this map is important for local jurisdictions," said Brechwald. "A lot of city governments, homeowners and business owners use it for their planning." She added, "It creates a body of residents who are empowered to ask for what they want their future to look like. If they want a higher quality of life, they ask their elected officials. If constituents are asking for change, thats how money can be raised and adaptation can occur." ALSO: Map in new study shows impact of 4-foot sea-level rise on San Francisco Bay Area It's important to keep in mind that the mapping tool presents the worst-case-scenario, and dozens of projects are in the planning and construction phases around the bay to combat flooding from sea-level rise. San Francisco International Airport is planning to surround the airport with a wall, while the Port of San Francisco is engaged in a seawall resilience program. The city of Alameda completed a climate action plan identifying adaptation measures to protect city assets such as the south shore, and Coyote Point Recreation Area in San Mateo recently made storm pump enhancements to deal with flooding. Amy Graff is a digital editor for SFGATE. Email her: agraff@sfgate.com. Cancer can take a toll on a womans body, with many unable to conceive after rigorous treatments. In some cases, especially for women who have no children yet, they opt for egg cell freezing so they can still become pregnant after treatment. Now, for the first time, a woman has given birth to a baby from frozen immature eggs harvested from her five years ago. The patient, who gave birth at Antoine Beclere University hospital in Clamart near Paris, was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago. She was offered fertility counseling when she was about to have chemotherapy at age 29. She was advised at the time that many women who underwent cancer treatments became infertile. Before treatment, doctors harvested immature eggs from her ovaries, matured in the laboratory, and frozen for use for later. The doctors performed In vitro maturation (IVM), a novel procedure to enable the eggs to develop and mature in the laboratory. The doctors froze the eggs for years through vitrification, a process that frees the cells quickly in nitrogen until the woman is ready to become pregnant. Macro view through the microscope at process of the in vitro fertilization of a female egg inside IVF dish in the laboratory. Image Credit: Bezikus / Shutterstock First birth from IVM For years, women received the advice of opting for having their immature eggs frozen. However, no births had been reported, not until now. The women had chemotherapy for five years and had been on remission. When she decided to have a baby, she had problems with conceiving. She opted to go back to the hospital, where her eggs were frozen. The frozen eggs were thawed and were fertilized. The doctor transferred one embryo into the womans uterus for implantation and pregnancy. After nine months, the woman gave birth to a healthy baby, named Jules, on July 6, 2019. For the duration of the pregnancy, the woman had no issues and difficulties. She successfully gave birth to the first baby born through freezing immature eggs without problems, and she reached her term pregnancy. Last resort For the doctors, IVM is the last resort for women who wants to freeze their eggs. Typically, women who want to freeze their eggs use IVF when they decide they want to have babies. These women need to go through many weeks of hormone treatments. The most reliable procedure is ovarian stimulation. But for the woman, this is not an option since she has cancer and needs urgent treatment. Further, there were fears that the stimulation may trigger cancer. IVM enables us to freeze eggs or embryos in urgent situations or when it would be hazardous for the patient to undergo ovarian stimulation. Besides, using them is not associated with a risk of cancer recurrence, Professor Michael Grynberg, head of the Department of Reproductive Medicine and Fertility Preservation at the Antoine Beclere University Hospital, said. We are aware that eggs matured in the lab are of lower quality when compared to those obtained after ovarian stimulation. However, our success with Jules shows that this technique should be considered a viable option for female fertility preservation, ideally combined with ovarian tissue cryopreservation as well, he added. The team also suggested that fertility preservation should always be considered as part of the treatment of young cancer patients, so they can have an option to have children in the future. New Delhi, Feb 20 : Amid public outcry over the delay in execution of death penalty given to four convicts in Nirbhaya case, the Supreme Court on Thursday stayed the death warrant issued by a Gujarat court in the execution of a 22-year-old man convicted in the rape and murder of a three-year-old child in Surat in 2018. A bench headed by Chief Justice S.A. Bobde and comprising Justices B.R. Gavai and Surya Kant stayed the death warrant as it was issued before the limitation period. The Chief Justice observed that court judgements should be strictly complied with while issuing death warrants. The observation from the top court gains significance in the backdrop of the Nirbhaya case where lawyers for convicts contend they should be given a chance to exhaust all their legal remedies. The top court queried the state counsel as to how an order of this kind could be passed despite a reported order of the Supreme Court on a similar issue in the Amroha murder case. According to the law, a challenge against the death sentence can be filed within 60 days. However, in this case, the death warrant was issued merely 33 days after the High Court's order. The convict's lawyer argued before the court that the lower court judge, who issued the death warrant, hurriedly issued direction without giving the convict the mandatory 60 days to file appeal in the top court after the High Court confirmed the death sentence. The Chief Justice said, "How could such death warrant be issued when there is a judgment of this court in Shabnam vs State of UP?" This judgement says death row convicts have to be given sufficient time to avail of legal remedies, and unless they exhaust them, execution of the death penalty cannot take place. The top court directed Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, representing Gujarat, to take instructions in the matter and stayed the death warrant. The Gujarat High Court on December 27, 2019, upheld the conviction of the accused. Anil Yadav was convicted in the criminal case by an Additional Sessions Court in July 2019. The victim had gone missing from her home. Her corpse was recovered in a plastic bag. Yadav, who lived in the neighbourhood, initially joined the search for the child, but later disappeared. The police arrested him from Bihar. Yadav was convicted on the deposition of over 30 witnesses, besides medical and circumstantial evidence. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text BOSTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- It turns out that the IPO magic has long been more hype than substance. Bain & Company analysis shows that two-thirds of companies that went through global IPOs underperformed against their established peers, with a weighted annual average total shareholder return (TSR) of 0.4 percent, far lower than the 8.4 percent of the respective indices. According to the new report, Reversing the Winner's Curse of the IPO, the underperformance of companies after their initial public offerings is a global phenomenon that extends well beyond the technology sector. Bain & Company's analysis of all IPOs that stayed public from 2010 through 2014 finds that they underperformed against their established, publicly listed peers, often substantially (more than 100 percentage points short of the benchmark). Post-IPO companies had an annual weighted average total shareholder return (TSR) that was 8 percentage points lower in the five years after the IPO. Performance was particularly weak in India, Indonesia, Brazil and Russia. Only China and Switzerland were at par with their indexes. Most of the 30 largest global IPOs underperformed, and the weakest sectors were retail and healthcare. These finding come as the number of publicly held companies has fallen in the US, with levels dropping from 8,090 in 1996 to 4,397 in 2018, according to the World Bank. Instead, money has been flowing towards private equity, with investors allocating a staggering $7.1 trillion to the industry since the start of the current economic cycle in 2009. Despite the trend towards financing in the private markets, IPOs still hold inherent value for certain companies. "IPOs remain relevant for companies looking to raise substantial capital quickly to fulfill growth targets, or gain credibility and recognition," according to Hubert Shen, a partner with Bain & Company's Mergers & Acquisitions practice and co-author of the report. "Elite companies that outperform view the IPO as a beginning and a means to longer term value creation rather than the end in itself." Bain & Company's research identified three key actions that winners take: Have a long-term vision: Winning companies view the IPO as a springboard to longer-term value creation by using the proceeds in ways that maximize long-term value. They have already defined the vision for revenue growth, cash flow and profitability, along with a path to achieve those goals and alignment among the senior leaders about the vision Know who the shareholders are and what they want: Many of the newly public companies that outperform their established peers have gleaned how pre and post-IPO investors have fundamentally different objectives and incentives. Private company investors look for liquidity, want as high a valuation as possible and frequently push executives to tell as rosy a story as possible in order to maximize the proceeds at the IPO. Investors after the IPO have other priorities and look, in particular, for a practical scenario with some blend of growth and profits that the company can achieve. Tell the story of your strategy: Any IPO candidate needs technical capabilities to prepare for the launch. But companies that eventually outperform don't rely solely on transactional help, such as the services provided by investment banks and the various boutique advisory firms that are motivated to maximize IPO proceeds. They also emphasize strategic support that will help build long-term value creation. Too many firms underestimate the demands of being a public company," said Henrik Poppe, a partner with Bain & Company and co-author of the report. "To pull off a successful IPO requires more than just financial engineering: you need to have a solid strategy for your future and communicate this to new shareholders in a manner that makes then invest for the long-term." Editor's note: To arrange an interview with the authors, contact Dan Pinkney at [email protected] or +1 646 562 8102. About Bain & Company Bain & Company is a global consultancy that helps the world's most ambitious change makers define the future. Across 58 offices in 37 countries, we work alongside our clients as one team with a shared ambition to achieve extraordinary results, outperform the competition and redefine industries. We complement our tailored, integrated expertise with a vibrant ecosystem of digital innovators to deliver better, faster and more enduring outcomes. Since our founding in 1973, we have measured our success by the success of our clients. We proudly maintain the highest level of client advocacy in the industry, and our clients have outperformed the stock market 4-to-1. Learn more at www.bain.com and follow us on Twitter @BainAlerts. SOURCE Bain & Company Related Links http://www.bain.com The ministry of defence has set a goal of $26 billion, including export of $7 billion for the industry by 2025-26 through its Defence Production Policy 2018. Despite a marginal 6 per cent rise in defence allocation for FY21, domestic companies - Jindal Defence and L&T Defence - are actively looking at participating in the defence growth story, currently dominated by imports. Recently, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) and Europe-based MBDA, a world leader in missile systems, formed a joint venture (JV) to set up a missile integration facility in Tamil Nadu. Delhi-based Jindal Defence, part of O P Jindal Group, also announced its foray into small arms manufacturing in India via a JV with Taurus Armas S A, of Brazil. At present, foreign players supply almost 50 per cent of the total requirement of Indias defence equipment. "The small arms market in India is estimated to be $10-12 billion by 2035. "This gives enough opportunity for domestic firms like us (Jindal Defence) to venture into defence manufacturing, Abhyuday Jindal, promoter of Jindal Defence told Business Standard. The ministry of defence has set a goal of $26 billion, including export of $7 billion for the industry by 2025-26 through its Defence Production Policy 2018. Due to this, the cumulative anticipated capex spend for domestic industry over the next six years would be about Rs 10 trillion. "With Make in India initiative kicking in, the indigenisation in defence sector should go up from the 35-40 per cent to 70-75 per cent. "So, there is ample scope for domestic players, said J D Patil, director and senior executive vice-president (defence &smart technologies) at L&T (defence business). L&Ts JV will build complete missile systems for the armed forces, exploring prospects under the Buy {Indian - IDDM (Indigenously Designed, Developed and Manufactured)}, Buy (Indian), and Buy & Make (Indian) categories for defence procurement. Meanwhile, new entrant Jindal Defence plans an initial investment of $5 million for its small arms unit in Hisar. The company aims at a private investment in the initial stage and will explore funding opportunities later. Jindal wants to position itself as an import substitution in the long term. Our major competition will be imports from global firearms manufacturers. "There are a few other Indian private companies in this (small arms) space. "However, they lack significant capacities to meet the demand. Our focus will be import substitution, said Jindal. India ranks among the worlds top five countries, with the highest expenditure in defence sector, said experts. The sector has a healthy mid- to long-term potential to be a major contributor to Make in India and modernising of armed forces through indigenisation. "Given long-term strategic independence, the government has little choice but to refocus and promote building indigenous platforms right from the development of technologies and concepts, said Patil. Though India has a long way to go in terms of being self-reliant in the defence segment, there is certainly an ample scope and potential in-house. The decision-making pace is picking up for large programmes, especially, under strategic partnership category. "While these are big positives this year, the defence capital budget, which saw a nominal increase, has disappointed the industry. "However, the solace has been found in the statement that national security should remain countrys core priority, said Patil. The strategic partnership model is aimed at reducing Indias dependence on defence imports and helps private companies to gain an entry into defence procurement. Photograph: Reuters The Manipur state board cancelled the class 11 final exams after question papers of at least five subjects were leaked, a senior official said on Thursday. Question papers of Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Biology and Manipuri were leaked, Council of Higher Secondary Manipur (COHSEM) secretary Ch Biren Singh told PTI. The final examinations, which began on February 17, of all streams of class 11 have been cancelled as "concrete evidence regarding the leakage" was found, COHSEM chairman L Mahendra said. The council has instructed principals of all the affiliated schools to return the questions papers "in their original forms as collected" by February 24, he added. Mahendra assured stern action against those found responsible and said the principals who do not comply with the council's direction will be considered as individuals responsible for the leakage. "Authorities of private institutions found guilty will have their affiliation cancelled," he said, adding that the council will announce new dates for the exams soon. The exams were earlier scheduled to end on March 26. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu will the chief guest at the convocation ceremony of the Goa University on February 24, an official said on Thursday. Naidu will arrive in Goa on Monday morning and address the Goa University's 32nd convocation ceremony to be held at Kala Academy in Panaji, the government official said. Nearly 11,000 students would be conferred degrees, including 78 who would be awarded PhDs, during the ceremony. Goa Governor Satya Pal Malik and Chief Minister Pramod Sawant are also scheduled to attend the convocation ceremony. Naidu would stay at the state Raj Bhavan before leaving on February 25, the official added. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 18:10:36|Editor: yhy Video Player Close WELLINGTON, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- Thousands of children have begun receiving a free lunch on every day of the school week under the government's free and healthy school lunch program, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said on Thursday. The program is currently under way for 7,000 students at 31 schools, which is to extend to 21,000 students in 120 schools by the start of 2021, Ardern said while serving up lunch at a school in Hawke's Bay. "A full stomach makes all the difference to a child's learning," Ardern said. "Providing a free and healthy lunch at school is one way to help make New Zealand the best place in the world to be a child and to make that difference immediately," she said, adding providing these lunches has also led to jobs for local families. The free and healthy school lunches program is one of 75 initiatives from New Zealand's Child and Youth Wellbeing Strategy launched last year, which was developed with input from 10,000 New Zealanders including 6,000 young people, said Education Minister Chris Hipkins. ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan, Feb. 20 By Huseyn Hasanov Trend: The US Embassy in Ashgabat is not aware of any known cases of novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) in Turkmenistan, Trend reports with reference to the embassy. However, the Government of Turkmenistan has announced that citizens of all countries in which there are confirmed cases of COVID-19, or travelers who have recently visited a country with confirmed cases, which includes the US, will be subject to initial medical examination at border checkpoints and ports of entry, and may be required to undergo additional medical screening and possibly quarantine for an unspecified period of time before being allowed into the country. Travelers will be required to pay for any medical tests and procedures. The US Embassy recommends that its citizens decline any invasive medical procedures, such as blood draws, as they cannot guarantee that all medical protocols comply with US standards. Travelers should be prepared for changes in screening and quarantine practices to be put into effect with little or no advance notice. US citizens should contact the US Embassy emergency telephone numbers if they are subject to quarantine or prior to undergoing any invasive medical procedures. Turkmenistan takes all necessary preventive measures in connection with the threat of coronavirus. The appropriate measures have been taken given the development of international contacts, the geographical location, the growth of the tourism industry in Turkmenistan, as well as in order to avoid any dangerous infections in the country. Turkmen Ministry of Health and Medical Industry issued an order "On measures aimed at revealing the symptoms and treatment of pulmonary diseases of unknown etiology". Turkmenistan Airlines canceled flights to Beijing, Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur due to the danger of the spread of coronavirus. The Turkmen flag carrier also stopped flights to Russia's St. Petersburg and Kazan cities. However, according to the company, this was due to "technical necessity." Mexico City law enforcement has arrested suspects for the death of a seven-year-old girl. Authorities arrested a woman and a man late Wednesday for the kidnapping of a 7-year-old girl who was later found wrapped in a plastic bag a day later. Arrest warrants served by the city's prosecutors are for kidnapping charges with intent to cause harm. Murder and other charges could be added later. The seven-year-old girl Fatima Cecilia Aldrighett was last seen being picked up from school by an unidentified woman. Her mother was about 15-20 minutes late to pick her up. Family members condemned social services when their calls for help went unanswered. Authorities waited for a formal missing person's case file to be opened, losing a full day in searching for the seven-year-old child. Investigators were drawn to a white vehicle that was spotted in the area before the crime. At least five witnesses were interviewed by the authorities. They also searched a property in the Xochimilco neighborhood where they found clothing and other items belonging to Fatima. They initially appealed to the public, offering a $107,000 reward for any information about Fatima or the woman seen on the video. Authorities released a sketch of the woman during a press conference Tuesday afternoon. "We want to ask everyone to support us with the dissemination of the image, as well as the physical characteristics to the person we're referring to," they said. Fatima's body was discovered in Tlahuac over the weekend. She was found to have suffered sexual abuse and beating before she died. Mexico City Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum said that the two suspects were a couple who had abandoned their rented home located in a southern neighborhood the day before the body was discovered. Sheinbaum said the family knew the woman. She also confirmed via twitter that the suspects were detained by state police and National Guard. Fatima was buried Tuesday. Grade school students in Mexico City walk out of school after classes to meet their parents on the sidewalks. Many have criticized the school for not calling police to get Fatima when no parent was there to get her. Sheinbaum said they plan to disperse uniformed workers for security at drop-off and pick-up hours. They also plan to accelerate the deployment of security cameras and bolster protocols for identifying the people who pick kids up from school. Sheinbaum said they are also reviewing the timeline of response from the time the girl was reported missing. The news of Fatima's death sparked another wave of anger amongst the women and girls demanding better protection from the Mexican government. Fatima's death comes days after the gruesome murder of Ingrid Escamilla, a 25-year-old who was found skinned and disemboweled in her own home. Femicide, the killing of women, have increased a whopping 137% in the last five years. A total number of 1,006 cases of femicide were reported in 2019, with 912 reported the year before. According to activists and authorities, 10 women are killed in Mexico every day. Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador came under fire for comments regarding Fatima's murder where he appeared to blame the neoliberal economic policies and society as a whole. Oman budget carrier SalamAir has announced a strategic tie-up with Tune Protect Commercial Brokerage to offer an array of travel protection benefits for its passengers. The agreement encompasses insurance cover for travel-related uncertainty of the airlines domestic and international passengers. The insurance products offered are specially designed for SalamAir travellers. The travel protection programme provides travellers with a host of benefits such as overseas medical expenses, travel cancellation, missed departure, baggage delays, travel delay, emergency medical evacuation, repatriation, personal accident and many more. Captain Mohamed Ahmed, CEO of SalamAir, said: I am delighted to announce our new partnership with Tune Protect which will help SalamAir offer its customers an added service. As part of this agreement, we will offer comprehensive travel insurance provisions for our customers that will allow them to be assured in case of any travel-related eventuality. Having a travel protection plan enables travellers to travel with peace of mind. Travel Protection is very popular in all markets across the world and we believe that our passengers will benefit from what Tune Protect is offering. Tune Protect offers comprehensive and affordable protection plans to meet the needs of travellers. Arijit Munshi, general manager of Tune Protect EMEIA, said: We are proud of our partnership with SalamAir. SalamAir is in the midst of its most exciting growth phase and I am sure that the technology provided by Tune Protect EMEIA to facilitate the travel protection program across its network will provide ease and convenience, as well as a memorable travel experience to SalamAirs customers. SalamAir currently operates three Airbus A320 aircraft and five Airbus A320Neo aircraft making it the first Omani carrier to utilise the highly rated single aisle aircraft. SalamAir flies to domestic destinations including Muscat, Salalah, Suhar and International destinations to Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Bahrain, Kuwait, Doha, Jeddah, Riyadh, Dammam, Tehran, Shiraz, Istanbul, Alexandria, Khartoum, Multan, Sialkot, Karachi, Dhaka, Chattogram, Kathmandu, Colombo and Phuket. Additional passenger services to compliment the customer experience on the home-grown airline include options for extra luggage, seat and meal selection. - TradeArabia News Service A 40-month prison sentence brings an end to the decades-long career of Roger Stone, a smooth-talking agent provocateur and self-proclaimed dirty trickster who thrived in the shadier margins of U.S. politics. But before Stone's fate was revealed, he arrived to court all smiles amid a tweet storm of support from President Trump, who could still have his longtime political ally and Watergate survivor walk away scot-free should he decide to issue a pardon. Trump had already voiced his fury at the initial nine-year sentence demanded by career prosecutors for Stone's guilty verdict of lying to Congress, which Attorney General William Barr later overruled, sending the Department of Justice into a crisis. This is just the latest chapter in Stone's extraordinary career of political swindling that had seen him evade jail time despite being entangled in some of the most controversial presidencies in U.S. history. Roger Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison Thursday after being found guilty in November of obstructing justice, witness tampering and lying to Congress President Trump issued a series of tweets Thursday morning in support of Roger Stone ahead of his sentencing for lying to Congress Growing up in Lewisboro, New York, to a blue-collar Catholic family, Roger Jason Stone Jr.'s zeal for the rough and tumble of political life was apparent from a young age. In elementary school he advocated for John F. Kennedy telling kids in the cafeteria line that Nixon would make them attend extra classes on a Saturday if he won the 1960 election. When he was a junior and vice president of student government in high school Stone manipulated the ouster of the president so he could take over. 'I built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket,' he would brag to the New York Times decades later. 'I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that's mean? No, it's smart.' Stone entered the political arena for real in 1972 when he ditched his studies at George Washington University, this time to support Nixon in his re-election campaign not to be the only time he shifted allegiances without a qualm. In one of his first 'dirty tricks' he contributed $135 to one of Nixon's Republican rivals in the name of the Young Socialist Alliance - then slipped the receipt to a journalist. When Nixon triumphed the braggadocios young aide was rewarded was a job on the administration. Perhaps unintentionally, his association with student dirty tricks also gained him an association with the 'ratf***ers,' the dirty operative beloved of Nixon. Stone himself denied being one of them, saying they were from the University of Southern California, but the nickname was attached to him for life. He worked for Richard Nixon, becoming so enthralled with the president that Stone would later have Nixon's face tattooed on his back Stone was hired as an adviser when Trump finally launched a bid for the White House nearly two decades later after Stone first suggested he run. Stone was pushed out in a power struggle The 37th President of the United States left a lasting impression on Stone: the longtime GOP operative would later have Nixon's face tattooed on his back. 'Women love it,' he told the New Yorker. 'The reason I'm a Nixonite is because of his indestructibility and resilience. Nixon left another legacy on Stone: Watergate. During congressional hearings into the scandal in 1973 it emerged Stone had recruited a spy to infiltrate the campaigns of several of Nixon's Democratic rivals. He was fired from his job with then-Senator Bob Dole but his reputation for the dark political arts was intact. Stone reunited with Dole for his 1996 presidential campaign but resigned when The National Enquirer revealed he placed ads on a swingers website seeking sex partners for himself and his second wife Nydia Bertran Stone. He later referred to himself in an interview with the New Yorker, partly conducted in a swingers club, as 'a libertarian and a libertine'and a 'trysexual I've tried everything'. The couple have more recently apparently found religion, bringing a pastor in robes to the trial with them and being seen at Sunday mass. The former advisor to President Donald Trump has a tattoo with Nixon's face on his upper back, which he showed off for a Netflix special In 1996 The National Enquirer revealed Stone placed ads on a swingers website seeking sex partners for himself and his second wife Nydia Bertran Stone Stone adopted President Nixon's iconic V for victory symbol, often posing with it Stone, pictured at his office in Florida, is a veteran Republican political operative after entering politics in 1972 Stone went on to work for several more presidential campaigns: those of Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and, eventually, his longtime friend Donald Trump, who had hired Stone to lobby for his casino businesses in the 1990s. He likewise forged a longtime bond with the disgraced former Trump campaign chairman and now federal prison inmate Paul Manafort after the pair co-founded one of DC earliest 'mega-lobbying' firms, Black, Manafort & Stone, in 1980. Along the way he picked up a reputation for dark arts and darker acts, a penchant for expensive tailoring and a rolodex of clients from the top of the Republican party and further afield including Donald Trump's struggling casino business, a connection which was to prove key to his future. Stone first suggested Trump run for president in early 1998, and even worked out of Trump Tower for a while to help him. He was hired as an adviser when his old ally finally launched a bid for the White House nearly two decades later. But he was pushed out in a power struggle which left him on the outside looking in and phoning Trump with his advice and also apparently bragging of his connections to WikiLeaks. Outside the campaign he accused Ted Cruz of having had affairs with five women; Cruz shot back that he was a 'ratf***er' and claimed he was 'pulling the strings on Donald Trump.' But inside Trump Tower, there was a different, and for Stone sadder, picture emerging. Stone went on to work for several more presidential campaigns including Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and his longtime friend Donald Trump Roger Jason Stone Jr grew up in Lewisboro, New York, to a blue-collar Catholic family and where his zeal for politics was apparent from a young age (pictured with Paul Manafort and Lee Atwater) Senior Campaign figures hinted that the silver-haired Svengali's influence was waning by the time WikiLeaks threw the 2016 Presidential race into turmoil. Rick Gates said Stone still had access to senior Trump figures despite having left his position but the relationship had become 'tense.' And Steve Bannon admitted in his testimony that he derived enjoyment from 'heckling' Stone when his big Julian Assange predictions fell flat. In the past, a Republican presidency had been a sure-fire payday for Stone but this time round his association with Trump was toxic and expensive. He found work with InfoWars, an apt home for a man who had pushed conspiracy theories for decades, and a regular place on the speaking circuit. But the Mueller inquiry brought massive legal bills and even then expensive legal counsel did not stop him committing a massive blunder in 2017: lying to Congress. Despite that Stone was predicting right up until January of this year that he would evade Robert Mueller's prosecutors, sneering in an exclusive DailyMail.com interview: 'They got nothing.' Three weeks later he found himself in handcuffs when rifle-wielding FBI agents surrounded his Fort Lauderdale, Florida home in the middle of the night to take him into custody. In the past, a Republican presidency had been a sure-fire payday for Stone but this time round his association with Trump was toxic and expensive Stone's home was raided in the early hours of the morning this year and he was taken into custody Then, on the steps of the federal courthouse in Broward County, Stone enjoyed perhaps his last hurrah, emerging defiant and unbowed to deliver a scathing diatribe about the Mueller 'witch-hunt' while flashing Nixon's trademark victory signs. When he followed that up by peddling 'Roger Stone did nothing wrong' t-shirts, launching a media tour and posting a mocked-up Instagram image of Judge Amy Berman Jackson in rifle crosshairs, enough was enough. Berman Jackson responded by slapping Stone with a gag order banning him from speaking about his case in the press or via social media. When it was their turn to address the trial, defense attorneys chose to play audio of Stone speaking before Congress in 2017 rather than have jurors hear from the man himself. It was perhaps tacit acceptance that the world had heard quite enough already from Watergate survivor Roger Stone and his vindictive brand of no-holds-barred politics. ABC News Former President Donald Trump, his sister Maryanne Trump Barry and the estate of his late brother Robert Trump tried on Tuesday to convince a New York judge to dismiss a lawsuit by Mary Trump that accused her family of swindling her out of at least $10 million. Attorneys for the Trump siblings argued Mary Trump's claims are time-barred by a six-year statute of limitations and prohibited by legal releases she signed in 2001 when the family settled the estate of Fred Trump Sr., the former president's father. The Trumps also argued Mary Trump possessed "boxes and boxes of information" about the estate settlement that should have given rise to any claims at the time. THE man accused of murdering detective garda Adrian Donohoe was deported from the US and later jailed for separate offences, a court has heard. The jury in the trial of Aaron Brady (29), who denies capital murder, were told that the accused pleaded guilty to dangerous driving, unauthorised taking of a vehicle and criminal damage in October 2012. He was deported from the US in March 2017 and after arriving back in Ireland was remanded in custody. Mr Brady was later given a 12 month jail term, increased on appeal to two years with 12 months suspended, for these offences in Dundalk. Det Insp Mark Phillips agreed with Michael O'Higgins SC, defending, that after this sentence was completed he was brought to court in March 2018 and charged with capital murder. The book of evidence was served in July of that year. Aaron Brady, of New Road in Crossmaglen, Co Armagh, has pleaded not guilty to the capital murder of Adrian Donohoe (41), who was then a member of An Garda Siochana acting in the course of his duty, at Lordship Credit Union in Bellurgan, Co Louth, on January 25, 2013. The accused also denies the robbery of approximately 7,000 in cash and assorted cheques from Mr Pat Bellew at the same location on the same date. This afternoon the trial heard that between December 2018 and January 2020, the defence received 34 disclosure packs from the prosecution with some containing thousands of statements and documents. Det Insp Phillips agreed that he had never seen a case with as much disclosure as this, and Mr O'Higgins said he was giving the jury an illustration of the amount of material served on the accused. Under cross examination the witness told the court he couldn't say why a diesel laundering yard, where Mr Brady said he was around the time of the murder, was not searched by the PSNI. The investigation had taken an account from Aaron Brady in early February 2013, he said, in which the accused told gardai he was only at the diesel yard at 8pm for up to 15 minutes, and from there went to a house on Lough Road between 9pm and 10.30pm on the night of the murder. Det Gda Donohoe was shot dead at around 9.29pm. He said that the account given by Mr Brady was corroborated by three people who were interviewed in the days after the accused gave his voluntary statements to gardai. Det Insp Phillips said that the first time he became aware that it was being suggested Aaron Brady was at the yard on Concession Road at the time of the murder was in September 2019. Asked by Brendan Grehan SC, prosecuting, when he first became aware of the narrative of the alibi, the witness said last December. The senior detective also said that he was deployed to Dundalk to investigate the murder of Det Gda Adrian Donohoe and the robbery at Lordship credit union, and that his brief didn't include investigating diesel laundering. He agreed with Mr Grehan that there were close to a million pages of material involved in the case. This included 40,000 hours of CCTV footage harvested from 300 locations, 6,000 jobs in 36 jobs books and in excess of 3,000 statements, the court heard. The jury were also told that on March 13, 2013, a property around a mile from the Lordship credit union was searched on foot of a district court warrant. The home belonged to the parents of an alleged accomplice of Aaron Brady and during the search a walkie-talkie was recovered. Sgt Dave O'Leary gave evidence of photographing the item as well as two registration plates discovered inside the house. The walkie-talkie was then shown to the court. The trial continues before Mr Justice Michael White and the jury of eight men and seven women tomorrow morning. The alleged case of input tax credit fraud was taking place through fake invoices issued by bogus firms. New Delhi: An anti-evasion wing of Central-GST has detected a fraud of more than Rs 214 crore through fake invoices in Delhi, an official release said on Wednesday. A person has been arrested and sent to judicial custody of 14 days, it added. The fraud wad detected by the anti-evasion wing of CGST Delhi South Commissionerate. The alleged case of input tax credit fraud was taking place through fake invoices issued by bogus firms. Investigations found the accused had also been generating bogus e-way bills to back the fake invoices, the finance ministry said in the statement. "Over 35 entities are involved in the bogus transactions, involving fake invoicing to the tune of Rs 214.74 crore and tax evasion of Rs 38.05 crore," it said. Further investigations in the matter are in progress, the ministry said. We are burning through our supplies much faster than anticipated. We just do not know how long this will continue, how many more people will need help and for how long, a level of emergency that is impossible to comprehend, said Mercy Corps country director Kieren Barnes. The Independent Election Commission has confirmed the results announced in December. Main rival Abdullah Abdullah challenges the outcome again, wants an "inclusive government". Ghani calls for unity to end the civil war. Kabul (AsiaNews/Agencies) After five months of waiting, the results of Afghanistans elections of September 2019 were released yesterday. Incumbent President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani took 50.64 per cent of the vote against 39.52 per cent for his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah. Right after the vote, the latter had requested and obtained a recount. The Independent Election Commission (IEC) confirmed the results of the first count in December which had given the victory to Ghani. At that time, Abdullah, who is chief executive officer of the state, contested the official results, declared victory, and vowed to form "an all-inclusive government." The election saw a very low turnout in a country torn by almost 20 years of civil war and almost daily attacks. The official turnout was 1.8 million out of about 9 million eligible voters. Ghanis spokesman Daud Sultanzoy told RFE/RL that "the [electoral] system worked well." However, the pointless delay [in the announcement of the results] due to meaningless interferences put the Afghan people on hold and made them worry. A few hours after the final outcome was announced, President Ghani spoke to his supporters at the presidential palace dedicating this victory of the people. Ghani said it was time to come up with patience both in small and big matters, to exercise patience and self-acceptance, not use weapons. Crabb said the cases original prosecutors had approval from U.S. Attorney Timothy Shea to make their recommendation and that their filing was done in good faith. He said his understanding was there had been a miscommunication between Barr and Shea, centered on what the expectations were from the attorney general and what the appropriate filing would be. He apologized for the confusion although even in court, his position seemed somewhat muddled.He refused to say whether he had written the softer sentencing recommendation, which bore his signature, because it would expose internal deliberations. B ritish cruise passenger David Abel has described how he "nearly passed out" as he arrived in hospital after the leaving the quarantined ship Diamond Princess. Mr Abel and his wife Sally, who announced this week that they had tested positive for coronavirus , were among dozens of British nationals staying on the ship. They have now been taken to hospital in Japan where they are being treated for the virus. British nationals on the ship will be repatriated on a flight departing Tokyo on Friday, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said. David Abel posted a picture of his wife Sally in hospital (David Abel/Facebook ) / David Abel/Facebook Those repatriated from the ship will be quarantined at accommodation at Arrowe Park on the Wirral on their return, a Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said. In his latest Facebook latest, Mr Abel said that he and his wife had been taken to hospital in Japan by ambulance after leaving the ship. "Outside the hospital I came over a bit weird and nearly passed out. Every pore on my body opened and I was wheelchaired to our room," he said. He revealed that both he and Mrs Abel have a cold, but it has not yet turned into pneumonia. He also said again in the post that the couple have coronavirus. David and Sally Abel / PA Full health inspection and now we know whats going on. We both contracted a cold (unaware of) and it has not yet turned into pneumonia. (We do have coronavirus)," he wrote. "Tomorrow the big tests commence. Chest x-rays, ECG, chest scan, urine + more. "We are both in the best place! They do know what they are doing and our two nurses are gorgeous. Sally likes the Dr too. Following treatments we require two days of all clear tests then we go for another big 3rd round of tests." David has been vlogging his experience on the Diamond Princess / David Abel Celebrant Training (YouTube) Mr Abel said that the couple still had a number of tests to undergo, but that this post would be his last for "some time" due to WiFi problems. He added: "Just logged on to Three (my network) and they have charged me 57 for the text messages & good wishes photos people have been sending us. "So final decision, after 10 years I shall be leaving Three. "Last communication so please dont worry about not hearing from us. He added: "See you all before you know it. All the best, Sally & David." Sharing a picture of his wife in another post, he said: "Now Sallys turn. Both beds in same room." Mr Abel also shared another photo of himself receiving treatment in a hospital bed. Mr Abel receiving care from a Japanese health worker / Facebook/David Abel In response to David's complaint Three have said that they are "making sure" he can continue contacting his family. A Three spokesperson said: We are in touch with Davids family and are making sure he can continue to keep in touch with friends and family. Another British national on the ship who has recovered from the virus posted on Facebook on Wednesday to say he is heading home. Alan Steele said: "Informed we will have to do another 2weeks quarentine (sic) back in blighty although japan has set me free as all ok." There were 78 British passengers on the cruise liner when cases of the coronavirus strain known as Covid-19 started to emerge. Four British cases have since been confirmed by the Foreign Office, although the number could be higher. Barbs aimed at Sanders, Bloomberg Former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg suffered a punishing welcome and Sen. Bernie Sanders was bludgeoned with criticism as an animated cast of rival candidates spent Wednesdays presidential debate scrambling to stake their claims against the two rising contenders in the Democratic race. Sanders (I-Vt.) was challenged on his electability and questioned on his health, the combativeness of his online supporters and the viability of his policy prescriptions. Bloomberg was hit for his political record, his alleged coarse descriptions of women, his extraordinary wealth and his contention that he is best positioned to defeat President Trump. The other candidates on the stage, who have attended each of the previous eight debate rounds, took advantage of their first opportunity to directly challenge the billionaire, who has spent more than $339 million of his own money on advertising to put his campaign in contention. (Washington Post) Featured stories From left, Democratic presidential candidates, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., former Vice President Joe Biden, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., participate in a Democratic presidential primary debate Wednesday in Las Vegas. (John Locher, Associated Press)AP Democratic voters at watch parties unimpressed by Bloombergs first debate performance (NBC News) Fact-checking the Democratic debate in Las Vegas (FactCheck.org) Donald Trump offered Julian Assange a pardon if he denied Russia link to hack (The Guardian) Trump takes up call for Barr to clean house at Justice Department (New York Times) Roger Stone drama enters its final act today at sentencing (ABC News) Nine killed at two shisha bars in Germany in suspected far-right attack (CNN) National news Trump to name Richard Grenell, U.S. ambassador to Germany, as acting head of intelligence (Washington Post) John Rood, top defense official, latest to be ousted after impeachment saga (New York Times) U.S. judge sides with migrants in Arizona case against Border Patrol (NBC News) Boy Scouts says its safe, and offers sex abuse victims just 80 days to file claim. Victims balk (USA Today) As Trump visits California, Governor Newsom calls homelessness issue a disgrace,' vows change (USA Today) Trump signs order diverting water to California farmers against state wishes (The Hill) BYU removes homosexual behavior ban from honor code, reflecting Mormon church stance (USA Today) Two 13-year-olds arrested in massive library blaze that leaves 1 firefighter dead, 1 missing (NBC News) Two women were found dead after a car plunged from a Miami ferry (CNN) Mr. Bob, 88-year-old crossing guard, dies saving two kids from being hit by car (CBS News) World news After 14 days, an extraordinary quarantine of the Diamond Princess cruise ship ended Wednesday, with thousands of passengers and crew to disembark over the next several days in the port of Yokohama. (Jae C. Hong, Associated Press)AP Two Japan cruise ship passengers die from coronavirus (CNN) New coronavirus spreads more like flu than SARS: Chinese study (Reuters) Iran elections to be dominated by hard-liners as young people refuse to vote: Its a joke (CNBC) Sec. Mike Pompeo says hell raise case of U.S. citizen allegedly tortured in Saudi custody (ABC News) UK weather: Parts of UK could see a months rain in 24 hours amid floods (BBC) Israeli PMs rival denies wrongdoing amid probe reports (Associated Press) Syria war: Turkish operation in Idlib only a matter of time (BBC) UK to close door to non-English speakers and unskilled workers (The Guardian) Libya conflict: Tripoli rocket attacks halt peace talks (BBC) Iran wont hand over damaged black box of Ukraine plane: ministers (Reuters) New Delh i: Ahead of United States President Donald Trump's maiden India visit next week, an influential US Congressman on Wednesday expressed concern over the situation in Kashmir and agitations over the new citizenship law, saying the country must protect its minorities and not lose its secular democracy. Ami Bera, Chair of House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific in the US Congress, said it was the desire of the US to see resolution of the Kashmir issue and return of normalcy in the region. Bera, a democrat, and George Holding, the Republican co-chair of the India caucus, are on a two-day visit to India to "demonstrate" bipartisan support to India in the US Congress. "We expressed our concerns over continued detention of political leaders in Kashmir," Bera told a group of journalists when asked whether he and Holding conveyed their concerns to Indian officials over situation in Kashmir. "We do not want to India to lose secular democracy that is what sets it apart from countries in the region, that is what makes it such a valuable partner of the US," he said. Bera also said he would like to take a Congressional delegation to Kashmir. "We did express our that we would like to take a delegation to Kashmir in some point of time." The US lawmaker also hailed India's vibrant democracy where he said 800 million Hindus are living side-by-side with 200 million Muslims. "Indian citizens are the ones that ultimately will control the outcome of where India heads to...We can offer that what we admire about India...is that it's this vibrant secular democracy and we would hate to see India lose or tarnish any of that reputation," said Bera. On his part, Holding said economic development will bring prosperity to Kashmir, adding a stable and predictable political situation is going to attract investment into the region. The special status of Jammu and Kashmir was withdrawn around six months back and it was bifurcated into two union territories. The government had imposed severe restrictions following the move including detaining sizeable number of political leaders. Replying to a question on widespread protests against the new citizenship law in India, Bera said expressed concerns over it but at the same time added that the demonstrations reflected inherent strength of the democracy. "It is important to keep lines of communications open," he said, adding India must protect its minorities. India has witnessed massive protests against the citizenship amendment law which seeks to grant citizenship to non-Muslims who came to India from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh facing religious persecution. The protesters feel the law is discriminatory as citizenship will be granted based on religious identity. Both the lawmakers also spoke about the bipartisan support to growing ties between India and the US in diverse areas including in trade and commerce, defence and strategic affairs. Both the lawmakers hoped that India and the US will be able to seal the much anticipated trade deal. Official sources said negotiations on the deal was not "stuck" and both sides mutually agreed "not to rush" into it, suggesting that it will not be signed during Trump's visit to India next week. Trump, accompanied by wife Melania Trump and a high level delegation will arrive in India on February 24 for a little less than 36-hour-long trip. From Ahmedabad, he will travel to Agra before arriving at the national capital for main leg of the visit. Hormel Foods Corporation HRL has posted first-quarter fiscal 2020 results, wherein both top and bottom lines increased year over year. Its sales surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate, while earnings missed the same. Quarter in Detail Quarterly earnings of 45 cents per share lagged the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 46 cents. Nevertheless, the bottom line increased 2% year over year. This can be attributed to higher sales and reduced effective tax rate. Net sales were $2,384.4 million, which surpassed the Zacks Consensus Estimate of $2,361 million. Moreover, the top line increased 1% year over year, owing to rise in sales at International, Jennie-O Turkey Store and Refrigerated Foods units. Notably, organic sales grew 4% year over year. Hormel Foods' volumes witnessed a 1% drop, while rose 2% on an organic basis. Selling, general and administrative expenses increased nearly 1% to $195.5 million. Operating margin contracted 120 bps to 11.8%. Hormel Foods Corporation Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise Hormel Foods Corporation Price, Consensus and EPS Surprise Hormel Foods Corporation price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | Hormel Foods Corporation Quote Segment Details Sales in the Grocery Products unit decreased 10.9% to $540.6 million and volumes declined 14% due to the divestiture of CytoSport. Further, organic sales declined as gains from SPAM and Wholly could not completely offset weakness at Skippy. Also, segmental profit declined 28.2% to $68.4 million. Revenues in the Jennie-O Turkey Store segment rose 2.8% to $330.1 million, with volumes rising 8%. Sales were driven by improvements at commodity and whole-bird businesses along with better pricing. Segmental profit grew 1.7% to $3.6 million, owing to increased commodity profits and operational gains. The companys Refrigerated Foods segment generated sales of $1,351.8 million, up 5.7% year over year. Also, volumes rose 3%. The upside was fueled by-products like Hormel Bacon 1 and Hormel Fire Braised as well as retail sales of Hormel Black Label and Hormel Cure 81. Also, improved deli sales of Hormel Gatherings party trays along with Applegate branded products contributed to the upside. Moreover, segmental profit increased 2.9% to $167.3 million due to increased commodity profits. International & Other revenues increased 5.4% to $161.9 million. Additionally, volumes increased 5%. Results were driven by improved fresh pork export volume and robust demand in China. However, segmental profit plunged 20.1% to $20 million on elevated input costs in China, Brazil and other countries in Asia. Balance Sheet & Cash Flow The company ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $724.4 million, and long-term debt of $309 million (excluding current maturities). In first-quarter fiscal 2020, Hormel Foods generated cash of $188.4 million from operating activities. Capital expenditure summed $58 million in the quarter. Management expects capital expenditure of $360 million for fiscal 2020. Key Development The company announced an agreement to acquire a Texas-based pit-smoked meats company, Sadler's Smokehouse. The buyout is in synch with Hormel Foods initiative of strengthening position in foodservice. Also, the company plans to expand the Sadler's product line into its retail and deli channels. The deal, which is worth $270 million, is likely to be closed in March 2020. The acquisition is anticipated to be neutral to slightly negative to fiscal 2020 earnings as a result of the investments into the business and production facility. Yearly sales, excluding transfers to Hormel Foods, are likely to be somewhere near $140 million. Outlook The company is pleased with the strength in the Refrigerated Foods segment and at the Jennie-O Turkey Store. The company is particularly encouraged about the prospects of SPAM, Whollyand Herdez. Also, it is undertaking efforts to enhance prospects at SKIPPY spreads and Hormel brands. However, headwinds related to the African swine fever and the recent outbreak of coronavirus in China. Also, it expects elevated protein prices for fiscal 2020. All Said, Hormel Foods reaffirmed its previous guidance. The company anticipates net sales of $9.5-$10.3 billion for fiscal 2020, whereas it reported$9.5 billion in fiscal 2019. Earnings are likely to be $1.69-1.83 per share, whereas it reported$1.80 in fiscal 2019. Price Performance The Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) stock has gained 19.5% in the past six months against the industrys decline of 1.3%. Story continues Looking for More Food Stocks? Check These Pilgrim's Pride PPC, which currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy), has a long-term earnings growth rate of 22.5%. You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank stocks here. Lamb Weston LW, with a Zacks Rank #2, has a long-term earnings growth rate of 8.8%. Hershey Company HSY, which carries a Zacks Rank #2 at present, has a long-term earnings growth rate of 7%. Biggest Tech Breakthrough in a Generation Be among the early investors in the new type of device that experts say could impact society as much as the discovery of electricity. Current technology will soon be outdated and replaced by these new devices. In the process, its expected to create 22 million jobs and generate $12.3 trillion in activity. A select few stocks could skyrocket the most as rollout accelerates for this new tech. Early investors could see gains similar to buying Microsoft in the 1990s. Zacks just-released special report reveals 8 stocks to watch. The report is only available for a limited time. See 8 breakthrough stocks now>> 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 Hershey Company (The) (HSY) : Free Stock Analysis Report Hormel Foods Corporation (HRL) : Free Stock Analysis Report Pilgrim's Pride Corporation (PPC) : Free Stock Analysis Report Lamb Weston Holdings Inc. (LW) : Free Stock Analysis Report To read this article on Zacks.com click here. Zacks Investment Research Al-Ahram Institution CEO Abdel-Mohsen Salama and CEO of the Administrative Capital for Real Estate Development Ahmed Zaki Abdeen inaugurated on Thursday in New Cairo the first real estate exhibition by Al-Ahram dedicated to the New Administrative Capital. The exhibit, under the title 'The Capital of Hope,' is held from 20 to 22 February in one of New Cairo's hotels, featuring a number of real estate development projects in the New Administrative Capital. In a press conference held at the inauguration, Abdeen said that the Egyptian government will transfer its ministries to the New Administrative Capital on 30 June 2020. Salama said that he was working to make the exhibit an annual event in cooperation with the New Administrative Capital Real Estate Development. The first phase of the New Administrative Capital comprises a government district, residential neighbourhoods and a business district. The 700 square-kilometre capital, launched in 2015 by President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, will house more than 6.5 million people. Search Keywords: Short link: The Supreme Court on Monday directed that women officers in the Army be granted permanent commissions and command posts. New Delhi: Army Chief Gen. M.M. Naravane said on Thursday that letters were being sent to all women officers asking whether they would prefer permanent commissions. He said that the Army had prepared a roadmap for granting permanent commission to women officers. The Army Chief said the process will be the same for men and women officers. Gen. Naravane claimed the force was championing gender equality and the SC order granting permanent commission to women officers will give it a lot of clarity, moving forward. The Supreme Court on Monday directed that women officers in the Army be granted permanent commissions and command posts. The Indian Army does not discriminate against any soldier based on religion, caste, creed, or even gender. The outlook of the Indian Army has been throughout like this and that is why we started inducting women officers as early as in 1993, Gen. Naravane said. The Army has taken the initiative to induct women in its rank and file, and the first batch of 100 women soldiers is undergoing training at the Corps of Military Police Centre and School, he said. The Supreme Courts decision is a welcome one as it brings out a sense of clarity and purpose to gainfully employ officers for better efficiency of the organisation. I must assure that everybody in the Indian Army, including women officers, will be given equal opportunity to contribute to the nation as also progress in their careers, he said, hailing the verdict as an enabling one. Asked on the health condition of hardline Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, he said the security forces are geared up to take care of any situation. On the proposed creation of a theatre command exclusively for J&K, he said there will be detailed discussions before anything is finalised. FRANKLIN, Tenn., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- AccuReg, a healthcare technology solutions company offering a full suite of front-end revenue cycle SaaS solutions for hospitals, announces John Thompson has joined the company as vice president of performance management. In his new role, Thompson will engage with AccuReg customers to analyze and optimize their performance to eliminate denials, decrease cost to collect and increase cash collections. By leveraging his 23 years of experience as a highly sought-after expert on improving and maximizing the hospital revenue cycle process, Thompson will help hospital leaders drive change that both reduces costs and increases patient satisfaction. "John's extensive experience in improving patient access, revenue cycle management and transformation is an asset to our leadership team and our clients will benefit from his intense focus on performance management," said Paul Shorrosh, AccuReg Founder and Chief Executive Officer. "John shares our vision and passion to improve healthcare with a front-end approach to revenue cycle management. His commitment to utilizing innovative, automated technology to reduce operational costs, increase net revenue and improve the patient financial experience perfectly aligns with the mission of our company." Thompson will help further differentiate AccuReg, which was named to the Inc. 5000 List of America's Fastest-Growing Private Companies for the second time in 2019, from other revenue cycle vendors as an accountable partner. He will be responsible for ensuring customers understand the improvements they should achieve with the company's solutions, and for defining goals and providing performance metrics to which clients should hold AccuReg accountable. "As a front-end revenue cycle consultant focused on best-practice performance, I've assisted many organizations with selecting access management technology solutions," Thompson said. "As my clients consistently chose AccuReg following a thorough evaluation of the competition, I realized this company shared my primary goal of leveraging technology to help hospital clients achieve industry-leading performance levels. AccuReg is more than a technology vendor that provides front-end software, it's a leading access management partner that uses technology to accelerate client performance and I'm proud to join their leadership team." Thompson most recently served as principal at Revenue Cycle Coalition LLC in Chester, Md. Prior to that position he served as senior consulting manager with IMA Consulting Inc., principal at Phoenix Health Systems and he held various leadership roles at Children's National Medical Center, including director of the department of registrations and admissions. Thompson is co-founder of the National Capital Association of Healthcare Access Management and currently serves as its secretary, after previously serving as its president. He is a certified project management professional, a certified healthcare access manager and a certified healthcare finance professional, among other professional accolades. About AccuReg: AccuReg helps hospitals reduce costs, maximize cash collection and revenue and enable price transparency by providing transformative patient access solutions. Its cloud-based integrated suite utilizes automation and artificial intelligence to improve revenue capture and the patient financial experience. By combining an exception-based workflow, a continuous learning QA rules engine, intelligent eligibility and benefit validation and complete prior authorization management, AccuReg predicts and prevents denial-causing issues at the front of the revenue cycle where cost is significantly lower than the traditional resource-draining back-end approach. AccuReg also helps hospitals achieve the price transparency patients want with accurate out-of-pocket price estimates and payment processing. For more information, visit www.AccuRegSoftware.com. Media Contact: Philip Betbeze, [email protected] SOURCE AccuReg Related Links http://www.AccuRegSoftware.com needs to invest an estimated extra $109 billion in over the next decade to halve its crash fatalities, the said in a report released on a day when at least 35 people were killed in four separate accidents in the country. The bank said such an investment will bring economic benefits equivalent annually to 3.7 per cent of the GDP. The report titled "Delivering in India" was released at the 'Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety' in Stockholm. It points to the high death rate on India's roads caused by chronic lack of investment in systemic, targeted, and sustained programmes and identifies relevant investment priorities to reverse the trend. has one of the highest rates of road crashes in the world. Every year, about 150,000 people lose their lives on India's roads, and more than five times that number are injured or maimed for life, the report said. The highways alone claim one life a year for every two kilometers. This is ten times higher than the developed country threshold. Road crashes also impact economic growth, costing the economy between 3 to 5 per cent of GDP a year, it said. At least 20 people were killed and several injured seriously when a bus collided with a container lorry near Tamil Nadu's Avinashi town in Tirupur district in the early hours on Thursday. Six people were killed and seven injured when their car rammed into a stationary truck in Maharashtra's Chandrapur district on Thursday. In another accident in Jammu and Kashmir, five members of a family were killed when their car rammed into a stationary truck on the Jammu-Pathankot Highway in Samba district on Thursday. Four persons were killed when a tractor turned turtle in Chhattisgarh's Bastar district on Thursday. Given the rising trajectory of crashes in India, the report calls the country's recent enactment of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 as an important step towards reducing road crash fatalities. Part of a regional report, "Road Safety in South Asia: Opportunities for Shared Regional Initiatives," the in its report calls for regional initiatives to make roads and vehicles safer, even while making national-level actions a top priority. "Years of rapid economic growth in South Asia, followed by a steep rise in vehicle ownership have led to mounting traffic deaths and contributed to lost economic opportunities," said Hartwig Schafer, Vice President for South Asia. "South Asia's road safety crisis is unacceptable but preventable. The good news is that South Asian countries recognise the urgent need to protect their people, save lives, and sustain their journey toward greater prosperity. We at the World Bank stand ready to support their efforts," said the World Bank official. Towards this, the report suggests countries should collaborate on making regional trade corridors safer. All categories of road users and vehicle types animals, pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, motorcycles, motorized three-wheelers, cars, minibuses, buses, mini trucks, trucks, and agricultural vehicles are represented in these corridors with narrow lanes, limited or no shoulders, and inadequate pedestrian facilities, it said. According to the World Bank, the road safety conditions on these corridors mirror the nature and scale of conditions prevalent on highways. Crash data collected in a sample of highway sections across Nepal, India, and Bangladesh reveal alarming annual fatality rates ranging from 0.3 to 3 deaths per kilometer, at a yearly average of 0.87 fatalities per kilometer. "In India, 34.5 per cent of fatalities in 2016 resulted from crashes on the Highways, which comprise only 1.79 per cent of the country's total road network," the report said. "Historically, when countries reached motorisation levels of between 50100 vehicles per 1,000 people, road crashes became one of the leading causes of death and injuries. Improving road safety was then recognised as a national development priority," said Arnab Bandyopadhyay, Lead Transport Specialist, World Bank. "This holds important road safety lessons for the South Asia region where the rate of vehicle ownership has doubled over the past decade and remains on an upward trajectory. The report's proposed regional initiatives will go a long way in helping countries improve road safety," he added. To better monitor the effectiveness of road safety efforts, the report recommends a shared regional initiative to harmonise crash data management and analysis systems across South Asia. According to the report, currently, South Asian countries are in varying stages of developing crash data and performance management systems that analyse the underlying factors behind each crash whether it was defective road infrastructure, faulty vehicle design, or human error. Tamil Nadu has already rolled out a Geographical Information Systems (GIS-based) programme to map road accidents state-wide, identify the most crash-prone hot spots, and pinpoint corrective action, the report said. The system is also linked to medical facilities across the State, reducing the response time of emergency medical services from 30 to 11 minutes, at par with the world's best performing trauma services, it said. A large group of illegal aliens boards a bus bound for the Border Patrol processing facility after being apprehended by Border Patrol near McAllen, Texas, on April 18, 2019. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times) Small States With Low Immigrant Populations Hit Hardest by Influx of Illegal Aliens Illegal aliens are gravitating to so-called sanctuary cities in states with small immigrant populations where they strain local finances because they consume as much as $6,000 in taxpayer-funded services annually over and above any fiscal benefit they generate, according to a new study. The report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group that favors reducing overall immigration levels, comes in the wake of a Jan. 27 Supreme Court decision in Department of Homeland Security (DHS) v. New York upholding the authority of the Trump administration to keep out would-be immigrants deemed likely to become reliant on publicly-funded welfare programs. The administrations public charge rule aims to make sure future immigrants to the United States can support themselves without becoming a burden on taxpayers. America needs people who are able to stand on their own two feet, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), said of the rule in August 2019. The report also comes after DHS data showed an approximately 7 percent decline in the admission of lawful immigrants to the United States between 2016 and 2018, representing close to 87,000 people. This was the first noticeable decline in high levels of immigration in recent decades, FAIR said. Although many Americans believe that immigrants, whether legal or illegal, avoid less populated states with rural economies, many immigrants prefer such states because they offer diverse employment opportunities and a lower cost of living than densely populated states with large migrant populations such as New York or California, states the report from FAIR, Small Migrant Populations, Huge Impacts. Many illegal aliens move to smaller, less populated states because they receive less attention from immigration enforcement agencies than either the border states or the metropolises commonly associated with high levels of illegal immigration, the study states. Many local officials tout immigration, including illegal immigration, as a remedy to economic stagnation, Dan Stein, president of FAIR, said in a statement. However, as this report reveals, the reality is precisely the opposite. Illegal immigration, in particular, drives down wages and inhibits job opportunities for legal residents, while bringing more low-skilled, low-wage workers to these states, Stein said. In turn, this increases costs to state and local governments and discourages investment by businesses seeking a skilled labor force and lower overhead. The report states that lax immigration policies have a profound impact even on those states with small immigrant populations. The expanding influx of new people hits smaller states hardest because such states typically have fewer jobs available and condensed economies, making it harder to absorb newcomers. The report looks at the 10 states with the smallest foreign-born populationsAlaska, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyomingto determine how high rates of U.S. immigration have affected them. There are about 29 sanctuary jurisdictions in these states, whose policy is to refuse to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to FAIR. About 415,000 foreign-born individuals live in the 10 states, and around 21 percentor 88,000 peopleare unlawfully present in the United States, and these illegal aliens cost U.S. taxpayers $454 million dollars annually, the study states. To put that figure into context, that $454 million expenditure is more than 200 times what the state of Montana budgets for its entire Veterans Affairs program, and it is 2.5 times the total sum that West Virginia invests in its state university, according to the report. This means that each illegal alien in these states generates a net tax deficit of between $4,500 and $6,000 annually, the report states, crowding out funding for social programs for veterans, the disabled, and children who are U.S. citizens. A Different Take Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications for the left-leaning Migration Policy Institute, didnt express an opinion about the FAIR report, but said it was incredibly difficult to provide a complete picture of the costs and benefits of immigration. Immigrants are not just users of services, they are also workers who generate tax payments and consumers whose consumption creates value in the economy, she told The Epoch Times in a statement. So, capturing the costs and benefits across the economy requires consideration of a range of factors, not all of which are easily measurable. Mittelstadt pointed to a 2016 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that looked at economic and demographic trends in U.S. immigration over the previous 20 years. That study, which reviewed the vast research literature on immigration to come up with a picture of the fiscal impacts of immigration, is probably the most seminal piece of work on this subject in two decades, she said. The study reported that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S., and that there is little evidence that it has a significant impact on the employment levels of native-born workers, according to a summary. Some evidence on inflow of skilled immigrants suggests that there may be positive wage effects for some subgroups of native-born workers, and other benefits to the economy more broadly. The report acknowledged that first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments, mainly at the state and local levels, than are the native-born, in large part due to the costs of educating their children. But as adults, the children of immigrants are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population. Immigrants generally have a positive fiscal impact at the federal level but have a negative impact at state and local levels, the report states. A woman medico, who was India's first novel coronavirus patient being treated at the Government Medical College hospital here, was discharged today, official sources said. The decision to discharge her from the hospital was taken by the Medical Board, which met and examined the results of the woman's samples that had tested negative for the second time, they said. The discharge of the student marked the recovery of all three cases of infection in India reported from Kerala. Two other students one from Alappuzha and another Kasaragod had been discharged recently after they too tested negative for the virus in fresh tests days after being infected by it. The woman, India's first coronavirus patient, had been undergoing treatment in the isolation ward of the Medical College Hospital here since her return from Wuhan in China last month. All the three Keralites had earlier tested positive for the coronavirus on their return from Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly outbreak that has leftover 2,000 people dead in China, triggering a scare in the state. "The health condition of the third patient at Thrissur Medical College Hospital is satisfactory. The second consecutive test result of the blood sample of the student, sent to the National Institute of Virology in Pune, has returned negative," Health Minister K K Shailaja had said in a release on Wednesday. The health department has said a total of 2,242 people are under observation across the state, out of which, eight are in isolation wards of various hospitals and other under home quarantine. The student admitted to the isolation ward of Alappuzha Medical College was discharged on 6 February while the patient from Kasargod sent home five days later. Earlier, after the three students tested positive, the government had declared the coronavirus as a state calamity but withdrew it after effective quarantine and no fresh cases being reported. Data centre company Equinix is partnering with Irish firm AirSpeed Telecom to cut latency problems that beset corporate users of cloud computing - particularly staff working remotely from rural areas. The two firms said their new product, AirSpeed Cloud Connectivity, would help Irish clients that cannot support remote working for employees because their slow links to cloud-based services are prone to frozen displays, swirling circles and server disconnections. They said the service - officially launching today - would allow firms to establish on-demand virtual connections in near-real time. It promises bandwidth ranging from 10Mbs to 10Gbs for connection to more than 145 cloud service providers via dedicated private lines. Equinix - a Redwood City, California-based company with more than 200 data centres worldwide - operates four Dublin data centres outside the M50. Equinix channel manager Kevin O'Connor said its recent survey of 103 Irish information technology executives found a large minority - 38pc - suspect that their growing reliance on cloud-based services would result in more data breaches. "Ireland's IT decision-makers are cautious of the impact remote working will have on cybersecurity - and rightly so," he said. "Organisations must ensure that in their efforts to modernise their business, they are also considering the security risks in doing so." He said remote working should boost productivity, but unreliable and slow connections "will slow down workloads and frustrate users". "Having direct access to the world's leading cloud service providers is essential in removing these hurdles," he said. AirSpeed, founded in 2003 and based in Citywest in southwest Dublin, is 100pc owned by the Irish Infrastructure Fund, which is managed by AMP Capital and Irish Life Investment Managers. Its corporate clients include Chill Insurance, fruit and vegetable distributor Keelings, chicken producer Manor Farm and construction materials firm Kilsaran. Ive got this thing and its [expletive] golden, Rod Blagojevich gushed as federal investigators listened in on a wiretap. The comment regarded the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Barack Obama that Blagojevich was trying to sell to the highest bidder. But Tuesday was even more golden for the former Illinois governor, a Democrat from Chicago who also tried to shake down a childrens hospital. Were disappointed in President Donald Trumps decision to commute Blagojevichs sentence four years earlier than his projected 2024 release date. The felony charges against Blagojevich included wire fraud, extortion, bribery and conspiracy. Blagojevich was impeached by the Illinois House in January 2009 and removed from office by the unanimous vote of the state Senate. He entered prison in March 2012. In a state where four of the past 10 governors wound up in prison for corruption, Blagojevich distinguished himself by earning the longest term of them all. Hell be able to go back home with his family, Trump said Tuesday of the one-time Celebrity Apprentice contestant. That was a tremendously powerful, ridiculous sentence in my opinion and in the opinion of many others. Not in our opinion. Blagojevich deserved what he got. He should have served the full sentence. U.S. Rep. John Shimkus, R-Collinsville, joined by other members of the GOP House delegation, called Blagojevichs sentence fair. We believe he received an appropriate and fair sentence, which was the low-end of the federal sentencing guidelines for the gravity of his public corruption convictions, they said. Blagojevich is the face of public corruption in Illinois, and not once has he shown any remorse for his clear and documented record of egregious crimes that undermined the trust placed in him by voters. As our state continues to grapple with political corruption, we shouldnt let those who breached the public trust off the hook. History will not judge Rod Blagojevich well. Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said in a statement: Illinoisans have endured far too much corruption, and we must send a message to politicians that corrupt practices will no longer be tolerated. President Trump has abused his pardon power in inexplicable ways to reward his friends and condone corruption, and I deeply believe this pardon sends the wrong message at the wrong time. We recognize that Trump a Republican has the ability to lawfully commute the federal sentence of anyone he chooses, even convicted Democrats. That doesnt make it right in this case. Daily News, Effingham A gunman suspected of shooting at least nine people dead at two shisha bars in a Germany reportedly revealed he had far-right political views in a confession letter he left behind. The rampage late on Wednesday in Hanau, a town close to Frankfurt, ended with the suspect killing himself. German daily Bild said the man had left a written confession and a video claiming responsibility for the attack. Police chased a car used to leave the scene of one shooting to its owner's address, where they found the bodies of a 43-year-old German man and his 72-year-old mother, Hesse interior minister Peter Beuth said. Turkey's ambassador to Germany said five of those killed were Turkish citizens. "We expect German authorities to show maximum effort to enlighten this case. Racism is a collective cancer," tweeted Ibrahim Kalin, a special adviser to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Police said work to confirm the identities of the two bodies at the home was under way, and they could not immediately give details on them or the identities of the earlier victims, The Independent reported. Mental health issues are becoming more prevalent on college campuses across the country and researchers at Texas A&M University are working to develop evidence-based services that will help manage students' mental health. While mental health counseling is available on most college campuses, the stigma around mental health care can keep students away from the help they need. Tools to help combat this stigma are readily seen on college campuses today smart devices. Most college students have either a smartphone, tablet or smartwatch. These devices allow students constant access to one another and the world around them and can provide a reliable platform to deliver mental health services. A team of researchers led by Dr. Farzan Sasangohar, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is developing a wearable continuous monitoring tool. The tool utilizes advanced machine learning and a wide range of sensors provided on commercial off-the-shelf smartwatches to detect signs and symptoms of high anxiety and direct the smartwatch wearer to resources. The wearable device would be triggered by negative indicators, such as anxiety patterns of heart rate and self-reports by the smartwatch wearer, and would prompt the wearer to engage in therapeutic activities. The pilot program is called Mental Health Evaluation and Lookout or mHELP. Resources available through mHELP include therapeutic activities like mobile self-assessments, educational content and self-management tools, such as biofeedback and mindfulness exercises. These services are available through a mobile platform. The monitoring tool will also integrate with in-person and virtual counseling sessions, which will help mental health providers guide their patients' treatment plans more effectively. This pilot program hopes to bring mental health care to students as they experience anxiety or depression and provide on-demand or proactive access to virtual and in-person counseling. By allowing students to manage their mental health through a wearable device, the researchers feel that some of the stigma associated with mental health treatment can be overcome. Mental health is affecting students' academic success and their overall quality of life. Mental illness can also affect a student's motivation, concentration and social interactions, which are all crucial factors for a student to be successful in college and life." Dr. Farzan Sasangohar, assistant professor, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Texas A&M University This program is the first of its kind and could be used as a model for integrating mobile-enabled technologies into mental health care in other communities. Sasangohar will collaborate with Student Counseling Services, the Office of the Dean of Faculties, the Division of Student Affairs, as well as faculty in the Bush School of Government and Public Service, College of Education and Human Development, School of Public Health and College of Engineering. This project is funded by the X-Grants program at Texas A&M through the Office of the President. Funding will be used to implement the pilot program at Texas A&M. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 05:01:09|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close MUSCAT, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Oman's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) on Wednesday signed with China's Huawei a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to provide training programs for 1,000 Omani young people on 5G technology. "The Chinese company will offer a two-year training course for that number of Omanis to be picked by the TRA," the TRA said in a press release Wednesday. The MoU was signed by TRA Chief Executive Officer Salem Al Rawahi and Huawei Oman Regional Director Chen Bing. Yusuf bin Abdullah al-Balushi, the head of the TRA's 5G team, said the authority has provided the required frequencies for the operation of relevant networks in the fields of transport and logistics in the country. "Omantel telecommunications company has already launched the 5G services by the end of last year while Ooredoo, an international telecommunications company, will follow suit during the second quarter of this year," Balushi added. Armed conflict between Turkey and the Damascus regime and their allies escalated dramatically on Thursday, with airstrikes and artillery leaving dead and injured on both sides of the ongoing battle over Syrias northwest Idlib province. Turkeys defence ministry claimed it had neutralised some 50 troops loyal to the regime of Bashar al-Assad after his air force struck Turkish troops, killing at least two. A statement from the Russian defence ministry said that only four Assad regime troops were wounded in Turkish artillery strikes, and claimed its Su-24 warplanes struck rebel groups allied with Ankara on the outskirts of Idlib, capital of the hotly contested province. The exchanges of fire on Thursday potentially portend even more heavy warfare following a 29 February deadline set by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erodgan for Assad regime troops to withdraw from positions near a dozen observation posts established in Syrias northwest Idlib province as part of a de-escalation agreement it hammered out with Moscow and Tehran. But the Assad regime, backed by Russia and Iran, has intensified military operations in Idlib, hoping to stamp out the last significant rebel stronghold in the country after a civil conflict that has lasted nearly nine years. The assault has displaced 900,000 since 1 December, with the frontlines moving closer to more densely populated areas, including camps for the internally displaced (IDPs) and the city of Idlib. Many have been left homeless, forced to sleep out in the open in freezing winter temperates. The UN has raised the alarm over the "rapid deterioration of the humanitarian situation" and warned that it is receiving "daily reports" of children dying in the cold. Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in Show all 8 1 /8 Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in Displaced Syrian children sit in a small truck, as they head to the area where their family and others will settle in, after fleeing violence of Maarat al-Numan town EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Syrians forced to flee Maarat al-Numan as Assad forces move in EPA Turkey worries the offensive will prompt a fresh flood of refugees across its borders, potentially destabilising the country, which already hosts at least 3.6 million Syrians. Turkey has shown that Idlib is a red-line and it is ready to defend the last rebel stronghold with its military, said Yusuf Erim, an analyst at Turkeys state broadcaster. While the presence of the Russian military especially its air force may complicate the situation on the ground, it is not a deterrence for Ankara. What we are seeing right now are the footsteps of a major operation. Already tens of thousands of Syrians living in Idlib have flocked to the Turkish frontier, hoping to escape the regime onslaught. International aid officials have described the humanitarian situation in Idlib as one of the most acute crises in the world. Russia has ignored calls by international officials and aid groups to halt the offensive, instead accusing Turkey of prolonging the war by backing armed groups in Idlib. We call on the Turkish side to stop its support for the actions of terrorists and the transfer of weapons to them in order to avoid incidents, an organ of the Russian military said in a statement. Fighting in Idlib shows no sign of abating. In addition to Thursdays airstrikes, a Syrian monitoring group described fierce clashes between regime forces and Turkish-backed rebels on the ground east of Idlib, with Ankaras armed proxies backed by Turkeys precision artillery capturing territory from the regime. A Turkish operation would complicate Putins plans for Syria, said Mr Erim. I believe the Russian President will play it safe and seek a deal with his Turkish counterpart before the February-end deadline set by Ankara for a regime retreat. For Moscow entering March without a deal would be sailing into the unknown and playing Russian roulette with its Syria policy. Further escalation of the conflict could also encourage more international involvement, a scenario Moscow would prefer to avoid, said Mr Erim. Despite the escalating exchanges of fire, Turkish and Russian diplomats continue to meet in attempts to hammer out a fresh agreement. The United States, a Nato partner of Turkey, has encouraged Ankara to stand up to Russia, seeing an opportunity woo back an ally that has been increasingly drifting into the Kremlins orbit. Bloomberg News on Thursday cited an unnamed Turkish official as saying that Turkey was asking Washington for Patriot missile-defence systems on its southern border to protect its troops in Syria. The missile defence system would allow Turkey to use F-16 fighter jets to strike Assad regime troops, the official told Bloomberg. The CPI on Thursday urged the "progressive forces" in the country to protest US President Donald Trump's visit to India on February 24 and 25. In a statement, party general secretary D Raja called on all party units as well as civil society groups and other political parties to unite and protest "vehemently" on February 24 against Trump's two-day visit to India. The US president will arrive in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on February 24 and the next day he will be in Delhi. "It is a matter of serious concern that the Government of India instead of pursuing an independent foreign policy is succumbing to the pressures of US imperialist power while the US is continuing to imposing its hegemonic policies on the world along with its brazen hostilities towards Cuba, Palestine, Iran and others. "In this context, we have given a call for protest on the same day in Delhi and appealed to all the Left and secular parties to join the protest and give a befitting rebuff. Also the national secretariat of CPI has called upon all party units to organize protests all over the country," Raja said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) It's official: Murray State becomes member of Missouri Valley Conference Kudos for honesty Re: Limbaughs radio show is music to my ears, by Ruben Navarrette, Editorial Page, Monday: I am shocked and amazed! Ruben Navarrettes column about Rush Limbaugh took courage and acceptance. Kudos to Navarrette. I also dont always agree with Limbaugh or Donald Trump, but the meanness needs to end. And kudos to the Express-News for publishing a writer who is not afraid to speak his mind when he knows many will respond in anger. Michael Pullen, Bulverde On ExpressNews.com: Commentary: Our differences aside, Limbaugh's radio show was music to my ears Dem billionaire OK? Four years ago, the Democrats were having one conniption fit after another at the thought of a Republican billionaire for our next president. Of course, that billionaire was Donald Trump. The Democratic candidates have railed against the possibility of either re-electing Trump or having another billionaire as our next president. Now, however, Democrats have changed their tune. With the entry of Michael Bloomberg in the presidential race and his promise to spend as much of his personal fortune as he must to win (i.e., buy) the 2020 election, Democrats have embraced him as a viable replacement for Trump. Even former President Barack Obama, who enthusiastically campaigned against candidate Trump, is appearing in campaign ads for Bloomberg to be our next president. So, Im confused. Why is it OK for a Democrat billionaire to buy the election, but not OK for a Republican billionaire to run for re-election? Ruth E. Webster Far from D.C. Does anyone question why the coronavirus patients are being sent to California and Texas? Why not to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, D.C.? Why not to the hospital at Andrews AFB in southern Maryland, near Washington, D.C.? Why not to Weill Cornell Medical Center in downtown New York City somewhat close to Trump Tower? Just curious. Gary Morrison The old story of a farmer trying to get a stubborn mule to pull a wagon by dangling a carrot in front of its nose, or hitting its rump with a stick, may not seem to have much to do with the practice of medicine. But a new study suggests that when it comes to making the best use of health care dollars, it will take a combination of carrots and sticks to move things forward. The study looks at the effects of two initiatives that aimed to reduce the use of two blood tests that experts consider "low value" for most patients: Routine vitamin D tests, and an unnecessary thyroid test for tracking thyroid hormone levels. After an organization that advises the health care system in Ontario, Canada reported in 2010 that population-based Vitamin D screening does not improve outcomes, the province's health plan for all residents declared it wouldn't pay for low-value vitamin D tests. Soon after, the rate of testing dropped nearly 93 percent, the study shows. Patients who had a condition or medication that might lower their vitamin D levels could still get tested. But in the U.S., where no such payment change took place, 2.6 million unnecessary vitamin D screening tests happened in just one year, according to the researchers from the University of Michigan, University of Toronto and VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System who published the new findings in JAMA Internal Medicine. A few years later, as part of an education campaign called Choosing Wisely, physician professional societies issued recommendations on when not to use Vitamin D and T3 testing. And while use of the test in Ontario dropped an additional 4.5%, the use in U.S. patients covered by Veterans Health benefits or commercial insurance dropped about 14%. Our study found small reductions in the use of unnecessary vitamin D screenings in response to recommendations from the Choosing Wisely campaign, but much greater reductions in Ontario when recommendations were complemented by policy change. The biggest lesson is that while recommendations alone can work to reduce low value care, recommendations have greater impact when they are reinforced by changes to policy and practice." Eve Kerr, M.D., M.P.H., senior author of the new paper and a professor in the U-M Department of Internal Medicine Improving value Kerr heads a program at the U-M Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation called the Michigan Program on Value Enhancement. She and her colleagues used the same Choosing Wisely guideline to build an alert for clinicians who had ordered a vitamin D test of low potential value into the electronic health record at Michigan Medicine, U-M's academic medical center. In 2018, they reported that this guideline-based "carrot" had led to a positive and sustained change in orders for low-value vitamin D tests. James Henderson, Ph.D., the first author of the new paper, assistant director of MPrOVE and a data science consultant at U-M's Consulting for Statistics, Computing and Analytics Research unit, notes that the new paper's findings show that Choosing Wisely recommendations for T3 testing did not appear to have had the desired impact. T3 testing, which is no longer recommended for patients with known thyroid issues because a test called TSH is more accurate, did not decline in either the U.S. or Canada after Choosing Wisely guidelines were issued. In fact, in the study population of U.S. patients with private insurance, the rate of testing actually went up slightly. Handle with care Kerr, Henderson and their colleagues from IHPI and the VA Center for Clinical Management Research note that policy decisions for low-value care including payment changes must be made with care, to avoid problems with access to that type of care for patients who could benefit. For instance, the Ontario payment change exempted patients who have bone or digestive disorders that can change vitamin D levels, and patients who take certain medications that can change vitamin D absorption from food and supplements. "Payment policies are not the only effective means for reducing low-value care," says Kerr. "Indeed, sometimes restricting payment may be too blunt an approach and could lead to underuse." She adds, "Other effective policies that can be coupled with recommendations include population based education programs, communication approaches to help patients and physicians make more patient-centered decisions, decision support for doctors about low-value care, and most importantly, culture change initiatives that emphasize the responsibility of health care institutions, clinicians, and patients to provide and seek high-value, evidence-based care while avoiding low-value services." Ryan Brown, CEO of Native Roots, chose Cova only after a thorough evaluation. "We put Cova through quite a set of trials to test their POS, digital retail technology, support, and training," Brown said. "They delivered so well on our needs, and so impressed us with their responsive enterprise-level capabilities, we're confident it's the perfect fit for Native Roots." Native Roots has established itself as a premier brand and now faces the logistical challenges of high-volume sales and high customer expectations. Cova's refined tech infrastructure, scalable feature set, and mature API are an essential upgrade for the dispensary chain. The company will leverage Cova's enterprise capabilities to replace deficiencies in their previous system and better manage sales and inventory across all locations. "We needed a dependable POS that offered global management of twenty plus stores," said Alex Bitz, IT Director at Native Roots. "Cova allows us to set up products and inventory in one place. We are impressed with the speed at which the system can work to set up our entire product inventory within a matter of minutes. We also needed a solution that could provide data that was on-pointe. Cova's API access lets us pull what we want, how we want, and where we want." Another feature that lends a competitive advantage is Cova's wireless functionality. Native Roots can now leverage the benefits of mobile tablet-based sales tools, adding flexibility to customer experience concepts going forward. Budtenders can walk around stores to engage and educate customers on the sales floor. Because Cova separates the front-end budtender sales tools from the backend system, sales staff now have all the information and streamlined functionality they need to complete significantly faster transactions. "The overall speed at which we can create a transaction is phenomenal," said Bitz. Cova's cannabis retail platform is the fastest growing in the industry, used by 65% of all private stores in Canada, and hundreds of dispensaries in markets across the U.S. The move by Native Roots underscores the value of the system's built-in scalability. "We were ecstatic to earn Native Roots' business across Colorado, and to help their move into Canada," said Gary Cohen, CEO of Cova. "We built our platform to help cannabis retailers of all sizes, from single stores to expansive operations with a hundred locations. Native Roots is an incredible success story, and their trust in Cova validates a lot of hard work and investment in scalable solutions. Because we share the same ambition to move the industry forward and raise the bar for customer experience, it also inspires us to keep working and stay ahead of the curve." About Cova Cova is an award-winning POS and Inventory Management solution designed to streamline cannabis retail. A compliance-first company, Cova meets all system requirements in every market served and constantly adapts to changing rules and regulations. In addition to automated compliance, Cova offers an intuitive, user-friendly design and lightning-fast transaction time. Its technology platform currently powers stores of all sizes with virtually no downtime, even on 4/20, making it the most robust and reliable cannabis POS system available. Headquartered in Denver, CO, and Vancouver, BC, Cova's team spans North America, including California, Oklahoma, Illinois, Michigan, and Missouri. Learn more at www.covasoftware.com. About Native Roots Native Roots Cannabis Co. is Colorado's largest vertically integrated cannabis operator. With 19 locations serving both adult-use populations as well as medical cannabis patients, Native Roots has a large state-of-the-art cannabis cultivation and manufacturing facility in Denver to meet demand. In addition, they operate four Native Roots Wellness shops, selling hemp products which don't contain THC. Native Roots has over a decade of experience in providing cannabis to consumers, and has won recognition for its sustainable business practices, retail store design, and high quality products. SOURCE Retail Innovation Labs Inc. Related Links https://www.covasoftware.com/ Assam forest officials have seized 12 trucks carrying around 120 tons of illegal 'Burmese supari' (betel nuts from Myanmar) from Dima Hasao district in the state's southern part, officials said on Thursday. The market value of the betel nuts is estimated to be Rs 3.60 crore. Acting on a tip off, the forest department personnel seized the trucks in the Harangajao and Jatinga area near Haflong with the help of local people on Wednesday. According to the forest officials, the 'Burmese supari' is smuggled from Myanmar and then unlawfully transported to different parts of India and abroad. Villagers told the media that a nexus comprising a section of police officials, political leaders and traders are carrying on the illegal trade of 'Burmese supari'. "These 'Burmese supari', various drugs, other contraband are being smuggled from Myanmar into Mizoram and Manipur and then through Assam illegally transported to different parts of India and even abroad," the forest officials said refusing to disclose their identity. The officials alleged that the police did not assist them in curbing the illegal business in forest produce and unlawful trade in various items like 'Burmese supari'. Last month Assam Rifles personnel seized around 1,353 bags of 'Burmese supari' weighing approximately 82 tons and worth around Rs 2.44 crores and 491 logs of different categories of timber worth approximately Rs 2.5 crores from Manipur's border villages in Kamjong district (northeastern Manipur) bordering Myanmar. Four Indian northeastern states of Mizoram, Manipur, Nagaland and Arunachal Pradesh share a 1,640-km unfenced border with Myanmar. There have been 114 assaults on ambulance staff over the past two years. A union representative claims many more assaults are not being reported. These new figures have been released by the National Ambulance Service under the Freedom of Information Act. They show that, in 2018 and 2019, there were 114 assaults against ambulance staff. 70 were physical, 43 were verbal and one was sexual, which relates to a patient exposing themself to a staff member. But Tina Martin, the co-chairperson of the National Ambulance Service Representative Association, claims the problem is far worse than the statistics suggest. She points to a survey of paramedics that found 68% of them had been assaulted over a two-year period. "The incidents of assaults is increasing yearly. I am in the job 16 years and you wouldn't have heard of it, there would have been very little of it," said Ms Martin. So it is increasing year-on-year. You would get physical assaults like slapping or hitting or pushing and there would be a lot of verbal abuse. The National Ambulance Service says staff safety is a priority, and they're trained in the management of violence and aggression. The number of assaults in both 2018 and 2019 were highest is the South region which includes Carlow, Cork, Kerry, Kilkenny, Tipperary (South), Waterford and Wexford. In each year there were 22 assaults on ambulance staff. Last year in the region there were 10 physical assaults down from 13 the previous year. Last year in the North Leinster region - Cavan, Dublin, Kildare, Laois, Longford, Louth, Meath, Monaghan, Offaly, Westmeath and Wicklow - there were 20 assaults, 15 of which were physical. In 2019, the West region - Clare, Donegal, Galway, Leitrim, Limerick, Mayo, Roscommon, Sligo and Tipperary (North) - saw assaults on ambulance staff more than half. There were nine assaults last year compared to 20 in 2018. The Parliamentary Press Corps of Ghana's Parliament, has honoured the Member of Parliament for Effutu, Alexander Kwamena Afenyo-Markin. The Awards dubbed 'First Parliamentary Reporting Awards', the group awarded the astute legal practitioner and legislator, Afenyo-Markin the Most Media Friendly MP of the Year 2019(Majority Caucus)' According to the group, Honourable Afenyo-Markin's relationship with the membership of the Press Corps specifically and the media in general cannot be underestimated. The Effutu MP, the group said, opens his doors to them as and when they approach him. In giving the award to the Effutu MP, the Dean of the Parliamentary Press Corps, Nana Agyeman Birikorang said: "For his outstanding role in helping build a friendly relationship with the Members of Parliament and the media, we are happy to award this to Honourable Alexander Kwamena Afenyo-Markin, MP, Effutu Constituency" he stated. The Member of Parliament for Effutu, Alexander Afenyo-Markin is known for his strong ties with the media. The award from the Press Corps lends credence to that belief. 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 (Bloomberg) -- Thousands of passengers on two cruise ships that had been held in separate ports in Asia to prevent the spread of the deadly coronavirus are disembarking -- only to face new hurdles on their journeys home. Japan allowed the first 500 guests aboard the Diamond Princess liner, quarantined off Yokohama for 14 days, to leave the ship, despite worries the country hasnt done enough to prevent the spread of disease from the vessel. The cruise ship has the most infections anywhere outside China. In Cambodia, 781 remaining passengers from the Westerdam cruise liner tested negative for coronavirus. But now they must circumvent obstacles to get home after three nations moved to block their transit through some of Southeast Asias biggest airport hubs. Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand are refusing to let Westerdam guests enter or transit through the countries after an American passenger from the cruise was found to be infected. The ship had been turned away by five ports before Cambodia agreed to accept it. Hundreds of passengers from the Westerdam were already on their way home before the infection was detected. Its over the top, said V. Padmanabha Rao, an 81-year-old retired surgeon from Virginia, of the travel bans. Makes us feel like a pariah. Its like what lepers were made to feel. The plight of the thousands of passengers on the two ships, operated by units of Carnival Corp., have fanned fears of outbreaks on luxury liners and prompted a growing number of nations to block cruises from accessing their ports. Meantime, health authorities around the world are implementing plans, from quarantines to additional testing, to prevent transmission of the virus as passengers make their way home. The contagion has killed more than 2,000. In Cambodia, Rao said he and other passengers began to disembark Wednesday afternoon and were ushered onto buses, but they werent told where they were headed or given details of how they will get home. Story continues Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen said Westerdam passengers will fly to Dubai, Japan and another Southeast Asian destination to catch flights home, local news outlet Agence Kampuchea Presse reported. Cruise operator Holland America Line said its working to complete arrangements. Two Thai nationals from the ship have agreed to self-quarantine, while two fellow travelers transiting through the airport are being held for monitoring for two weeks, even though they all tested negative for the virus, according to Thai authorities. Transmission Risk In Yokohama, a slow and steady stream of people clutching travel bags walked off the ship. Many waved to surgical mask-wearing passengers perched on ship balconies, video images on Japanese television showed. Some were taken to public transportation hubs in Yokohama, told to keep a close eye on their health and get in touch with authorities if they get sick. While this may mean a return to normal life for many of those disembarking, hundreds of foreigners will be subject to another 14 days of quarantine once they return home, including 200 people Australia plans to fly out on a chartered plane. Hong Kong said a charter flight is also being arranged for as many as 330 of its residents, who will return home to a two-week stay at a quarantine center. A charter flight from Canada was due on Friday. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said risks remain and Japans measures may not have been sufficient to prevent transmission among individuals on the ship. It imposed travel restrictions on the passengers and crew on the vessel, adding there may be additional confirmed cases of Covid-19 among the remaining passengers on board the Diamond Princess. Of the 3,700 passengers and crew on the vessel when it went into quarantine two weeks ago, 542 people were confirmed to have contracted the virus as of Tuesday. Aboard the Diamond Princess, guests were trading messages on private group chats about the testing process and were worried that not everyone was tested this week before they were cleared to leave. Kent Frasure, a 42-year-old passenger, said he was last tested for coronavirus on Feb. 8 as authorities evacuated his wife after she became infected. My fear is that one or more passengers have the virus undetected and that will come out in the next few days or week from now and theyll want to re-quarantine all of us, he said. It may become a never-ending saga. Global Worry Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga defended his countrys response, telling reporters Wednesday that Japan did all that was possible to protect the health of those aboard the cruise. He refrained from commenting on the restrictions put in place in other countries. With people aboard hailing from more than 50 nations, the end of the quarantine raises concern the vessel could spawn a fresh wave of global infections. The number of people with the virus worldwide rose above 75,000, with the vast majority in China. Its entirely possible to get tested, be negative and get on an airplane and be positive once you land, said Keiji Fukuda, the director of the School of Public Health at Hong Kong University and a former World Health Organization official who has led responses to outbreaks. Thats just how infections work. Even though people test negative or are not symptomatic, its safest to assume some could be infected, he said, adding its prudent for countries to quarantine passengers. The risks became apparent after the U.S. evacuated more than 300 of its nationals over the weekend and received notice during the process that 14 passengers, who had been tested a few days earlier, had contracted the virus. Those who have tested positive on the ship have been taken to area hospitals, while people who tested negative but were in a room with someone infected are set for more checks and perhaps another two weeks of quarantine at a medical facility. A specialist on infectious diseases on Japans expert panel for virus measures said Tokyos decision to start letting people off the ship was reasonable. We have to decide certain criteria. If we try to have zero risk, people have to be under quarantine for 40-50 days, Hitoshi Oshitani, a professor of virology at Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, told reporters. When there are already infection clusters, its impossible to eliminate the risk entirely, he said. For Rebecca Frasure, news of the passengers release brought more uncertainty. She was evacuated from the ship, separated from her husband and taken to a Tokyo hospital when she became infected. Shes been told she will need two negative tests for coronavirus before shes discharged--but the U.S. CDC is not allowing passengers from the ship to enter the U.S. for another 14 days. Shes not sure what awaits her when she finally makes it home. Im concerned about the stigma and whether Ill be able to interact freely with people, said Frasure. I live in a small town. Even going to the gym--theyll be afraid to go near me. --With assistance from Shoko Oda, Virginia Lau, Isabel Reynolds, Shiho Takezawa, Natnicha Chuwiruch and Philip J. Heijmans. To contact the reporters on this story: K. Oanh Ha in Hong Kong at oha3@bloomberg.net;Emi Nobuhiro in Tokyo at enobuhiro@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Brendan Scott at bscott66@bloomberg.net, Frank Connelly, Marthe Fourcade For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source. 2020 Bloomberg L.P. Many of the products officers found in this case were labeled with stickers suggesting that they were to be sold in other states to patients medically certified to receive them, said Lake County Sheriff Oscar Martinez in the release. Items like these are supposed to be prescribed and regulated, however they end up in the hands of people who would sell them in Lake County in violation of Indiana law. TORONTO, Feb. 19, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Euro Sun Mining Inc. (TSX: ESM) (Euro Sun or the Company) is pleased to announce that it will attend the BMO Capital Markets 29th Global Metals & Mining Conference from February 23 to February 26, 2020 in Hollywood, Florida. The event is hosted by the BMO Capital Markets' Metals & Mining Equity Research team. BMOs metals & mining specialists are part of a team of equity analysts across Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. that together covers approximately 920 equities globally. With 11 analysts dedicated to the sector, BMOs Metals & Mining Equity Research team has one of the largest coverage universes of metals, mining and fertilizer companies in the world. BMO Capital Markets has been advising companies in the metals & mining industry for more than a century. For eleven consecutive years, including this year, Global Finance Magazine has recognized BMO Capital Markets as the best investment bank for metals and mining in the world. The annual conference brings together metals and mining industry leaders and institutional investors from around the world more than 1,400 professionals representing approximately 500 organizations. The event is considered a barometer of industry sentiment for the year to come, featuring presentations from some of the world's largest metals and mining companies. Notable panel discussions this year include: ESG Implications and Opportunities; China and Commodity Market Dynamics and Innovations in Mining Technology. "Our participation in this invitation only conference is an endorsement of the quality of the Rovina Valley Project as we develop one of Europes next gold and copper mines utilizing best in class environmental, social and governance practices, said Scott Moore, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Company. About Euro Sun Mining Inc. Euro Sun is a Toronto Stock Exchange listed mining company focused on the exploration and development of its 100%-owned Rovina Valley Gold and Copper Project located in west-central Romania. The property hosts 10.11 million gold equivalent ounces (7.05 million ounces of gold grading 0.55 g/t and 1,390 million pounds of copper grading 0.16%). Story continues Qualified Persons Mr. Randy Ruff, P.Geo, an employee of Euro Sun and a qualified persons as defined by NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the scientific and technical information in this press release. Further information: For further information about Euro Sun Mining, or the contents of this press release, please contact Investor Relations at info@eurosunmining.com Caution regarding forward-looking information: This press release contains "forward-looking information" within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, without limitation, statements regarding participation at the BMO Capital Markets 29th Global Metals and Mining Conference. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including risks inherent in the mining industry and risks described in the public disclosure of the Company which is available under the profile of the Company on SEDAR at www.sedar.com and on the Company's website at www.eurosunmining.com. Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. 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 statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except in accordance with applicable securities laws. The TSX does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this news release. NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Brixmor Property Group Inc. (NYSE: BRX) ("Brixmor" or the "Company") today announced that James Taylor, Chief Executive Officer and President, will present at the Citi 2020 Global Property CEO Conference in Hollywood, Florida on Wednesday, March 4, 2020 at 8:50 AM ET. Event: Brixmor Property Group Presentation at Citi 2020 Global Property CEO Conference When: 8:50 AM ET, Wednesday, March 4, 2020 Live Webcast: Citi Global Property CEO Presentation under the Investors tab at www.brixmor.com A replay of the webcast will be available through June 2, 2020. CONNECT WITH BRIXMOR For additional information, please visit www.brixmor.com; Follow Brixmor on: Twitter at https://twitter.com/Brixmor Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Brixmor Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/brixmorpopupshop YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/user/Brixmor; and Find Brixmor on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/brixmor. ABOUT BRIXMOR PROPERTY GROUP Brixmor (NYSE: BRX) is a real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns and operates a high-quality, national portfolio of open-air shopping centers. Its 403 retail centers comprise approximately 71 million square feet of prime retail space in established trade areas. The Company strives to own and operate shopping centers that reflect Brixmor's vision "to be the center of the communities we serve" and are home to a diverse mix of thriving national, regional and local retailers. Brixmor is a proud real estate partner to approximately 5,000 retailers including The TJX Companies, The Kroger Co., Publix Super Markets, Wal-Mart, Ross Stores and L.A. Fitness. Brixmor announces material information to its investors in SEC filings and press releases and on public conference calls, webcasts and the "Investors" page of its website at www.brixmor.com. The Company also uses social media to communicate with its investors and the public, and the information Brixmor posts on social media may be deemed material information. Therefore, Brixmor encourages investors and others interested in the Company to review the information that it posts on its website and on its social media channels. SAFE HARBOR LANGUAGE The presentation referenced in this press release may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements related to the Company's expectations regarding the performance of its business, its financial results, its liquidity and capital resources and other non-historical statements. You can identify these forward-looking statements by the use of words such as "outlook," "believes," "expects," "potential," "continues," "may," "will," "should," "seeks," "approximately," "projects," "predicts," "intends," "plans," "estimates," "anticipates" or the negative version of these words or other comparable words. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties, including those described under the sections entitled "Forward-Looking Statements" and "Risk Factors" in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2019, as such factors may be updated from time to time in our periodic filings with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Accordingly, there are or will be important factors that could cause actual outcomes or results to differ materially from those indicated in these statements. These factors should not be construed as exhaustive and should be read in conjunction with the other cautionary statements that are included in this release and in the Company's filings with the SEC. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or review any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise, except as required by law. SOURCE Brixmor Property Group Inc. Related Links http://www.brixmor.com VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Canada Organic Trade Association (COTA) is thrilled to announce the winners of this years Organic Leadership awards. Awards are presented annually to acknowledge the Canadian heroes who are advancing the Canadian organic movement and industry. Awards were presented during the 4th annual Organic Leadership Awards Gala held in Vancouver, BC on Wednesday, February 19th. With $6.6 billion in annual sales and the status of being the 6th largest organic market in the world, Canada is regarded worldwide as a market leader. The advancements and unique accomplishments of the Canadian sector would not be possible without the significant efforts of these organic leaders who have cultivated and built the positive reputation of the Canada Organic brand. Each of these leaders have advanced the collective organic principles of health, ecology, fairness and care. Winners include organic pioneers who have devoted their lives to reforming Canadas food system, organic farmers who are carving the path for more farmers to enter the organic chain, organic retailers who have trailblazed bringing organic to market and organic innovators who are ensuring that organic continues its path forward. Congratulations to this years award recipients: Organic Champion of the Year J. Wallace Hamm Leadership in Organic Science Dr. Ralph Martin Organic Retailer of the Year Whole Foods Market Organic Supplier of the Year Fruit dOr Organic Innovator of the Year Riverside Natural Foods Organic Farmer of the Year The Green Organic Dutchman J. Wallace Hamm of Pro-Cert Organic Systems Ltd. was awarded the title of Organic Champion a testament to his unending dedication to organic. Of my more than 50 years in agriculture, as both a producer and agriculture professional, these last 30 years of involvement with the organic movement have been the most fulfilling and enjoyable, explains Mr. Hamm. "I am humbled that the movement has chosen to recognize my service in protecting the integrity of the organic claim. Dr. Ralph Martin, award winner in the leadership in organic science category, highlighted the importance of continued development in the organic sector. Martin has been a driving force in all things organic since his creation of the first organic science cluster in 2009. Martin stresses how in the organic sector we do not have to accept either science or organic. There are plenty of scientific questions and subsequent research that can be applied to organic systems. We can have both science and organic and we do. Its an honor to be recognized as Canada Organic Trade Associations Organic Retailer of the Year for bringing high-quality organic products to market for more than 40 years, and our leadership as the first U.S. 'Certified Organic' national retailer in North America a designation weve held since 2003 - and now as a retailer certified to the Canadian Organic Standards with stores in both Ontario and British Columbia, said Ann Marie Hourigan from Whole Foods Market. Fruit dOr was honoured by COTA as Organic Supplier of the Year. They are the leading organic cranberry and blueberry processor and producer in Canada and recently launched their brand Patience Fruit & Co. We are very proud to have won the title of Organic Supplier of the year and we feel its a good way to highlight Fruit dOrs 20th birthday! says Marie-Michele Le Moine of the company. Fruit dOr has practiced organic farming since its beginnings, and we look forward to continue developing this beautiful industry in a sustainable way. Riverside Natural Foods was awarded Innovator of the Year, highlighting that snacking can be healthy and full of vitamins! Riverside Natural Foods name brand Made Good has been working tirelessly since 2014 to produce food that doesnt just taste good but does good. Expanding the market for organic products is a key part of our companys mission, explains Nima Fotovat, president and spokesperson of the company. We are very happy to accept this award and further promote the growth of organics in Canada. The Green Organic Dutchman (TGOD), a leading producer of premium certified organic cannabis, has proven to be a sustainability champion, taking home the award for organic farming at last nights awards. TGOD was born from a bold vision, to become the global leader in certified organic cannabis. Receiving this award validates the hard work and dedication of the team at TGOD and speaks to our promise of making life better for our customers and the communities where we do business. We would like to thank COTA for recognizing our efforts and commitment to sustainable organic cultivation, commented Brian Athaide, chief executive officer of TGOD. Full biographies of all of this years award recipients can be found here. Ultimately, the evening proved to be filled with celebration, a delicious organic menu, and an air of optimism for what the rest of 2020 has in store for the organic sector. The outstanding work being done by these industry leaders in the last year has propelled organic into the spotlight something that is invaluable to the sector as a whole as we continue to strive for social change, said Tia Loftsgard, executive director of the Canada Organic Trade Association. A collective voice is key to continue strengthening and sustaining the organic movement in Canada. The Canada Organic Trade Associations Annual Organic Leadership Awards were established in 2016. Awardees are nominated by their peers and chosen unanimously by the Organic Trade Association. A summary of past honourees can be found here. The Organic Gala and Leadership Awards is organized by the Canada Organic Trade Association, aided by the generous support of Horizon Distributors and SIAL Expo Canada. About the Canada Organic Trade Association The Canada Organic Trade Association is a membership-based association for the organic industry in Canada: representing growers, processors, certifiers, provincial farmers associations, importers, exporters, retailers and others throughout the organic value chain. COTAs mission is to promote and protect the growth of organic trade to benefit the environment, farmers, the public and the economy. COTA brings together the diversity of Canadas organic sector: from farmer and processor to retail, including food products, fibre and textiles, personal care, and emerging sectors such as organic aquaculture. www.canada-organic.ca Media contacts: Tia Loftsgard, Executive Director, Canada Organic Trade Association, cellular 613-852-4691, tloftsgard@canada-organic.ca A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/7fe53c67-c4b1-4f65-8d18-57a6d2a104bb Howard University Receives Record Donation for STEM Scholarships Howard University has received the largest donation in the universitys history. Howard has received a $10 million gift from the Karsh Family Foundation. The donation will be used for Howards Karsh STEM Scholars Program. The program will provide for scholarships that will pay for the tuition and fees for 30 students at Howard University each year. Howard President Wayne Frederick told NBC News that, We were able to attract highly qualified students who can actually get into any major university in the country but thought the idea of pursuing a degree in STEM with compatriots who look like them and had similar lived experiences would be attractive. Howard is the top producer of African American undergraduates who earn a Ph.D. in science or engineering according to a 2013 study. ADVERTISEMENT The number of Historically Black Colleges and University (HBCU) students increased 47 percent, from 223,000 to 327,000 students, between 1976 and 2010 and then decreased 9 percent, to 298,000 students, between 2010 and 2017 according to a recent report by the National Center for Educational Statistics. HBCUs represent less than 3% of colleges and universities in the United States but enroll 12% of all African American students attending college. HBCUs produce 23% of all African American college graduates. Howard University also recently announced that it will transform roughly 32,000 square feet of land into a 230,000 square foot hub of mixed-use activity near campus. I am proud of Howards continued efforts to drive economic development in the District. Adding critical residential and retail amenities transforms vacant and underperforming assets into thriving communities that both improve the fabric of the neighborhood and add vitality to Howards mission, said Howard President Wayne Frederick. I am also particularly happy that we were able to include Gideon, which is headed up by a strong Howard University Alumni with a history of giving back. Here's some good news for Honor fans: Honor 9X Pro is on the way and is coming to Malaysia very soon. The company will be hosting a global online launch on the 25 February (1:30am local time) that will feature a few new devices, including this mid-range smartphone. While the official launch is still a few days off, we already got to take a look at the new phone and have taken some photos of it. If you refer to our review on the Honor 9X, you can see that the Honor 9X Pro looks just the same in terms of design. It has the same pop-up camera on the top, triple-camera at the back, SIM tray moved to the top, and fingerprint sensor moved to the power button. The only thing that is different is the charging port being USB Type-C instead of micro USB. Front of the device, with no notch or punch-hole Back of the phone, really digging the X shape formed by reflected light The pop-up camera and SIM tray can be found on top The charging port at the bottom uses USB Type-C and the audio jack was retained Pop-up camera in action Triple rear camera has a bit more AI capabilities this time Under the hood, the Honor 9X Pro's biggest improvement over the Honor 9X is its Kirin 810F chipset that was manufactured on the 7nm process. Overall, it'll perform better and have lower battery consumption. In addition, the new chipset comes with a built-in NPU that will use AI to deliver photos with enhanced sharpness and white balance. We didn't get to play around with the camera for too long, but we did manage to take a few photos with it. From what we've seen, the triple rear camera performs really well, delivering great white balance and details on the standard or wideangle shots. The selfie shot we took was a bit less satisfactory, as it had a portion that was rather washed out. We've included a few samples below so you can judge them for yourself. Good white balance and the picture looks quite sharp Wide angle shot Portrait mode Selfie - Window on the left looks washed out Now that you've got to see the Honor 9X Pro, what do you think it so far? Would you be interested in purchasing the device when it becomes available in Malaysia? Let us know on our Facebook page and stay tuned to TechNave.com for more details. SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- To encourage the next generation of persistent and passionate entrepreneurs, Hint, Inc. proudly announces the "Hint of Entrepreneurship" Scholarship launching at Arizona State University. Founded by ASU alumna Kara Goldin, Hint is best known for Hint water, the nation's most popular unsweetened flavored water. "I believe that great business ideas can come from anywhere," says Goldin, "but making them into a successful business takes a plan, strong commitment, scrappiness and financing. Throughout my career I have applied lessons learned while attending ASU. I'm proud to partner with ASU to help the next generation of entrepreneurs." Gretchen Buhlig, CEO of the ASU Foundation said, "Kara is tapping into the ethos of ASU by supporting entrepreneurialism to any student in any major. We're thrilled that her experience as an ASU student contributed to her success and we're grateful for her generosity in giving back to inspire the success of others." After years of mentoring young entrepreneurs and launching The Kara Network, a mentoring platform to help other disruptors in various industries, Goldin is bringing the entrepreneurial spirit back to campus. The first "Hint of Entrepreneurship" Scholarship will be awarded to one or more ASU undergraduate or graduate students who can best communicate their plan for a venture that would have a positive impact on people and/or the planet. The scholarship will be applied to the 2020-21 academic year. For more information, please contact: Anne Breza VP, Communications [email protected] SOURCE Hint, Inc. The most in-demand IT skills in the country are security, data protection, cloud computing, IT services management, big data analytics, and networking. This is according to a new Future of Work Skills report commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by IDC (International Data Corporation). The report found that with over 90% of South African businesses engaged in digital transformation, the country is experiencing a need for deeper and more complex digital skills. As organisations look to deploy a wider range of technologies to support their digital transformation agendas, so their skills requirements will increase, it said. 44% of South African companies are now finding it difficult to recruit staff with digital skills, and these challenges are expected to grow over time. 64% of businesses also expect to see an increase in positions that require deep technology skills over the next two to three years. To meet demand, more than half of organisations in South Africa are now actively upskilling their employees. Mark Walker, associate vice-president of the IDC, said the biggest challenge in acquiring these skills comes less from a lack of qualifications and more from a general lack of expertise. To meet this growing concern, companies are relying on hiring experienced workers from their own or other industries. These companies are not looking for qualifications, they are looking for expertise which are two mutually exclusive areas, he said. Walker said companies typically poach experienced staff from their competitors to acquire the skills they need. Most in-demand IT skills in South Africa The biggest skills gap currently lies in security-related and data protection skills a reflection of the heightened awareness among businesses about the increasing threat of cybercrime. 53% of companies say they already lack this necessary skill set, while 59% expect to need more security specialists in just two years time. The demand for cloud computing skills is also high, which is not surprising given the race for South African organisations to deploy cloud technology. Nine out of ten companies in South Africa increased spending on cloud computing last year, the report states. Other in-demand skill sets businesses will need to help drive digital transformation are mobile technology specialists, good networkers, and data analysts. Deep technology skills will become particularly sought after over the next two years, Microsoft said. The charts below show the most in-demand skills in South Africa, and skills which are likely to be needed in future. Currently Lacking Skills in South Africa Skills needed in future Ease of Acquiring Digital Skills The Indian Air Force (IAF) evacuation flight to extract the remaining Indian citizens from coronavirus epicentre Wuhan has been delayed, it has been announced as mainland China reported 114 new deaths overnight, taking the death toll from the outbreak to 2,118 until Wednesday night. The flight of the IAF aircraft, which was to bring medical supplies for China to aid its fight against the covid-19 outbreak, and then evacuate Indians from Wuhan has been delayed due to technical reasons. On Thursday, Chinese health officials said the mainland reported the biggest drop in new novel coronavirus infections in almost a month, with 394 new confirmed cases. The total number of confirmed infections is 74,576, health officials announced Thursday morning. The worst-hit central Chinese province of Hubei reported 349 new cases of novel coronavirus pneumonia on Feb 19, with 108 new deaths and 1,209 cases of recovery. The total number of infections in the province climbed to 62,031, with 10,337 recovered and 2,029 dead, officials said. Meanwhile, for the 90-odd Indians who had registered for the third round of evacuation arranged by New Delhi, the wait to be pulled out just got longer. The Indian embassy in Beijing has circulated a message among the group, informing them about the delay because of technical reasons. The IAF was expected to dispatch one of its largest transport aircraft, Boeings C17 aircraft, to Wuhan with medical supplies. On its way back, the flight will take back Indians who remain in Wuhan, a city of around 11 million under a total lockdown to contain the spread of the virus. As we continue to work on the logistics of the evacuation, we would like to inform you that due to technical reasons, the date of the flight is being changed. The new date and further instructions regarding pick up and movement to Wuhan airport will be communicated in due course, the message to the Indians said. All are requested to be prepared for departure at short notice, the message added. In Hubei, and its capital, Wuhan, the fight against the outbreak continues as authorities scramble to arrange for more beds and deploy medics. China has gone all out to treat COVID-19 patients both with mild symptoms and in severe conditions alike in the epicenter city of Wuhan as the number of hospital beds reserved for COVID-19 patients has risen to about 40,000 and the supporting medical personnel over 30,000, official news agency, Xinhua said in a report early Thursday. Currently, more than 30,000 medical personnel, including military medics, have been sent to Wuhan from across the country with specialties in a number of disciplines, including respiratory infections, heart and kidneys. Wuhan now has 11,000 intensive care medical staff, accounting for 10 percent of the nations total, the report added. (Natural News) As readers can probably imagine, it takes a lot to set off a genuine public furor in China, especially when the subject is critical of the government, or challenges its authority in any way. (Article by Tyler Durden republished from ZeroHedge.com) Yet a video depicting nurses in Gansu Province having their hair shaved off has accomplished just that, while raising serious questions about Beijings ability to contain the public frustration over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak that spawned COVID 2019. In the video report, which was posted by the newspaper Gansu Daily a state-run paper in Gansu to better accommodate the full-body medical gear that they will be wearing in Hubei, where they were being sent by the government. Viewers can watch the original video here. Many more videos of nurses cutting their hair can be found on YouTube. And what appears to be another propaganda film by the SCMP can be viewed below: But for whatever reason, that original video triggered a severe backlash that prompted Chinas censors to spring into action. They took forced the Gansu paper to take the video down from its social media pages and website. Even in the US, its difficult to find online. According to Quartz, the video generated comments like these, translated from Weibo (like Chinas Twitter) by Quartz: In the video, the people who shaved the womens heads grabbed their ponytails roughly and just started shaving their hair using electronic clippers. Are you treating them as humans or some animals waiting to be shaved? I am so angry that my minds gone blank, said a user (link in Chinese) on Weibo yesterday (Feb. 17), when the video started trending on the network. If you didnt tell me they were medical workers, I would have thought they were some evil criminals who were going through this serious humiliationEven their tears are used by the authorities to try to touch the audience, making them the illustration of the spirit of collectivism, wrote Chen Mashu, an author for Epoch Story, an account on messaging app WeChat that publishes analyses and first-person accounts of social affairs. China appears to be running into one of the unavoidable conflicts that arises from an authoritarian system out of step with a liberal world: In the digital age, you cant possibly keep out all of the information from outside (unless youre North Korea, and even they cant hide all of it). Whats worse is this latest incident appears to be a propaganda stunt gone awry. But China doesnt want to emulate North Koreas insane level of social controls. The North Korean people are without a doubt the most heavily controlled on the planet in terms of the level of government involvement in their lives. Its a libertarians nightmare. But in China, the people have a better idea of how Beijings actions to combat the virus have been perceived, and whats worse that there are others across China who feel the same way about the government censorship. That is, that it contributed to the governments hesitation to publicly address the outbreak. As one professor says, China has entered a different time. China has entered a different time, said Gu Su, a professor of philosophy and law at Nanjing University. Covering positive stories while withholding the cruel facts wont work as people can still access information from elsewhere. The propaganda department needs to reflect upon its approach. During the outpouring of rage and grief that followed the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, Beijing initially cracked down, before backing off, understanding that the people needed to grieve, before slyly redirecting their anger toward local officials, who ultimately paid the political price for Lis death. Letting people mourn about the doctors death serves as a pressure valve to let off steam, said Lynette Ong, an associate professor in political science at the University of Toronto where she studies social control in China. Still, the most sensitive posts asking for freedom of speech were censored. After the scapegoating of local officials, President Xi allegedly told the Politburo Standing Committee to get the word out to the state-controlled press to promote touching stories from the front line of the virus fight. This command unleashed a wave of sappy human-interest stories in government-controlled tabloids like the Global Times. As #Xinjiang has not been seriously hit by the #coronavirus, local companies are on track to resume production on a large scale. https://t.co/szFsPZUZNM pic.twitter.com/8cJrjk6Ntn Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 18, 2020 Along with reports claiming the virus is under control. The #coronavirus outbreak is getting under control as number of new infections in non-Hubei regions dropped for the 14th consecutive day to 79. What lessons has China learned from the outbreak? What experience can China offer to other countries in combating a contagious virus? pic.twitter.com/iQBa8rH9N4 Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 18, 2020 And directing hostility and anger toward the US. #China's FM said if reports the US is considering banning its firms' aircraft engine exports to China's homegrown passenger jet #C919 are true, it will be another example of the US using political means to sabotage bilateral business cooperation. https://t.co/DdwBZbdlU5 pic.twitter.com/O2QKXYnbdM Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 18, 2020 Still, optimistic tales of triumph over the outbreak contrast with the lived experience of roughly half the country. Some 760 million citizens are facing some form of quarantine. Doctors in Wuhan have repeatedly warned about the atrocious working conditions, as many continue to work despite having contracted the virus. Wuhan has more than 1,1000 medical staff, more than half of the infected hospital workers annually. Beijing has also staged press events with recovered patients and others to tell foreign journalists about how the virus actually wasnt that scary and that they received the best care available (which, of course, isnt saying much). The disease is not that scary, said one patient in Beijing who gave her surname as Li. If you are infected, you must believe in the country, the hospital, the doctor. They will definitely cure you. The idea is to keep readers from thinking about broader issues. By allowing some criticism and focusing on human stories, they are keeping people from discussing more systemic issues, Tsang said. Given the scale of the challenge, public sentiment could be much, much worse. According to Bloomberg, these staged events are meant to prevent journalists from asking questions like why are your new hospitals in Wuhan not yet fully operational? and so when are these lockdowns going to end, anyway? and what about all these supply shortages? The video of the nurses is hardly the only breakout social media phenomenon to spark outrage on the mainland since the outbreak began. And we suspect there will be more. Read more at: ZeroHedge.com The Calcutta High Court on Thursday asked the West Bengal school education department to pay the dues of a teacher, who died in harness in an accident, to her mother -- almost a decade after her demise. Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj directed the department to clear the dues of Kakali Panja, a teacher at Sahanpur Netaji Subhas High School in Howrah district who remained unmarried till death, within 16 weeks of receiving the court order. Panja died in an accident in April 2011. Karuna Panja, her mother and only legal heir, had approached the school education department for payment of her dues and family pension, her lawyer Ashish Chowdhury said. Failing to get the money despite reminders, Karuna then moved the high court in 2015, seeking direction to the department for release of pension and other benefits. The high court directed that payment be made to her, Chowdhury said. However, Karuna moved the court again earlier this year, claiming that she had not been given her dues, despite submitting all documents, in line its order. After hearing her plea and examining the documents, Justice Bharadwaj directed the school education department to pay death-cum-retirement benefits to the mother of the deceased within 16 weeks of receiving the order. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 21:45:05|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close BEIJING, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- China is able to secure the payment of old-age pension on time and in full despite the fact that the supportive policies of fee reduction may cause revenue losses to the pension fund, said Yu Weiping, vice finance minister, on Thursday. China's old-age pension system has been running smoothly with the balance of the fund reaching over 5 trillion yuan (about 714 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of last year, Yu said at a press conference. The State Council has decided to lower or waive employers' contributions to the old-age pension, unemployment and workplace safety insurance schemes to help them tide over the novel coronavirus outbreak. The reduced contributions are expected to cause revenue losses worth 471.4 billion yuan to the pension fund; however, the impact is generally controllable, according to Yu. Measures are in the pipeline to replenish the pension fund, including increasing the transfer of part of the state-owned capital, he said. Vinay Sharma, one of the convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape case attempted to kill himself in his cell early this week. He reportedly attempted to hurt himself by hitting his head against a wall. Sources in Tihar Jail told that he was stopped by the jail authorities and was being treated. A Tihar Jail source on the condition of anonymity told India Today, "One of the death row convicts of the Nirbhaya case, Vinay, attempted to hurt himself by banging his head against a wall in his cell. He received minor injuries." On February 17, Vinay Sharma's lawyer Mukesh Kumar Singh told the court that his client was suffering from "acute mental illness". He further said that this is exactly why the death sentence cannot be carried out. Also read: Nirbhaya case: SC junks accused Vinay Sharma's plea; dismisses 'mentally ill' argument Apart from this, he claimed that Vinay was also assaulted in jail and had head injuries. Singh also told the court earlier that the Nirbhaya rape convict Vinay Sharma was on a hunger strike in jail. After hearing these arguments, the Court directed the Tihar jail Superintendent to take care of Vinay as per the law. Also read: Nirbhaya case: President rejects clemency plea of convict Vinay Kumar Sharma Also read: SC rejects Nirbhaya convict Mukesh's petition challenging President's rejection of mercy plea The Court recently directed that the four convicts in the Nirbhaya gang rape case of 2012 - Akshay Kumar (31), Mukesh Kumar Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (26) and Vinay Sharma (26) will be hanged until death on March 3 at 6 am. This, however, is the third time that the death warrants were issued against the convicts. The death warrant was previously issued on Janury 7 which got deferred two times, on January 17 and on Janury 31. Also read: Nirbhaya case: All four convicts to be hanged at 6am on March 3 South Korea reported its first death from the new coronavirus on Thursday, with 53 new cases of the coronavirus confirmed in a single day to bring the total to 104. Most new cases occurred in the southeastern city of Daegu. The citys mayor urged its 2.5 million people to refrain from going outside to stem the spread of the virus. This weeks surge in the number of infected people, increasing the nations total infections by more than 70, came as the health authorities warned that the virus has begun spreading locally. Vice Health and Welfare Minister Kim Kang-lip told reporters that, At this stage, (the government) judged that COVID-19 is spreading locally with a limited scope. The health authorities have been adjusting its quarantine and prevention work to cope with local transmission, Mr Kang-lip said. They will deploy 24 more doctors to Daegu and expand the number of virus-detection centres to 22 in the city. Still, the authorities kept the virus alert level at orange, the third-highest, Mr Kang-lip said. Of the 53 new cases, 51 are in Daegu, 300 kilometres southeast of Seoul, and neighbouring North Gyeongsang Province. The remaining two were reported in Seoul, the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said in a statement. The countrys first patient presumed to have died from the coronavirus had been receiving treatment at a hospital in the southeastern city of Cheongdo. Confirmation of his infection was revealed after he died of pneumonia on Wednesday, according to the health authorities. The health authorities are working to determine the exact cause of the patients death. Daegu and North Gyeongsang Province are home to some 5 million people. Of the 51 new cases in Daegu, 23 patients are believed to be linked to a 61-year-old South Korean woman who was confirmed to be infected Tuesday, the KCDC said. The countrys 31st virus patient is presumed to have infected about 40 people so far as she attended church services in Daegu before testing positive for the virus. An epidemiological survey is underway to determine whether or not the 31st patient is linked to two confirmed cases at a hospital in Cheongdo, south of Daegu, the KCDC said, adding the patient visited Cheongdo earlier this month. KCDC Director Jung Eun-kyeong called for people who visited the Daegu church and the Daenam Hospital in Cheongdo to stay indoors or report to health authorities if they show symptoms. The number of coronavirus patients who are receiving oxygen therapy increased to four from one Thursday, Mr Eun-kyeong told reporters. Most new cases have no clear ties to travel to China, where the virus originated, or Southeast Asian countries, the KCDC said. Mr Eun-kyeong said the 31st virus patient may have contracted the virus via other patient, indicating that there may be more infections. Authorities probed two worship services at the Daegu church, which were held on February 9 and 16, and attended by the 31st patient. Currently, we are investigating the possibility that the 31st patient contracted the virus via a secondary infection, Mr Eun-kyeong said. The countrys probable coronavirus super spreader was hospitalized at a Daegu hospital from Feb. 7 to Monday. The KCDC said that the patient has had contact with 166 people, who have now placed themselves into self-quarantine. Advertisements The Shincheonji Church of Jesus in Daegu, where the 31st patient attended worship services, said in a statement that it had been shut down after about 10 members tested positive for the virus. Local media reports said about 1,000 members attended worship with the 31st patient. The KCDC said 1,001 members of the church are asked to self-isolate to contain the spread of the virus. In a televised news conference, Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin urged the citys 2.5 million people to stay indoors after 35 new cases were reported in two days in the city and its neighbouring areas. The number of people being checked for the virus and under quarantine came to 1,860 on Thursday, up from 1,633 earlier in the day, the KCDC said. South Korea has screened 13,098 people for COVID-19 since Jan. 3, with 11,238 testing negative and 16 patients having been discharged from quarantine after making full recoveries. South Korea also started to check those who show suspicious symptoms for the novel coronavirus as it grapples with new infections without links to existing cases or overseas travel. The measure broadens screening for more people and makes it easier to detect and isolate COVID-19 cases, the KCDC said. Under the latest revision, front-line doctors will be allowed to actively conduct coronavirus tests if they think a person may have contracted the sickness. South Korea has the capacity to conduct 5,000 coronavirus tests a day, but the figure will be increased to 10,000 by the end of the month. In addition, the country plans to check those who are suffering from pneumonia due to unknown causes. (Yonhap/NAN) New Delhi, Feb 20 : Public sector major NTPC and Rajasthan Solarpark Development Company Ltd (RSDCL), a subsidiary of Rajasthan Renewable Energy Corporation Ltd (RRECL), on Thursday signed signed an 'Implementation Support' agreement to develop a 925 megawatt (MW) capacity Nokh Solar Park at Nokh in Jaisalmer. As per the agreement, the RSDCL will develop infrastructure in the solar park and NTPC will develop the solar projects. The agreement is likely to bring investment of more than Rs 4,000 crore in the state, said an official statement. Rajasthan Energy Minister B.D. Kalla said that the state government has given many relaxations and facilities in the recently-issued Rajasthan Solar Energy Policy, 2019 and Rajasthan Wind and Hybrid Energy Policy, 2019. He appealed to the stakeholders and investors present at the ceremony to come forward and avail the benefits of the policies and tap the "untapped vast" potential of solar and wind energy available in the state. RRECL Chairman Ajitabh Sharma said the RSDCL will invest about Rs 450 crore in infrastructural development in the project and NTPC is expected to invest more than Rs 3,500 crores in solar projects development. WASHINGTON President Donald Trump said Thursday he will not immediately pardon longtime friend and ally Roger Stone but will instead let the process play out in the courts. Im going to watch the process, Im going to watch it very closely, Trump said at an event in Las Vegas. And at some point I will make a determination. The president said everybody has to be treated fairly. And this has not been a fair process." "Roger has a really good chance of exoneration in my opinion," Trump said. Trump's remarks came hours after Stone was sentenced by a federal court to 40 months in prison and two years of probation, a stunning downfall for the longtime political consultant. Stone was found guilty in November of lying to Congress and obstructing the Russia investigation. The 67-year-old GOP operative was one of several Trump associates to be convicted in cases stemming from former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 presidential election. Roger Stone, former political advisor to President Donald Trump, arrives for his sentencing hearing at the Federal District Court in Washington on Feb. 20, 2020. Roger Stone: 'Truth still matters': Judge sentences Roger Stone to 3 years in prison for obstructing Congress' Russia investigation Trump's remarks in Las Vegas follow a public dispute with Attorney General William Barr over his previous statements about criminal cases. Trump railed against the Justice Department for recommending Stone serve up to nine years, describing the initial recommendation as a "miscarriage of justice." Justice officials backed away from that tougher sentence. That reaction has prompted an outcry from critics of the Trump administration who say the president is making inappropriate forays into criminal cases. Barr, who said Trump had not directly gotten involved in the Stone case, has told associates he could resign over the presidents use of Twitter to weigh in on cases handled by federal prosecutors. Trump called Stone a smart guy and a good person. Id love to see Roger Stone exonerated, and I would love to see it happen because I personally think he was treated very unfairly, he said. Story continues Trump suggested the jury that convicted Stone was tainted because the jury forewoman was an anti-Trump activist. She had a horrible social media account, he said. The things she said on the account were unbelievable. How can you have a jury pool tainted so badly? he asked. Its not fair. Tomeka Hart, a former school board member in Memphis who once ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primary for Tennessees 9th congressional district, had revealed on Facebook earlier that she had been the jury forewoman. Hart defended the career prosecutors who recommended that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison. I want to stand up for Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, Michael Marando, and Jonathan Kravis the prosecutors on the Roger Stone trial," Hart wrote. "It pains me to see the DOJ now interfere with the hard work of the prosecutors. They acted with the utmost intelligence, integrity, and respect for our system of justice. Contributing: Kristine Phillips Uncertainty: 'Angst, anger and disappointment': Roger Stone intervention stokes uncertainty across federal justice system This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Donald Trump praised Roger Stone but indicated no pardon is imminent Surprising new data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope suggests the smooth, settled "brim" of the Sombrero galaxy's disk may be concealing a turbulent past. Hubble's sharpness and sensitivity resolves tens of thousands of individual stars in the Sombrero's vast, extended halo, the region beyond a galaxy's central portion, typically made of older stars. These latest observations of the Sombrero are turning conventional theory on its head, showing only a tiny fraction of older, metal-poor stars in the halo, plus an unexpected abundance of metal-rich stars typically found only in a galaxy's disk, and the central bulge. Past major galaxy mergers are a possible explanation, though the stately Sombrero shows none of the messy evidence of a recent merger of massive galaxies. "The Sombrero has always been a bit of a weird galaxy, which is what makes it so interesting," said Paul Goudfrooij of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), Baltimore, Maryland. "Hubble's metallicity measurements (i.e., the abundance of heavy elements in the stars) are another indication that the Sombrero has a lot to teach us about galaxy assembly and evolution." "Hubble's observations of the Sombrero's halo are turning our generally accepted understanding of galaxy makeup and metallicity on its head," added co-investigator Roger Cohen of STScI. Long a favorite of astronomers and amateur sky watchers alike for its bright beauty and curious structure, the Sombrero galaxy (M104) now has a new chapter in its strange story -- an extended halo of metal-rich stars with barely a sign of the expected metal-poor stars that have been observed in the halos of other galaxies. Researchers, puzzling over the data from Hubble, turned to sophisticated computer models to suggest explanations for the perplexing inversion of conventional galactic theory. Those results suggest the equally surprising possibility of major mergers in the galaxy's past, though the Sombrero's majestic structure bears no evidence of recent disruption. The unusual findings and possible explanations are published in the Astrophysical Journal. "The absence of metal-poor stars was a big surprise," said Goudfrooij, "and the abundance of metal-rich stars only added to the mystery." In a galaxy's halo astronomers expect to find earlier generations of stars with less heavy elements, called metals, as compared to the crowded stellar cities in the main disk of a galaxy. Elements are created through the stellar "lifecycle" process, and the longer a galaxy has had stars going through this cycle, the more element-rich the gas and the higher-metallicity the stars that form from that gas. These younger, high-metallicity stars are typically found in the main disk of the galaxy where the stellar population is denser -- or so goes the conventional wisdom. Complicating the facts is the presence of many old, metal-poor globular clusters of stars. These older, metal-poor stars are expected to eventually move out of their clusters and become part of the general stellar halo, but that process seems to have been inefficient in the Sombrero galaxy. The team compared their results with recent computer simulations to see what could be the origin of such unexpected metallicity measurements in the galaxy's halo. The results also defied expectations, indicating that the unperturbed Sombrero had undergone major accretion, or merger, events billions of years ago. Unlike our Milky Way galaxy, which is thought to have swallowed up many small satellite galaxies in so-called "minor" accretions over billions of years, a major accretion is the merger of two or more similarly massive galaxies that are rich in later-generation, higher-metallicity stars. The satellite galaxies only contained low-metallicity stars that were largely hydrogen and helium from the big bang. Heavier elements had to be cooked up in stellar interiors through nucleosynthesis and incorporated into later-generation stars. This process was rather ineffective in dwarf galaxies such as those around our Milky Way, and more effective in larger, more evolved galaxies. The results for the Sombrero are surprising because its smooth disk shows no signs of disruption. By comparison, numerous interacting galaxies, like the iconic Antennae galaxies, get their name from the distorted appearance of their spiral arms due to the tidal forces of their interaction. Mergers of similarly massive galaxies typically coalesce into large, smooth elliptical galaxies with extended halos -- a process that takes billions of years. But the Sombrero has never quite fit the traditional definition of either a spiral or an elliptical galaxy. It is somewhere in between -- a hybrid. For this particular project, the team chose the Sombrero mainly for its unique morphology. They wanted to find out how such "hybrid" galaxies might have formed and assembled over time. Follow-up studies for halo metallicity distributions will be done with several galaxies at distances similar to that of the Sombrero. The research team looks forward to future observatories continuing the investigation into the Sombrero's unexpected properties. The Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), with a field of view 100 times that of Hubble, will be capable of capturing a continuous image of the galaxy's halo while picking up more stars in infrared light. The James Webb Space Telescope will also be valuable for its Hubble-like resolution and deeper infrared sensitivity. ### The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy in Washington, D.C. Asadullah Khalid, a former spy chief and current Afghan defense minister, says his countrys forces are committed to preserving the gains of the past two decades. Radio Free Afghanistan: U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the United States has negotiated a weeklong reduction in violence with the Taliban. In your view, what does that mean? Asadullah Khalid: As you are aware, negotiations have been going on in Doha for a long time. From time to time, theres been news of progress and regress. But the Afghan government was the first to propose a peace plan, and our overwhelming pressure on the Taliban was to force them to come to the table. But nothing is done blindly, unconditionally, or without taking into consideration the importance of this subject [peace]. And we are very cautious about this. Radio Free Afghanistan: Will the Taliban only reduce their attacks on U.S. forces during the seven-day reduction in violence, or on the Afghan forces as well, who are doing most of the fighting against them now? Khalid: We will have these details later. We will be one side of the agreement. We have to see what they have to offer. A few years ago [in June 2018), we had the experience that there was a truce for a few days that went very well. Radio Free Afghanistan: You know that despite repeated calls from the international community, NATO, and the United States, the Taliban have refrained from holding direct talks with the Afghan government. Do you think the Taliban will join direct peace talks with the Afghan government in the future? Khalid: You are following the talks in Qatar. A lot has changed in the past year. It is no longer about changing the government; it is not about destroying the army. Now the talks are about peace. We promise our people that their army will defend all the gains of the past two decades under any circumstances. As far as I know, their talks with the Afghan government will start within a week [after signing the agreement with the United States. Radio Free Afghanistan: The Afghan government has always said a reduction in violence is unacceptable and there should be a cease-fire in place. Do you think reducing violence will eventually lead to a cease-fire? Khalid: We have the experience of a onetime cease-fire, and I repeat again that no agreement that compromises the achievements of the past two decades will be acceptable. And yet we do not have the full details of the Taliban's proposal with regard to a reduction in violence. But no agreement is unconditional. Radio Free Afghanistan: The Taliban usually launch their offensives against you and international forces in the spring. If they reduce attacks against U.S. and NATO forces under an agreement but launch their spring attacks against your troops, what should be done? Khalid: We are not concerned about where and when the Taliban will implement their plans. We are in pursuit of the Taliban both in the spring and now, and the Afghan security forces have the upper hand in the war. The number of foreign visitors to Japan fell for the fourth straight month in January, down 1.1 percent from a year earlier, government data showed Wednesday, with sharper declines seemingly inevitable in the months ahead due to the new coronavirus outbreak. An estimated 2.66 million foreigners visited Japan, with the number of South Korean tourists continuing to fall sharply as relations between the two countries remain soured by wartime issues, according to the data from the Japan Tourism Agency. Visitors from China hit a record high for the reporting month at 924,800, up 22.6 percent, on the Chinese New Year holiday period that started in late January. Last year, the holiday began in early February. The Chinese government, however, banned group travel and some individual trips overseas on Jan. 27 following the spread of the pneumonia-causing virus. Japanas tourism industry is expected to be hit over the long term. Compared with the period before the outbreak, about 70 percent of regular flights between Japan and China, or 1,160 round trips, have been cut, Japan Tourism Agency Commissioner Hiroshi Tabata said. The Executive Director of the National Service Scheme and Parliamentary Candidate of the New Patriotic Party In Yagaba Kubori Constituency, Mustapha Ussif organized a health screening, with Places GH Foundation, at the Constituency. The screening which took place on Wednesday, 19th February, was organised Yizeisi a suburb in the Mamprugu Moagduri District witnessed a tremendous turnout. The oversubscribed screening covered constituents of all ages and genders. The Places GH team were supported by local nurses and Doctors. Richard Gyamfi, leader and founder of Places Ghana Foundation and the Deputy Manager of Surgical Emergency Unit, John Radcliffe Oxford in the UK said, the team is very impressed with the cooperation and the massive turnout they witnessed. He admonished them to prioritize their health and engage in regular check ups to ensure they have a healthy life. He assured them of coming back with his team for another mega health screening. The 12 member health team consisted of Physician Assistants, Nurses, Doctors, a Physiotherapist and Volunteers from the United Kingdom. Hon. Ussif who is seeking a comeback to parliament said, health of my constituents has always been a priority to me. That was why as an MP, I registered over 5000 people on the National Health Insurance Scheme, Provided them with 1st ever Ambulance in the constituency and also supported several Chps Compounds. I will be embarking on more of such projects. The community members could not hide their excitement seeing young guys and ladies handling their health issues. Over 2000 people were successful screened and administered drugs for a various illness which included Malaria, Typhoid, Hypothesis B, Skin Diseases, BP, among others. 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 MONTREAL - It is rare for a company make commitments as specific as those written in "black on white" by Alstom as part of its offer for Bombardier Transportation, the new president and chief executive officer of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec said Thursday. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Logo for the Caisse de Depot et Placements, Quebec's pension fund, is seen in Montreal on February 21, 2018. he Caisse de depot et placement enjoyed its strongest return on investment in five years, but says it fell below its benchmark portfolio due to lacklustre real estate and infrastructure assets and a focus on long-term stability.The Quebec pension fund manager generated a 10.4 per cent annual return on investment in 2019, or $31.1 billion, growing its net assets to $340 billion. Its benchmark portfolio, however, grew 11.9 per cent. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz MONTREAL - It is rare for a company make commitments as specific as those written in "black on white" by Alstom as part of its offer for Bombardier Transportation, the new president and chief executive officer of the Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec said Thursday. Rather than suggesting "monstrous lawsuits," as Quebec Premier Francois Legault did this week in the event of breaches in its commitments, Charles Emond preferred to emphasize the precise nature of Alstom's promises, as part of the unveiling of the pension fund manager's annual results. The Caisse generated a 10.4 per cent annual return on investments in 2019 its strongest return in five years growing its net assets to $340 billion. But it missed its benchmark portfolio, which grew 11.9 per cent due to a lacklustre performance of real estate and infrastructure assets and a focus on long-term stability. "We have (obtained) black-and-white written commitments," the former business banker told reporters. "In my experience of two decades doing (transactions), this is far from the norm. In fact, it is rather the exception. The French manufacturing giant has committed to establish its North American headquarters that will supervise 13,000 employees in Montreal in the first year after concluding its deal to buy Bombardier's railway division. It will also set up a research centre and improve production at Quebec sites, where around 500 Bombardier and Alstom employees work. The Caisse was involved in negotiations since it owns 32.5 per cent of Bombardier Transportation. It will become Alstom's largest shareholder with an 18 per cent stake after the US$8.2 billion transaction closes as expected in the first half of 2021. Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec president and CEO Charles Emond comments the pension fund's annual results in Montreal on Thursday, February 20, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson These written commitments were ratified by the board of directors of one of the largest French companies listed on the stock market, which makes Emond believe that there is "no concern" to have. Emond wouldn't disclose what the Caisse will do with its stake in Bombardier once the company only builds business aircraft a cyclical sector that's vulnerable to the vagaries of the economy that seems less of a fit with the institution's strategy. "I'm not going to comment too much because Bombardier remains an important player," he replied. "After the transaction (with Alstom), Bombardier will remain one of the five largest industrial groups in Canada. Emond, who succeeded Michael Sabia as CEO this month, said he expects the coming decade to be more challenging than the past one, when investors rode "the longest bull market in history." He said the Caisse is aiming for caution amid a growing gap between real economic performance and a soaring stock market. "Overall, CDPQ's portfolio is built to be more stable over the long-term and less vulnerable to sharp market movements, so it is well-positioned to take on the headwinds that await us." In the past five years the Quebec pension giant has yielded investment results of $106 billion an 8.1 per cent return with net deposits of $17.5 billion. Its real estate holdings, which saw a 2.7 per cent negative return on investment last year, suffered from the decline of shopping malls across the country the Caisse owns 25 in Canada and weaker residential real estate in New York following rent control regulations, the Caisse said Thursday. "The way people are consuming now is changing quite dramatically," said Nathalie Palladitcheff, head of Caisse real estate arm Ivanhoe Cambridge, citing the growth of e-commerce. 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 Caisse's infrastructure portfolio return of 7.1 per cent was well below the benchmark index return of 17.7 per cent, which the Caisse says is due up to lower-risk assets with long-term promise. The acquisition by Alstom is expected to come under intense scrutiny from antitrust regulators in the European Union, but Emond expressed confidence the deal would pass regulatory muster. "I think we've got a very strong case to actually see this go through," he told reporters. Last year, EU authorities blocked a proposed merger between Alstom and the train division of German industrial conglomerate Siemens AG, arguing the proposed tie-up would result in higher price tags on signalling systems and bullet trains. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 20, 2020. Companies in this story: (TSX:BBD.B) 'Allodoxaphobia': Tharoor drops 'word of the day' to take dig at BJP Kerala Cong chief warns Shashi Tharoor: Fall in line or will be removed from party Need to energise cadre: Shashi Tharoor backs Sandeep Dikshit on 'non-Gandhi as Congress chief' India oi-Deepika S New Delhi, Feb 20: Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Thursday backed Sandeep Dikshit view on party leadership and said that dozens of party workers from across the country had expressed the same opinion privately. After Delhi debacle, Dikshit had said there were many leaders in Congress who were capable of leading the party and accused the party high command of inaction over the question of the election of a party president. "What Sandeep Dikshit said openly is what dozens of party leaders from across the country are saying privately, including many with responsible positions in the Party. I renew my appeal toCWC to hold leadership elections to energise workers and inspire voters," tweeted Tharoor. However, Nirupam expressed his displeasure and tweeted: "Rahul Gandhi is the only leader who can lead the party and can save it. Other leaders are just a group leader and such leaders at the helm will encourage more groupism. Period !" Earlier, Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia had underscored the urgent need for new thinking and new ideology in the grand old political party. Shashi Tharoor to cough up Rs 5k for non-appearance before court "The Delhi result is highly disappointing for us. We urgently need new thinking and work approach as the country has changed now," Scindia told reporters. Sonia Gandhi returned to steer the party after Rahul Gandhi had resigned from the top post on May 25, just days after the party's dismal performance in 2019 Lok Sabha elections. The Union Home Ministry was asked by opposition members of Parliament to explain how Jammu and Kashmir could hope to attract investment in the current security situation. The tough questions from the MPs came during a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Parliament yesterday when the lawmakers were being briefed by the Union Home Secretary Ajay Kumar Bhalla. Speeches dont attract investment. In addition, infrastructure in J&K also doesnt support the kind of investment that Centre is talking about, a senior opposition MP who was at the meeting but didnt want to be named, said. Local body elections in J&K scheduled in March have had to be deferred because of security concerns. The ministry didnt have a clear answer to these questions. They have, however, assured us that it would come back with details, the MP said. Parliament had last August scrapped Jammu and Kashmirs special status and split the state into two Union Territories. Immediately after the removal of the special status, curbs on telecom and movement were brought in fearing a law and order flare-up. Some curbs have been removed since over the past six months. But curbs on telecom still remain. Recently the Jammu and Kashmir administration released its Information Technology policy to attract investors and has spoken of roadshows in metros to attract investment. Besides. the administration has also been planning an international investors meet to attract foreign investors. Oleksii Liskonih/iStock(IDLIB, Syria) -- As fighting over Syria's last rebel-held stronghold intensifies and puts U.S. ally Turkey in direct conflict with Russia, there is a growing chorus for the U.S. to do something about the dire humanitarian crisis. Nearly one million people have been displaced since December by Syrian President Bashar al Assad's offensive into the Idlib province, backed by Russian air power and Iranian-commanded forces. Relief organizations are struggling to respond to the overwhelming need amid freezing temperatures and a lack of basic resources -- like tents. But for the four million civilians in Idlib, there is no where to go as Assad's forces back them closer to the border with Turkey, which remains shut as Turkey struggles to host nearly four million Syrian refugees already. Turkey and the Syrian forces it arms and backs have been pushing to hold Assad's offensive at bay, with direct clashes on Thursday. But while the Trump administration has condemned the offensive and vocalized support to Turkey, advocates -- including, the last U.S. ambassador to Syria -- are urging for U.S. intervention. "What's happening in Idlib is the worst case scenario we have worried about in Syria since 2011. We never wanted it to come, we hoped it wouldn't come, and it's here," said Ambassador Robert Ford, who was forced to leave Syria amid threats from Assad when he served as U.S. envoy from 2011 to 2014. He continued, "This is not just another problem in Syria. The scale is much greater than anything the world has seen in recent decades." More than 900,000 people have fled their homes or shelters in Idlib, according to the United Nations, most of whom were previously displaced by Syria's now nine-year old civil war. Approximately 80% of the displaced are women and children, facing severe winter weather conditions like snow and freezing temperatures. The military offensive has killed hundreds of civilians, according to war monitoring groups. But the freezing temperatures have killed seven children, according to the humanitarian group Save the Children. "We are striving to save lives, but the space for these efforts is shrinking," Filippo Grandi, the high commissioner for refugees at the U.N. said Thursday. That's in part because aid organizations themselves have also been forced to flee, including Huzayfa al Khateeb, a Syrian radio reporter and volunteer relief worker. He was forced to flee from his home in western Ghouta outside Damascus three years ago, but in Idlib in recent days, he's been forced to live in his car while so many sleep outside or in the rubble of schools, hospitals, and other buildings bombed by Assad's forces and Russia. "There is no place safe, in Idlib and in any place. Every day, they are bombing us," al Khateeb said. "They can't live here because the Assad regime is bombing us, Russian regime, and they can't -- there is no single town, no single area you can live." For Joumane Mohamad and her two young children, they are lucky enough to have a house to rent. But the psychological toll of the bombing has deepened, even after nine years of war have forced them to move to 10 different houses across the country. "I hope that you will let the world know what sufferings, what pain, what frustration, and what inhuman conditions that we are living here now," she said during a briefing call with al Khateeb, organized by Refugees International, an advocacy organization. "We feel as if the world has betrayed us, as if the world has abandoned us." Mothers are "suffering the most because of all the burdens and responsibilities and fears they have to deal with," Mohamad said, adding every morning feels "as if it could be our last meeting." She said she tried to smuggle her family, including her nine-year old and her nursery-school age son, across the border into Turkey once -- but was scared away by gunfire. Turkey has all but shut down its border in recent months, overwhelmed by the 3.6 million Syrians it already hosts, according to U.N. data. Instead, Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to use military force to repel Assad's offensive if it isn't halted. Erdogan has armed, trained and backed rebel forces throughout Syria's civil war and entered into agreements with Russia and Iran to create safe zones in areas, including Idlib -- which Assad, Russia and Iran have later seized. U.S. special envoy for Syria James Jeffrey traveled to Ankara last Wednesday to meet with senior Turkish officials and offer U.S. assistance for its NATO ally. Before the trip, Jeffrey told reporters in Washington the U.S. was "looking at the various things we can do" to halt the offensive, including more sanctions, but hinted at no immediate action. That's not enough, according to activists who rallied on Capitol Hill Thursday. "What's also more outrageous is the lack of outrage that we're seeing across the United States and in the Western world," said Mouaz Moustafa, executive director of the Syrian Emergency taskforce, an advocacy group. "No one is talking about what's unfolding there, no one is speaking out for children, some of whom have been burned to a cinder." He and Ford called on the Trump administration and Congress to "take some prompt steps," to halt the offensive, including finding funds for humanitarian groups to deal with the "unprecedented" need, press Russian officials to halt their support and back Turkey in what way they can. President Donald Trump once claimed credit for "saving" Idlib by tweeting his opposition to a previous Assad offensive in 2018. But while he told Assad and Russia "Don't do it!" in December, his tweet was undercut by his clear unwillingness to take action to stop any fighting that he does not see as America's problem. "Let Syria and Assad protect the Kurds and fight Turkey for their own land," he tweeted in October. "I hope they all do great, we are 7,000 miles away!" But Ford warned that whatever comes next, the crisis will spill out of Syria, just as Assad and Russia's assault on Aleppo led to mass refugee flows into Europe that bolstered far-right politics across the continent. While the Turkish-Syrian border is closed for now, al Khateeb and Mohamad both said there are plans to storm the border because they say it may be Syrians' only option to survive. Even if it kills "1,000 people, the rest will save their lives and cross the border and be in safety," al Khateeb said. He added, "This is what people are thinking about because there is no other chance, no other choice for us." Copyright 2020, ABC Audio. All rights reserved. New York, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) is hosting a day-long conference to give women a platform to connect, share ideas and be inspired by changemakers in diverse fields who have made transformative change, locally and globally, through their careers, civic and philanthropic work. Women Shaping the World will be held Saturday, March 7th from 10am to 3pm at Convene in Lower Manhattan. Coinciding with International Womens Day, it will also feature the launch of AGBUs new global womens initiative, built on the success of AGBU Armenias Women Entrepreneurs (W.E.) program, designed to empower women in Armenia to succeed economically and socially. The conference will open with Suni Harford, President of UBS Asset Management and a long-time advocate for developing women leaders in finance and business. A dynamic panel discussion will follow, featuring Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Womens World Banking, the worlds largest network of microfinance institutions and banks; Carineh Martin, a leading luxury brands executive who co-founded RAD, which partners with talent and brands to use the Red Carpet for advocacy and social good; and the academy-award winning senior producer Katherine Sarafian from Pixar. Moderating the panel will be Alexis Alexanian, an independent producer and former President of New York Women in Film & Television. Following lunch and the launch of AGBUs new initiative, conference participants will have the opportunity to engage in small group discussions led by leading professionals in different industries. Registration for the full-day event is $100 and $50 for young professionals. Sign up at www.agbuevents.org/womensconference. The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU) is the worlds largest non-profit organization devoted to upholding the Armenian heritage through educational, cultural and humanitarian programs. Each year, AGBU is committed to making a difference in the lives of 500,000 people across Armenia, Artsakh and the Armenian diaspora. Since 1906, AGBU has remained true to one overarching goal: to create a foundation for the prosperity of all Armenians. To learn more visit www.agbu.org. M ichael Bloomberg has faced a barrage of attacks at his first Democratic presidential debate as his rivals rushed to criticise him for his wealth, record on race and history of sexist comments. The billionaire seemed nervous and hesitant in a rough debut before a national audience in a debate that gave voters their first unscripted look at the self-funding former New York mayor. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg lined up to go after Mr Bloomberg on Wednesday night, frequently shouting over one another in what amounted to the most contentious of the nine Democratic White House debates. All the contenders accused Mr Bloomberg of trying to buy his way into the White House and said his record as mayor and a businessman would lead the party to defeat in November. Mike Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar and Joe Biden talk during a break in a Democratic presidential primary debate / AP "We're running against a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-face lesbians," said Ms Warren, a senator from Massachusetts. "And, no, Im not talking about Donald Trump, Im talking about Mayor Bloomberg." "Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another," she added. Mr Bloomberg has been accused over the years of many sexist and misogynist comments, and several lawsuits have been filed alleging that women were discriminated against at his media company. He did not respond to Ms Warren's comments about his past remarks about women, which were taken from a booklet given to him in 1990 that was said to be a compilation of his sayings over the years. A campaign spokesman said Mr Bloomberg "simply did not say the things somebody wrote in this gag gift." Mr Bloomberg, who entered the race in November and is skipping the first four early voting states in February to focus on later nominating contests in March, said he was using his money for an important cause. "Im spending that money to get rid of Donald Trump the worst president weve ever had. And if I can get that done, it will be a great contribution to America and to my kids," he said. The debate came at a pivotal time, three days before Nevada's presidential caucuses, the third contest in the state-by-state race to find a challenger to Trump in the November election. The high stakes were evident in the intensity of the exchanges, with Mr Biden and Ms Warren in particular facing the do-or-die task of reigniting their campaigns after poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire earlier this month. Both Ms Warren and Mr Biden, the former vice president, asked Mr Bloomberg to commit to releasing women who had signed nondisclosure agreements to settle lawsuits. Mr Bloomberg refused, saying they were made "consensually" with the expectation that they would stay private. "We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements, and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against," said Ms Warren. Mr Bloomberg said there were "very few" nondisclosure agreements. "None of them accuse me of anything," he said. "Maybe they didn't like the jokes I told." Bernie Sanders, the Left-wing Vermont senator who is leading the race, condemned the challengers stop and frisk police policy when he was mayor, which has been heavily criticised by civil rights groups. Mr Biden, who is banking on his support among African Americans to revive his flagging candidacy, said stop and frisk had thrown close to five million young black men up against the wall. Mr Bloomberg said he was embarrassed about his past support for stop-and-frisk and that he had apologised for supporting it. He said there was no chance that Mr Sanders could beat Mr Trump. Pete Buttigieg said that if Mr Bloomberg and Mr Sanders were the last two in the race to take on Mr Trump then the party will be left with a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks money is the root of all power. President Trump was happy to inject himself into the debate pile-on of Mr Bloomberg, telling supporters at a rally in Phoenix: "I hear he's getting pounded tonight." The Nevada caucuses are the first in a state with a more diverse population after contests in predominantly white Iowa and New Hampshire. UCLA cancelled a plan to use facial recognition technology on campus after students protested over privacy concerns, including one critique that likened use of the digital surveillance to George Orwell's book, '1984.' The school issued a statement on Wednesday, saying that its plan for using facial recognition was scrapped due to the privacy concerns that were expressed. 'UCLA will not pursue the use of this technology,' wrote UCLA administrative vice chancellor Michael Beck in a statement released on Wednesday. UCLA cancelled a plan to use facial recognition technology on campus after students protested over privacy concerns One critique of UCLA's decision to use facial recognition, before scrapping the plan, likened use of the digital surveillance to the dystopian novel, '1984', by George Orwell (pictured) 'We have determined that the potential benefits are limited and vastly outweighed by the concerns of our campus community,' he explained in the statement, obtained by MailOnline.com. The Los-Angeles-based public university wanted to use facial recognition to raise an alarm if someone who was banned from campus suddenly showed up at the school. UCLA also had wanted to use the technology to recognize and authorize individuals seeking access into restricted areas. However the school wasn't prepared for backlash from students, as well as a national movement against such surveillance measures. The editorial board of the school's newspaper, 'The Daily Bruin', published a story last month that opens with, '2020 is looking more and more like '1984.' That is, UCLA is watching you', in a reference to Orwell's dystopian novel. The editorial board of 'The Daily Bruin,' in a story responding to UCLA's plan to use facial recognition, rapped the school for not heeding student concerns The book published in 1949 describes an imagined, future society ruled by an oppressive, totalitarian 'Big Brother', who employs government surveillance measures on every aspect of a citizen's life. The newspaper points out that UCLA had not learned its lesson after it had also scrapped a 2018 plan to centralize on-campus surveillance cameras and give campus police access to footage during emergencies, after students had also complained. 'Rather than learning from students' reactions to campus surveillance, UCLA seems to have jumped off the deep end by taking a page out of Big Brother's playbook,' the editorial board wrote. 'The implementation of facial recognition technology would present a major breach of students' privacy and make students feel unsafe on a campus they are supposed to call home,' explains the editorial board. 'It is one thing to monitor campus activity with security cameras, but it's another entirely to automatically identify individuals and track their every move on campus.' Fight for the Future, an advocacy group, issued a letter on Thursday in support of student protests against facial recognition across the country. 'Fight for the Future,' an advocacy group, issued a public letter on Thursday in support of students against campus surveillance across the US. Pictured is an image from the group's landing page, banfacialrecognition.com Fight for the Future's website links to a landing page, banfacialrecognition.com, which describes how the technology (pictured) is used Images showing how facial recognition works are included at banfacialrecognition.com The group's website includes links to the landing page, banfacialrecognition.com, which includes an interactive map of schools and other institutions that have chosen to pass on facial recognition, or which are considering its use. The site also points out schools in the states of Washington, Colorado and Texas that were using facial recognition. University of Colorado was cited by advocacy group Fight for the Future for using facial recognition The University of Texas uses facial recognition at its Memorial Stadium, according to advocacy group Fight for the Future's landing page, banfacialrecognition.com They include the University of Texas, which uses the technology at its Memorial Stadium, and University of Colorado, which is currently experimenting with facial recognition under a project funded by US military and intelligence agencies. The St. Therese Catholic Academy and University Child Development School, both in Seattle, Washington, are also using facial recognition, according to the website. Fight for the Future says it is in the process of testing Amazon's Rekognition algorithm on UCLA atheletes and faculty, complaining that the technology incorrectly had placed the faces of black people on to other people's mug shots. The findings expanded on previous concerns that the technology has a higher error rate for black people and women. Fight for the Future is partnering with students for a national day of protest on March 2. (Bloomberg) -- Safaricom Plc., weighing an offer for Ethiopias telecom business later this year, plans to take on debt to fund a joint bid by a consortium including parent Vodacom Group Ltd. and two other entities. We do know the investment to build the network in Ethiopia will be big, Safaricoms interim Chief Executive Officer Michael Joseph said in an interview at the companys Nairobi headquarters. So all of us will have to borrow to invest. The composition of the consortium will be on your willingness and your capability of taking on debt and your willingness to take a risk. The privatization of Ethiopian Telecommunications Corp. and issuance of two spectrum licenses has been delayed by elections that were pushed to August from May, according to Joseph. The government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed hasnt yet provided guidance on the bidding process, including any limits on foreign ownership, he said. East Africas biggest company had total borrowings of 4 billion shillings ($39.5 million) in 2019, and 36.3 billion shillings in undrawn bank facilities, according to its annual report. Revenue has been rising every year since 2003, when the company became profitable, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Leverage makes sense for Safaricom considering their balance sheet size, so the cost of borrowing will be low, Silha Rasugu, an analyst at EFG Hermes, said in response to emailed questions. It also allows them to maintain dividend payout through the high capex cycle as they build a network in Ethiopia. Safaricom shares closed unchanged at 29.95 shillings after a seven-day losing streak on the Nairobi Securities Exchange. Unlike Kenya, where Safaricoms business became profitable within 3 1/2 years, Joseph said Ethiopia is probably a 10-year journey. Regulatory Change Opening up the telecommunications industry is part of a raft of reforms to liberalize Ethiopias economy as Abiy looks to increase foreign-capital inflows. Other carriers, including Orange SA and MTN Group Ltd., have expressed interest in expanding in the nation of more than 100 million people, which has a relatively low level of data penetration and internet access. Story continues In December, Ethiopias investment-promotion agency released proposed regulations that would reserve banking and micro-finance for local investors, which would prevent Safaricom from providing such services via its M-Pesa payments platform. We cannot go in there as Safaricom and provide mobile-money services if we have to give it all away to somebody else just under some sort of technical support, Joseph said. We will if we have to, but in the end we want to have a license to provide those services, so the regulations will have to change. (Updates with analyst comment from fifth paragraph) To contact the reporter on this story: Bella Genga in Nairobi at bgenga2@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Malingha at dmalingha@bloomberg.net, Helen Nyambura For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com Subscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source. 2020 Bloomberg L.P. Postponed: William & Mary to host areas first Juneteenth celebration Remembering the enslaved: The Juneteenth celebration will be held near the site where the Memorial to African Americans Enslaved by William & Mary is expected to be built. The concept for the memorial (pictured here) is titled Hearth and resembles a brick fireplace, representing both a place of work for the enslaved as well as a place of gathering and community. Photo - of - Hide Caption Update: W&M's first Juneteenth celebration will now be held in 2021. The decision was made for two primary reasons. For the first year of the event, organizers did not want to place participants or performers in the position of choosing between attendance and an uncertain health situation. Also, they wanted to be certain the first Juneteenth event in this community is a meaningful and significant event. - Ed. William & Mary is partnering with the York-James City-Williamsburg NAACP and the City of Williamsburg to host the areas inaugural Juneteenth celebration, which commemorates the end of slavery in the United States. Other organizations and groups will likely join as partners. The event, to take place June 19 beginning at 3 p.m., will include live music, vendors, food trucks and performances by local talent, including actress Morgan McCoy. It is free and open to the public. More information will be released closer to the date of the celebration. The celebration will take place on campus near the site of the planned Memorial to African Americans Enslaved by William & Mary, which is expected to be erected within or near the universitys Historic Campus. Smithsonian Magazine fittingly called Juneteenth our other Independence Day. William & Mary is excited to see the commemoration flourish in the Historic Triangle, said President Katherine A. Rowe. Our inaugural Juneteenth celebration comes at an important moment. We have entered the second decade of the Lemon Projects groundbreaking work to tell a more complete and inclusive story of the universitys past. W&M welcomes the opportunity to celebrate Juneteenth with our entire region. While not recognized as a federal holiday, the observance of June 19, 1865, as the African-American Emancipation Day, also called Freedom Day, has spread across the United States and beyond. It marks the day on which Union soldiers brought news about the Emancipation Proclamation to Texas. While Juneteenth celebrates freedom, it also highlights community, education and achievement in the African-American community. The celebration of Juneteenth, the date on which news of Lincoln freeing slaves in Confederate States finally reached Texas, has been celebrated in communities throughout the United States of America since the early part of the 20th century, said Brian J. Smalls, branch president of the York-James City-Williamsburg NAACP and a member of the Juneteenth planning committee. Celebrating Juneteenth in the Greater Williamsburg community is long overdue. With so much rich history right here in our own backyard, it makes sense to add another chapter to it commemorating such a momentous occasion in our nation's history. A committee of community members, faculty, staff and students chaired by Chief Diversity Officer Chon Glover has been meeting since last fall to plan the celebration. While the program is still being finalized, one of the performers will be McCoy, an actress, author and speaker known for her one-woman show Evolution of a Black Girl: From the Slave House to the White House. McCoy received her undergraduate degree from Hampton University and her masters from Regent University. The City of Williamsburg is honored to partner with William & Mary and the NAACP on this commemoration, said Williamsburg Mayor Paul Freiling 83. Williamsburg is steeped in American history, some of it is joyful, some painful and some redemptive, and its important that we recognize that history in full so that we may continue to learn from it. This event will help us do that while also bringing campus and community together to celebrate the end of an abhorrent institution. The celebration coincides with planning underway for a memorial at William & Mary. The university hosted an international competition in 2018 to solicit ideas for the memorials concept, and the winner was announced in April 2019. The concept, created by William Sendor '11, is titled Hearth and resembles a brick fireplace, representing both a place of work for enslaved people as well as a place of gathering and community. Baskervill Architects has been selected to transform the artists concept into a constructible design, according to Gregg Shipp, director of planning, design and construction. The memorial design kickoff meeting with the building committee was held last month, and several more are scheduled over the next few months as the team works collaboratively to finalize the details. The design documents are expected to be completed by late summer, said Shipp. The memorial is part of W&Ms continuing efforts to more fully recognize the vital contributions of African Americans to the university. The idea for the memorial came from the Lemon Project, a long-term research effort to explore the universitys history with slavery and its ongoing relationship with the African-American community. Juneteenth is another extension of those collective efforts. The York-James City-Williamsburg Branch of the NAACP is proud to partner with William & Mary, along with the other corporate partners for this event, said Smalls. The Lemon Project is a valiant effort to tell the full story of one of our nation's most prestigious academic institutions. Telling the whole story is important for our community and the nation, so we are glad to play a role in this endeavor. WASHINGTON The nation's airports are warning of chaos for passengers if the White House doesn't postpone the looming Real ID deadline. The law requires airline passengers to present a Real ID-compliant driver's license or ID card at Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in airports as of Oct. 1. Those licenses require more proof of identification than regular licenses and are generally marked with a star on the top. But while states have already issued 95 million Real IDs, that represents just 34 percent of the total, leaving two-thirds of the country with about seven months to get them if they hope to use a license to board a plane. Without a Real ID, airline passengers will be required to present a passport, military ID or Global Entry card to pass through security, even for domestic flights. The Airports Council International-North America, which represents the nation's airports, warned that thousands of passengers could be denied boarding and left stranded. ACI-NA President and CEO Kevin Burke told NBC News that "this is a crisis waiting to happen." "If the government doesn't make a definitive statement now that they're going to extend this, then we're going to have a real crisis on our hands come Oct. 1," he said. Congress passed the Real ID law after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to create a single, robust national standard for all states and territories. Across the country, motor vehicle offices have been flooded with people trying to upgrade to Real IDs. Everyone is required to present four pieces of identification, including a passport or a birth certificate, a Social Security card or a tax return and two documents that provide proof of residence a mortgage or a rental receipt and a utility bill. To handle the rush, state motor vehicle offices have staffed up and are allowing people to make appointments to present their documents for review. But many states say they're overwhelmed and can't keep up. Story continues Sue Fulton, chief administrator of the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, said, "Demand outstrips the number of available Real ID appointments." Oklahoma officials say only a handful of DMV offices will begin issuing Real IDs on April 30. The rest of the state will follow over the summer. Oregon authorities said it will take until July before they're able to issue the first new IDs. "If we worked 24/7, we'd have to do seven a minute to get the number of licenses out by October. But there's no way that we could do seven a minute," Tom Fuller, a spokesman for the state transportation department, said. Oregon is now urging residents to get a passport card or book, saying the process will be far quicker. Kaiya Arroyo, standing in line at a Manhattan DMV office Tuesday, said: "It's packed in there. The line is out the door. People are very upset, frustrated." Eric Silver added: "It's pretty chaotic. There's just people are everywhere. It's impossible to know when you're going to go up." Asked for a response to the Airports Council's demand for a delay, the White House declined to comment. So far, the Department of Homeland Security has given no indication that it's open to a delay, although it is considering options to speed the verification process. With the clock ticking to the Real ID deadline, travel pros are urging airline passengers to upgrade their licenses as soon as possible or plan on using passports, military IDs or Global Entry cards starting Oct. 1. CORRECTION (Feb. 27, 2020 3:13 p.m.): A previous version of this article misstated how long it takes Washington state residents to get some official documents. State officials say that it would be faster to get an enhanced driver's license or enhanced ID than it would to get the REAL ID, not that getting a passport would be faster than getting REAL ID. President Xi Jinping has called for great attention to the protection and care for medical workers to make sure they are healthy and stay focused on winning the battle against the outbreak of novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, made the remarks in a recent instruction on protecting the medical workers participating in the COVID-19 prevention and control. Noting that medical workers are the backbone force in defeating the epidemic, Xi stressed providing comprehensive support for them to ensure their strength, morale and energy. Xi emphasized the need to strengthen efforts to relieve the stress of medical workers, provide them with daily necessities, arrange time for their rest and give them encouragement. Xi also stressed efforts to ensure that medical teams in Hubei and Wuhan can carry out their work in a safe, orderly, coordinated, effective and swift manner. Particular concern Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the medical workers have worked day and night on the frontline. Some were infected or even sacrificed their lives while saving lives. Xi is particularly concerned about their wellbeing. He has held multiple meetings, delivered important speeches and made instructions to express the CPC Central Committee's care for medical workers battling the epidemic at the frontline, especially in Hubei and Wuhan. On Jan. 25, the first day of the lunar New Year, Xi expressed sincere gratitude to the medical workers at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on the epidemic prevention and control work. On Feb. 5, Xi called for a severe crackdown on violence against medical workers, at a meeting of the Commission for Overall Law-based Governance of the CPC Central Committee. On Feb. 10, Xi extended regards to medical personnel during his inspection of the epidemic prevention and control work in Beijing, making arrangements to address their difficulties and problems. He talked to doctors in Wuhan via a video-link and spoke at length about the protection and care for medical workers during the inspection. Since the outbreak, more than 30,000 medical workers, including military medics, have been sent from across the country to Hubei and Wuhan to fight the epidemic. Xi said these medical workers embody the great revolutionary spirit of forging ahead without fear of difficulties. The medical workers, racing against time to fight the virus, have shown a keen sense of responsibility to the Party and the people, he added. On Feb. 14, at a meeting of the central committee for deepening overall reform, Xi again called for strengthening the building of public health teams and improving the mechanisms for the training, employment, benefits, performance evaluation and incentives for medical practitioners. Government agencies gather beside buses to be used to take evacuees to a quarantine facility after arriving in Darwin, Australia, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. The evacuees have travelled from Japan after being stranded on the cruise ship Diamond Princess. (Helen Orr/AAP Image via AP) Around 180 Australians evacuated from a virus-stricken cruise ship in Japan arrived Thursday in the city of Darwin to begin a second quarantine period. The former cruise ship passengers will spend the next two weeks in a camp facility near the northern Australian city, health officials said. The new coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 illness has infected more than 620 people on the Diamond Princess. The ship has been docked at the port of Yokohama since early this month in a quarantine that was widely considered a failure. It ended Wednesday and about 500 passengers who tested negative for the virus left the ship. The group of Australian evacuees was flown from Japan early Thursday on a Qantas plane chartered by the Australian government. Not evacuated were 46 Australians from the Diamond Princess who tested positive for the coronavirus. They will be treated in the Japanese health system, Australian health officials said. More than 200 people are already quarantined at the Howard Springs facility after being evacuated from Wuhan, the central Chinese city that is the center of the viral outbreak. The new group will be kept separate from the Wuhan evacuees, who remain in good health, Di Stephens, acting chief health officer of the Northern Territory, of which Darwin is the capital, said before the flight left Japan. Evacuees wear masks and wave as they are bussed to a quarantine facility after arriving in Darwin, Australia, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. The evacuees have travelled from Japan after being stranded on the cruise ship Diamond Princess. (Helen Orr/AAP Image via AP) "These people need to go into quarantine because we are not entirely convinced that the quarantine procedures on that ship were 100% effective," Stephens said. "They'll be completely separated at the facility, they'll have separate medical staff looking after them and separate support staff in that quarantine zone." Australia, meanwhile, extended its 14-day China-related travel ban for another week until Feb. 29. Under the ban, foreign nationals who have been in mainland China are not permitted into Australia for two weeks from the time they left China. Explore further New coronavirus found in Japan evacuees who initially tested negative 2020 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission. The global economy lacks solid ground and uncertainty is becoming the new normal, according to Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in an article published on the IMF website ahead of the G20 industrialised and emerging market economies finance ministers and central bank governors summit, scheduled to be held 22-23 February in Riyadh. IMF projected global growth is strengthening, from 2.9 percent in 2019 to 3.3 percent in 2020 and 3.4 percent in 2021. This uptick is dependent on improved performance in some emerging and developing economies, according to Georgieva. Monetary and fiscal policy have been doing their part. Forty-nine central banks cut rates 71 times as part of the most synchronised monetary action since the global financial crisis, she explained. But a number of challenges remain, affecting the global economy. The coronavirus is our most pressing uncertainty. It is a global health emergency we did not anticipate in January. It is a stark reminder of how a fragile recovery could be threatened by unforeseen events." "There are a number of scenarios, depending on how quickly the spread of the virus is contained. If the disruptions from the virus end quickly, we expect the Chinese economy to bounce back soon. The result would be a sharp drop in GDP growth in China in the first quarter of 2020, but only a small reduction for the entire year. Spillovers to other countries would remain relatively minor and short-lived, mostly through temporary supply chain disruptions, tourism, and travel restrictions, Georgieva said. Georgieva asserted that the projected rate of global growth is still modest in too many parts of the world, and over the medium term growth is expected to remain below historical averages. She noted that trade, climate, and inequality are areas where finance ministers and central bank governors can make progress during the G20 meetings in providing more certainty about future actions. For trade, Georgieva proposed building a better global trading system, explaining that that phase one of the trade deal between the United States and China eliminated some immediate negative impacts on global growth. We estimate the deal will reduce the drag from trade tensions on the level of GDP in 2020 by 0.2 percent, about one quarter of the total impact, she said. However, according to Georgieva these types of trade arrangements have the potential to distort trade and investment while harming global growth, adding that IMF estimations suggest that managed trade provisions cost the global economy close to $100 billion dollars. Thus, the world needs a modern global trading system that can unleash the full potential of services and e-commerce while protecting intellectual property rights. On climate, Georgieva said that natural disasters reduce growth by an average of 0.4 percent in the affected country in the year of the event, and that these types of events are becoming more frequent, particularly in the poorest countries and those least able to cope with the impact. In this context, Georgieva said that investment in clean energy and resilient infrastructure will be important as an approach to dealing with climate change and natural disasters. Furthermore, additional revenues generated from carbon taxes could be used to cut taxes elsewhere and fund assistance to affected households, or to finance spending. On inequality, Georgieva noted that across much of the the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and G20 countries, income and wealth inequalities remain persistently high, adding that ministers can put a renewed focus on raising living standards and creating better paying jobs. Curbing deficits, as well, should be undertaken, along with protecting essential social spending, she added. This is how countries can increase access to opportunities for all and build a stronger foundation within their own economies," according to Georgieva. Search Keywords: Short link: An Indian-American Christian group has voiced its concerns about the safety and security of Christians in India and urged President Donald Trump to meet the minority community members during his maiden trip to the country next week. President Trump will pay a state visit to India on February 24 and 25 at the invitation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. "We fully agree with your policy of forging a strong bilateral relationship with India which is an emerging global power that shares the same core values of democratic principles," the Federation of Indian American Christian Organisations of North America or FIACONA wrote in a letter to Trump. However, members of the Indian Christian communities in the US, the FIACONA said, feel compelled to bring few issues of concerns about the safety and security of Christians in India to his attention. "Today, Christians across India are living in fear. Pastors, social workers, and ordinary Christians are arrested, tortured, or killed. Christian properties are burnt or destroyed by supporters" of the ruling party, it claimed. "We also urge you to meet with selected leaders of the Christian community in India as a show of support to the freedom of conscience and religion in India on this historic occasion," said the letter dated February 18 and signed by FIOCANA president Koshy George and chairman John Prabhudoss. Meanwhile, Rhodes J Nerren, from Tennessee, has written a letter to Trump seeking the release of her husband Pastor Bryan Nerren who has been detained in India for the past four months now. Indian police has accused him of carrying large amount of cash. He is being represented in India by American Centre for Law and Justice. "I recognise your steadfast efforts to ensure his safe return home and have shared your letter with my staff," Trump wrote in a letter to Rhonda on January 27. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A law student was allegedly raped by a lawyer and his accomplice inside his chamber in Uttar Pradesh's Bareilly district last week, police said on Thursday. The incident happened on February 15 in Bahedi area of the district, Bahedi SHO Pankaj Pant said. The woman, said to be around 21, had gone to the chamber where the lawyer and his accomplice raped her, the SHO added. An FIR has been registered on Wednesday following a complaint by the victim's mother, he further said. A manhunt is on for the accused men who are absconding, Pant said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A tribunal set up by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN) has adjourned the hearing of the charges against three doctors accused of negligence. The doctors, Iyoha Joseph, Obafemi Kuye and Oyewunmi Oladipo, were alleged to have administered unnecessary drugs to a three-month-old baby, Peace Oluwole. The doctors were also accused of delaying necessary action which eventually led to the babys death. The baby was admitted to the R. Jolad Hospital in Gbagada, Lagos State, in March 2013, where the three doctors work. The doctors appeared before the tribunal headed by the chairman, Abba Hassan. The medical and dental profession in Nigeria is regulated by the Medical and Dental Practitioners Act Cap 221 (now Cap M8) Laws of Federation of Nigeria 1990 which set up the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria with mandates which include disciplining of errant professional. The council is empowered to make rules for professional conduct and is also empowered to establish the Medical and Dental Practitioners Disciplinary Tribunal and Medical Practitioners Investigating Panel for the enforcement of these rules. Charges According to a prosecution counsel, The case of the prosecution is that the deceased patient was not in a position to be discharged when he was discharged at first. Even when the baby was brought back to the hospital, the respondent doctors were negligent in the treatment. We have two instances the first time was when the baby was brought and then the baby was discharged when the baby ought not to have been discharged. The treatment and discharge was negligent. And when the baby was brought back and taken care of by the third respondent doctor, he was also negligent, he said. However, the defense counsels position is that the respondent doctors were not negligent and some of the medication was administered by an ENT doctor that is not one of them (respondent doctors). He also said they duly discharged the baby, sincerely believing their treatment to have taken good effect. READ ALSO: They also said that when the baby was brought back, everything happened too quickly for them to have responded. They also said the mother of the child did not compose herself enough to explain what was going on with the baby, and so they could not get enough information. Mr Joseph was accused of discharging the baby prematurely on March 11, 2013, when he did not observe and document clear indications that the baby had recovered from illness. He was also accused of claiming to be a specialist paediatrician when he did not have any additional qualification registered by the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria (MDCN). Mr Kuye was accused of seeing the baby but failing to take adequate history of the baby or attending to him. Mr Oladipo was accused of failing to take remedial measure to relieve the patient of obvious respiratory distress when he was re-presented at the hospital after being discharged earlier. He was also accused of delaying other procedures for more than 30 minutes which eventually contributed to the cause of death of the baby. The three accused doctors pleaded not guilty to the seven-count charge read against them. Judgment has been suspended until the next session for which no date has been fixed. This article, UCLA cancels on-campus facial recognition program after backlash, originally appeared on CNET.com. UCLA will not go forward with a facial recognition program, and will prohibit the technology's use on campus, a university administrator said Wednesday. The move comes after backlash from student groups and privacy advocates, who are pushing for campuses across the country to bar facial recognition. "UCLA will not pursue the use of this technology," said UCLA administrative vice chancellor Michael Beck, said in a statement. "We have determined that the potential benefits are limited and vastly outweighed by the concerns of our campus community." The program would have used facial recognition to raise an alert if people who were banned from campus entered the premises, and to offer an extra level of authentication in restricted areas of the university, a university spokesperson said. The editorial board at the Daily Bruin student newspaper decried the program, and advocacy group Fight For the Future pointed to the university's plan as an example of how the technology could become pervasive on college campuses. Rights groups added their support for the students' demands in a letter Thursday. Fight for the Future said it had been in the process of testing Amazon's Rekognition algorithm on UCLA athletes and faculty, and found that it incorrectly matched the faces of black people to other people's mug shots. The findings echoed broader concerns that facial recognition has higher error rates for black people and women. Advocates say facial recognition is even more worrying when it works properly, creating an inescapable and pervasive surveillance tool. This has led to concerns over the technology's use at airports, in retail and by law enforcement. On Wednesday, Fight for the Future deputy director Evan Greer said in a statement other universities should take heed of UCLA's decision. "We won't stop organizing until facial recognition is banned on every campus," she said. Student activists are planning a day of action at college campuses around the country in March. The UCLA spokesperson said that while the school's current policy doesn't mention facial recognition, it'll be updated to specifically prohibit the technology on campus. EAST LONGMEADOW Homeowners with foundations crumbling because they were cast with pyrrhotite-contaminated concrete will air their concerns at an East Longmeadow Town Council meeting next week. The homeowners face the loss of their homes or six-figure repair bills not covered by insurance. They seek state funding to help fund those repairs and preserve taxable value in their communities. A similar arrangement is already in place in Connecticut, where the contaminated concrete originated and where the problem, described as a slow-motion natural disaster, first showed up. There are several of us impacted that are currently trying to get our voices heard so that funding can be set up if and when our foundations crumble, homeowner Marcin Kosinski wrote in an email. Connecticut has a fund in place however Massachusetts does not. Therefore, even one town over one homeowner may get funding in Connecticut but (not) in Massachusetts. Kosinski and a group including Russell Dupere of neighboring Longmeadow have reserved time during the public participation portion of the East Longmeadow Town Council meeting at 6 p.m. Feb. 25 at the Pleasant View Senior Center, 328 North Main St. The public speak-out portion of the meeting generally comes at the beginning. Dupere had to have the foundation of his Longmeadow home replaced after it began collapsing due to pyrrhotite. Hes now serving on the Massachusetts Special Commission to Study the Financial and Economic Impacts of Crumbling Concrete Foundations due to the Presence of Pyrrhotite. He is also a founding member of Massachusetts Residents Against Crumbling Concrete. Last month, the state commission issued a report saying it could cost $350 million to fully restore crumbling foundations of Massachusetts homes built with pyrrhotite-contaminated concrete. The panel estimates that about 2,000 central and Western Massachusetts homes were built with the material. The cost of jacking up a home, scooping up the bad concrete and replacing the foundation still the most proven way to remedy the problem runs $150,000 to $250,000 per house. The commission plans a separate public meeting next month: 10 a.m. to noon on March 14 at Granite Valley Middle School Auditorium, 21 Thompson St., Monson. There, members will present findings and recommendations. The forum will be hosted by state Rep. Brian Ashe, D-Longmeadow, and state Sen. Anne Gobi, D-Spencer. Pyrrhotite is a naturally occurring mineral that reacts with water and air over time, swelling and expanding. This reaction creates an unstoppable force that causes concrete to crumble. But it can take decades for the damage to make itself apparent. The now-defunct J.J. Mottes Concrete sold pyrrhotite-tainted stone from 1983 until it was told to stop doing so by the state of Connecticut in 2015. The concrete was shipped to construction sites across eastern Connecticut and central and Western Massachusetts, with documented cases all over eastern Hamden County and western Worcester County and into the Hampshire County town of Ware. The state commission recommended the Legislature require that all Massachusetts home sellers disclose to prospective buyers any testing, inspection or repairs performed on their foundation, and require, at the time of sale, core testing on any foundation built between 1983 and 2015 within 30 miles of Beckers Quarry in Willington, Connecticut, the source of the tainted concrete. Massachusetts mortgage lenders doing business in affected communities check for damage before lending. Pyrrhotite puts homeowners in bind. They facing a big repair bill while the value of their home is destroyed, and with it their ability to borrow money. Insurers refuse to pay, often saying homeowners policies cover only buildings that have collapsed, not buildings in the process of collapsing. Towns fear that their property tax base will erode along with the concrete if homeowners who cant finance the repairs simply walk away. Connecticut funds a captive insurance corporation, called the Connecticut Foundation Solutions Indemnity Co., with $20 million in state bond money a year beginning in 2018, and with $8.5 million a year beginning last year from a surcharge on homeowners policies. The program has made $34.9 million in construction and reimbursement commitments in about two years, according to its website. Got a news tip or want to contact The Republican about this story? Email newsdesk@repub.com or message us on Facebook or Twitter. According to U.S. Census Bureau data*, nearly 800,000 employees and their families move each year to start a new career or change roles at their existing company. Cartus estimates that there are 250,000-300,000 corporate-sponsored U.S. relocations annually, which leaves approximately half a million new hires and existing employees a year to face the challenge, stress, and complexity of finding a new community and new home while starting their new job on time and ready to be productive. In today's tight labor market, a professional relocation package is increasingly a necessity in the war for talent. For businesses with no formal relocation program, HR leaders are forced to estimate competitive relocation budgets while navigating unexpected expenses and complications from the transferee throughout the move. Mobilify simplifies the relocation process for both the stressed transferee and the overextended people managers or HR leaders. The patent-pending technology behind Mobilify provides data-driven, market-competitive budget support and recommended service offerings, powered by Cartus' unparalleled move database and the proprietary algorithms that leverage it. The user-friendly, self-serve interface allows new hires and transferring employees to customize services based on preference and family situation. They also benefit from a professional move from one of Cartus' trusted van line partners and access to lucrative cash-back opportunities* from the company's top-performing real estate broker network. Mobilify to Help Small and Mid-size Companies Attract and Retain Talent, Offers Easy Way for Larger Companies to Bolster Existing Relocation Programs According to Atlas World Group's 2019 Corporate Relocation Survey, 41% of companies with fewer than 500 salaried employees did not use a relocation services firm to manage their relocation needs in 2018. Tellingly, nearly half of all small firms surveyed also cited "lack of qualified people locally" as the primary factor impacting their relocation volume that year. This confirms what Cartus has heard from its own clients, which is why Mobilify leverages Cartus' unmatched historical database (e.g., nearly 600,000 U.S. domestic relocations over the last 10 years) to create market-driven, probability-based budget models for job candidates that employers can be confident are competitive against other offers. For Job Candidates and Employees, Mobilify is Mobility Simplified. Focusing on a new position without having to worry about the task of relocating is a huge concern for nearly 40% of newly hired employees or transferees polled in a recent Cartus survey. "[I was] too focused on the relocation and not focused enough on learning [my] new role." ~ Recent lump sum transferee Mobilify tackles these challenges by consolidating key resources and real-time status updates in a single place, enabling employees to arrive at their new jobs on time, ready to work. Built on the principles of human-centered design thinking, Mobilify's user-friendly interface enables employees to see their entire relocation budget distributionincluding a guaranteed van line moveand relevant contact information. As an added incentive, employees interested in either buying or selling a home can ask to be matched with a top-performing, background-checked real estate agent from a nationally recognized brand, with opportunities to earn cash back incentives on both the sale and purchase of their residences.** Employees also have access to: Detailed destination information provided at the destination city and neighborhood level A cash back reward** when they buy and/or sell their home Interactive tools to track move timelines and budgets Video tutorials covering key information related to their move Future iterations of the product will allow employees to select the services most important to them and their families from Cartus' pre-vetted supplier network. "Cartus is leading the way with innovative technology being developed in-house utilizing design thinking" commented Cartus CEO Katrina Helmkamp. "Mobilify radically simplifies the relocation process for both the transferee and the people leader while allowing companies of all sizes to balance their needs for talent acquisition and cost containment." *U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2016 Annual Social and Economic Supplement. **The cash back bonus is offered in most states. In some states, a gift card or commission reduction at closing may be provided in lieu of the cash back bonus. The program is not available for employer-sponsored relocations or transactions in Iowa or outside the United States. The cash back bonus is not available in Alaska, Louisiana and Oklahoma. In Kansas and Tennessee, a MasterCard MAX gift card will be issued. In Mississippi, New Jersey, and Oregon, a commission reduction may be available at closing. The cash back bonus is only available with the purchase and/or sale of your home through the use of a program-introduced real estate agent. The actual amount you receive is based on the purchase and/or sale price of your home. All real estate commissions are negotiable. Other terms and conditions may apply. This is not a solicitation if you are already represented by a real estate broker. Program terms and conditions are subject to change at any time without notice. Additional terms, conditions, and restrictions apply. About Cartus Cartus, the market leader in global mobility, provides a full spectrum of global relocation and can successfully move employees into and out of 185 countries. By leveraging innovative technology tools and its Leading Edge Analytics Practice (LEAP), Cartus serves more than half of Fortune 50 companies as well as smaller organizations. Cartus is part of Realogy Holdings Corp. (NYSE: RLGY), a global leader in real estate franchising and provider of real estate brokerage, relocation and settlement services. To find out how our greater experience, reach, and hands-on guidance can help your company, visit www.cartus.com, read our blog, or visit www.realogy.com for more information. Contact: Elizabeth Dowd at 203-205-8257 Email: [email protected] SOURCE Cartus Corporation Related Links https://www.cartus.com " " That pirate may not care what the proof of what he's swilling is, but we do. Candela Foto Art/Kreuziger/Getty Images If you've ever examined a bottle of alcohol (and who hasn't?), you've probably noticed that there are two measures of alcoholic content printed on it. One is the alcohol percentage by volume, and the other is the proof. You might also have noticed that (in the United States, anyway) the proof is always twice the percentage. So why do we need both numbers if one is always twice the other -- isn't that a little redundant? And what is proof, other than a number you get when you double another number? Explanations abound on the Internet for the origins of the term "proof." The details vary, but it boils down to a test involving gunpowder and fire. Yes, gunpowder and fire. Depending who you ask, this test could have been devised anywhere from the 16th to the early 18th century, and it came about because the need arose to test the alcoholic content of the spirits that people were making and selling. Advertisement In some of these origin tales, it's pirates or sailors who did the testing because they were tired of being sold watered-down rum by devious merchants. Sometimes it was the British or American government inventing the test because devious farmers were watering down the whiskey they distilled from their corn crops. Whatever the case, the testing agent was gunpowder, whether it was poured into the alcohol or a pellet of it was soaked in alcohol. The alcohol/gunpowder combo was then ignited, and what happened next supposedly determined how much alcohol was actually present. Again, the details differ, but the story goes that if the mixture flared or exploded, the alcohol was "above proof." Some sources say that the presence of fire indicated 50 percent alcohol, and some say it just meant that the alcohol wasn't watered down. In any case, fire proved that the alcohol was acceptable. These stories explain how the term "proof" might have originated, but they don't really tell us how our modern-day definition came about. In an article published in the Journal of Chemical Education, a chemistry professor named William B. Jensen does mention the gunpowder test but says that in 19th-century United States, 50 percent alcohol by volume was decided upon as the "100-proof" standard for taxation purposes. So that's why proof is always twice the percentage [source: Jensen]. Other countries have proof systems, too, but they're all wildly different -- what's 100 proof in the United States, for example, is 50 proof in France and 87.6 proof in the United Kingdom [source: Jensen]. But most countries do require that the actual percentage also be displayed, sparing international travelers a lot of confusion and unnecessary calculations. So if alcohol percentage by volume is the most straightforward, scientific measurement, why can't we just leave it at that? Why does proof, an antiquated, redundant term, still have to be printed on every bottle of alcohol? The answer, we're afraid, might have been lost to history, just like the details of that gunpowder test. The textiles ministry on Wednesday said the domestic industry should take advantage of the huge USD 20-billion space vacated in the global apparel market by China, which is going through a tough time following outbreak of the deadly coronavirus. Addressing a symposium on emerging opportunities for Indian textiles, Textiles Secretary Ravi Capoor said domestic textile exports have plateaued during the past 5-7 years, which is a "very worrying proposition for the government". "India should step in at this stage to take the advantage although not a good way to project ourselves but every crisis has its own silver lining and I think while we are with China with all our emotions and financial, political and diplomatic help but still there appears to be a big economic opportunity which is coming up our way," he said. In this background, Capoor said it would be the right time to bring the industry together and have a small dialogue to "see how the industry associations are prepared for this opportunity". As the exports have plateaued, he said the government understood that one of the major issues is that "take up the space that has been vacated by China other than this present crisis (coronavirus)". The secretary said USD 20 billion worth of apparel space, mostly in the man-made fibre, has been vacated by China in the past three years and taken away by Vietnam. "Now is a situation where we are in a position and the (textile) minister has just spoken to Finance Minister (Nirmala Sitharaman) also this morning. We are working towards seeing that the GST inversion on man-made fibre is also taken care of. "With all the efforts, if we are able to succeed in the removal of the inversion, then man-made fibre itself becomes a huge opportunity wherever China cedes space. India should step in a very big way," Capoor said. Textile minister Smriti Irani was also present at the symposium. The domestic textile and apparel industry, including handicrafts, stood at USD 140 billion in 2018, of which USD 100 billion was domestically consumed, while the remaining portion worth USD 40 billion was exported to the world market. (Photo : www.pxhere.com) (Photo : Screenshot from BBC Article Regarding Misleading News) As researchers rush to stem the growing tide of the infected and look for the cure of the virus, the internet is ablaze with fake news going viral, the one regarding a decade old map is just one story. Read Also: Watch: Expert Says Coronavirus COVID-19 Quarantine Procedures in Diamond Princess are 'Completely Chaotic' This decade-old map that depicts global air travel was incorrectly misused by news websites all over the globe, leading to headlines that are like "no country is safe from coronavirus" and "Terrifying map reveals how thousands of Wuhan travelers could have spread coronavirus to 400 cities worldwide". How did it begin The World Population Project, at the University of Southampton, published research predicting where people from Wuhan, the place where the virus was first found, had traveled within the two weeks before the city went into quarantine lockdown to prevent the outbreak. Scientists looked at the flow of air travel and mobile phone data of Wuhan residents from the previous years. The study brought in the estimation of nearly 60,000 people might have traveled to almost 400 cities worldwide before Wuhan authorities had imposed the travel ban. The researchers, however, posted a series of messages about their work on Twitter, including the same map in question being talked about today. They did not explain the map was not part of the study, and this prompted and since then has been deleted. The problem is as the university's press has stated to BBC, "somehow, from this, an incorrect story has spiraled". What is the Fake News About The fake news is talking about the spread of the global outbreak that is the coronavirus or COVID-19. The red lines, so say the presenter, represent five million Wuhan residents who have fled the city. In reality, it is just the flight routes around the world. Read Also: China Tech Giants Unite To Roll Out Color-Based QR Codes to Fight COVID-19: How Does It Work? The five million Wuhan residents stated it was from a very different source. This was from the mayor of Wuhan gave the number when talking about the total leaving the city ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday, while most of the residents stayed within China. How About Now News websites like 7News have now removed the online article. However, it still lingers on many other news outlets with the same story but different languages, which are still incorrect. To add, people still spread false information due to fear. Like one host last week about a guest on a radio show told Glenn Beck United Kingdom researchers had tracked the mobile phones of 60,000 peoples that had left China and indicated the world map. He said, "The chart is frightening." The problem is that fake news spread faster than legitimate news. It feeds on people's fears and makes them think the worst than be well educated about the conversation. News websites should be responsible for delivering news that is concrete and with facts rather than sources. Read Also: U.S. Responds to Alarming Level of Coronavirus Cases By Rolling Out Influenza Surveillance System in 5 Cities 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission. BOSTONIt's been almost two years since Martha's Vineyard homeowner Leah Bassett filed a lawsuit against Mile High Media, Gamma Films, Nica Noelle and several Mile High contractors, claiming that the defendants had broken local laws by filming hardcore scenes in her house, which she had rented to them during the winter of 2014, and of allowing various of Bassett's furnishings and artworks to appear in the finished DVDs. And now, the extent to which those latter claims should be litigated at trial was discussed at a hearing yesterday before U.S. District Judge Patti B. Saris. At issue are paintings and sketches created by Bassett, as well as hand-stitched pillows, a fireplace and a hand-painted table, all of which appeared briefly in one or more of the 14 adult videos shot for Icon Male by Noelle and her crew at Bassett's houseand none of which had Bassett gotten around to copyrighting until two years after she sued the video producers. As a result of this litigation, Mile High has pulled the 14 features in question from the market, though Bassett's attorneys claim that they can still be obtained through other sourcesand that "22,000+ stand alone Stills" taken during shooting are available as well, many of which do show the items for which Bassett is claiming copyright. "In the case at bar, it is indisputable that Ms. Bassett applied for, and received from the U.S. Copyright Office, three Registration Certificates, dated September 29, 2016, which collectively encompassed a total of 53 of her 'Works' that she had created and installed in her personal residence as part of its interior decor," Bassett's attorneys argued in their Memorandum in support of their Summary Judgment motion. "Here ... it is undisputed that the Mile High-owned porn films and Stills shot on Ms. Bassett's residence incorporated her Copyright-protected Works in photographic form just as they appeared visually in their original form throughout her house." In her complaint, Bassett had claimed that seeing those works in the defendants' features caused her enough mental distress that she had to seek professional help to overcome those feelings. But Mile High's attorneys were having none of that argument. "With respect to Plaintiffs equitable argument, Defendants addressed in their Motion the fact that any appearance of these items in the films was never a conscious decision to portray copyrighted work," the Mile High attorneys argued in their Response to Bassett's Summary Judgment motion. "These items were not registered at the time. Nor do they stand out as copyright protectable items. There is no evidence whatsoever that Defendants intentionally sought to portray copyrighted work (even to the extent copyright protection exists). Query: Who in the world would ever think these miscellaneous household items were being claimed as copyrighted? "Defendants did not use them or focus on them," the Response later states. "Nor do they have any bearing on the films. They were just there. Seeing these films reinforces the point that not a single person who watched these films would notice these items. Even when you know what to look for it can be difficult to focus on the items." In other words, Mile High claims that though the copyrighted works appeared in its features, their appearance was so minor as to constitute fair use. However, at the Tuesday hearing, Judge Saris made it clear that she has no intention of investigating the extent to which Bassett's works appear in the features, and that the attorneys for both sides would have to find some other way to quantify those works' screen time. "How do I decide?" Judge Saris asked the attorneys. "Short of watching every movie myselfwhich I do not intend to doand I do not intend to have a jury do it. I cant ask a jury to sit through that kind of a movie for hours and hours. That is not whats going to happen here." But Mile High's attorney Gary Jay Kaufman felt that the whole idea of timing how long each object appeared in any particular video was simply absurd. "I would bet my life savings if you polled every juror in the world, not one would say, 'I saw this film and focused on the etching or the stitching on the slipcover,'" Kaufman told the judge. On the other hand, Law360.com reported that attorney John A. Taylor, representing Ms. Bassett, claimed that he had already timed how long all of the objects in question had appeared on screen, and that the total time for all the works appearing was 473 seconds aka 7.9 minutesnot exactly what anyone would call massive coverage. The hearing, which lasted several hours and covered several topics, apparently led to no conclusions yet on any of the issues, and no date was given either for that hearing's continuation nor for when trial on these issues would commence. Error. Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more details. (25) Samsung users have been left "creeped out" after receiving strange notifications. Galaxy phone users worldwide were hit with the notification, which read only: "1". The issue appears to have been caused by a bug, or a test within Samsung's system. But the unusual wording and the app that sent it led many to panic and worry their phone had been compromised. "Anyone else get that find my mobile push notification that just about gave me a heart attack?" one user wrote on Twitter. "Jesus christ Samsung." Gadget and tech news: In pictures Show all 25 1 /25 Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gadget and tech news: In pictures Gun-toting humanoid robot sent into space Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). The robot Fedor will spend 10 days aboard the ISS practising skills such as using tools to fix issues onboard. Russia's deputy prime minister Dmitry Rogozin has previously shared videos of Fedor handling and shooting guns at a firing range with deadly accuracy. Dmitry Rogozin/Twitter Gadget and tech news: In pictures Google turns 21 Google celebrates its 21st birthday on September 27. The The search engine was founded in September 1998 by two PhD students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, in their dormitories at Californias Stanford University. Page and Brin chose the name google as it recalled the mathematic term 'googol', meaning 10 raised to the power of 100 Google Gadget and tech news: In pictures Hexa drone lifts off Chief engineer of LIFT aircraft Balazs Kerulo demonstrates the company's "Hexa" personal drone craft in Lago Vista, Texas on June 3 2019 Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures Project Scarlett to succeed Xbox One Microsoft announced Project Scarlett, the successor to the Xbox One, at E3 2019. The company said that the new console will be 4 times as powerful as the Xbox One and is slated for a release date of Christmas 2020 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures First new iPod in four years Apple has announced the new iPod Touch, the first new iPod in four years. The device will have the option of adding more storage, up to 256GB Apple Gadget and tech news: In pictures Folding phone may flop Samsung will cancel orders of its Galaxy Fold phone at the end of May if the phone is not then ready for sale. The $2000 folding phone has been found to break easily with review copies being recalled after backlash PA Gadget and tech news: In pictures Charging mat non-starter Apple has cancelled its AirPower wireless charging mat, which was slated as a way to charge numerous apple products at once AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures "Super league" India shoots down satellite India has claimed status as part of a "super league" of nations after shooting down a live satellite in a test of new missile technology EPA Gadget and tech news: In pictures 5G incoming 5G wireless internet is expected to launch in 2019, with the potential to reach speeds of 50mb/s Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Uber halts driverless testing after death Uber has halted testing of driverless vehicles after a woman was killed by one of their cars in Tempe, Arizona. March 19 2018 Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A humanoid robot gestures during a demo at a stall in the Indian Machine Tools Expo, IMTEX/Tooltech 2017 held in Bangalore Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie 'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Engineers test a four-metre-tall humanoid manned robot dubbed Method-2 in a lab of the Hankook Mirae Technology in Gunpo, south of Seoul, South Korea Jung Yeon-Je/AFP/Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway resembling the giant panda is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A test line of a new energy suspension railway, resembling a giant panda, is seen in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A concept car by Trumpchi from GAC Group is shown at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Rex Gadget and tech news: In pictures A Mirai fuel cell vehicle by Toyota is displayed at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A visitor tries a Nissan VR experience at the International Automobile Exhibition in Guangzhou, China Reuters Gadget and tech news: In pictures A man looks at an exhibit entitled 'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Getty Gadget and tech news: In pictures A new Israeli Da-Vinci unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Elbit Systems is displayed during the 4th International conference on Home Land Security and Cyber in the Israeli coastal city of Tel Aviv Getty Many users were especially concerned because the notification came from the app "Find My Mobile". That can be used for finding where in the world your phone is, as well as remotely erasing all of the data on it leading people to worry that their location could be getting hacked into, their files could be unsafe, or both. The notification did not actually appear to be related to anything in the app: clicking it just made the message disappear, and did not even open the "Find My Mobile" window. For some that seemed to make the message doubly eerie, since there was no indication of why the message had appeared or what users might have triggered by opening it. "I got this weird 'find my mobile' notif and my dumb ass clicked on it and nothing happened but I'm lowkey creeped out now," one affected user wrote. People who claimed to have managed to discuss the issue with Samsung customer assistants said they had been told that the notification appeared to be part of a test and should be ignored. Samsung did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Independent. Read More: Compare providers and find the best deals with our Mobile Phone Deals page VIENTIANE, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) kicked off a Special Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Coronavirus Disease here Thursday to discuss coordinating efforts in fighting against the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak. The meeting started with a rallying cry of "Stay strong, Wuhan! Stay strong, China! Stay strong, ASEAN!" by the ministers at a joint photo session. The meeting, co-chaired by Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Philippine Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin, is also attended by other ASEAN members' foreign ministers and ASEAN Secretary-General Lim Jock Hoi. During the special meeting, the Foreign Ministers of China and ASEAN will exchange views and explore ways and means of cooperation in dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak. The meeting itself also demonstrates China and ASEAN's solidarity and determination to jointly battle the outbreak. Speaking at the dinner party of the special Foreign Ministers' Meeting on Wednesday evening, Wang told his ASEAN counterparts that China is confident in winning the fight against the COVID-19 amid the support of the international community including ASEAN. Founded in 1967, ASEAN now groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. Defence minister Rajnath Singh will lay the foundation stone of the Thal Sena Bhawan in Delhi Cantt on February 21. Once ready, it will house various army establishments that are scattered across the national capital, including offices that currently operate out of hutments or barrack-like structures. Here are five things you need to know about the Thal Sena Bhawan: 1. The Thal Sena Bhawan will come up near the armys sprawling Manekshaw Centre in Delhi Cantt. Spread over 39 acres, the multi-storeyed building will be able to accommodate around 6,000 personnel. The building complex is expected to be ready by 2024-25. 2. Sena Bhawan, located near the South Block, will continue to function from its premises. It houses several key offices of the army. The army chief and several other senior officers who occupy offices in South Block will continue to sit there until the defence ministry moves out to a new location under the central vista redevelopment plan. 3. The army, which is the biggest among the three services, had been demanding a new complex for several years to accommodate its several wings that are scattered across the city. It has several offices functioning out of RK Puram. 4. The Thal Sena Bhawan is coming up at a time when the government has given its nod to the central vista redevelopment plan that includes a slew of changes to existing structures, with a new Parliament building and a common secretariat for all central government offices among the most prominent new features. 5. According to the plan, the North and South Block office complexes will be turned into national museums. The Prime Ministers residence will be shifted behind the existing South Block complex while the residence of the Vice President will move behind North Block. The central government ministries including those in the North and South Block will be shifted to a common secretariat. China's aerospace manufacturing and air transport sectors are collaborating to fight against the coronavirus epidemic. The Chinese Air Force is utilizing a series of domestically manufactured airplanes and improved aviation features to satisfy the needs of the post-epidemic recovery period. Large transport aircraft activated On February 13, China's Air Force sent two batches of Y-20 large transport airplanes to Wuhan's Tianhe International Airport to carry out their first non-military action. The Y-20 large multi-role transport aircraft was developed by the state-owned Aviation Industry of China (AVIC) and entered military service in July 2016. The development and application of the Y-20 marked a breakthrough of China's capability of large aircraft design and manufacturing, and also represented a major step forward of China's Air Force, said the AVIC. Together with the Y-20, the domestically manufactured Y-9 medium transport airplanes were in the fleet to send medical staff and emergency supplies in the emergency mission. According to the AVIC, technical professionals from multiple units of the group have joined the service, support and training works in fighting against the epidemic, contributing to the unique roles of the Chinese aviation industry. Civil aviation takes off The fast-developing civil aviation industry of China also reacted fast to satisfy the country's demands in emergency transports. Civil aviation authorities and Chinese civil airliners exhibited their capability in coordinating and transporting medical personnel and supplies during the nationwide epidemic. As of February 14, the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) has arranged and coordinated 21 Chinese air carriers to conduct 241 flights with 29,000 passengers. Among these, nine flights carried more than 1,100 passengers stranded overseas back to China, and 48 charter flights carried emergency transport missions. Chinese civil aviation authorities coordinated 50 charter flights within two days to carry more than 6,200 medical personnel to rush to support Wuhan. To lower the risk of infection on airplanes, flights with a higher number of passengers would change to bigger aircraft or be replaced with more flights, according to the CAAC. China has become the world's second-largest civil aviation market, thanks to the country's constant economic growth and persistent efforts in cultivating the sector. It has created a remarkable record of double-digit growth in the civil aviation sector over the past decades. The expanding fleet, extending route network and capability in air transport empower the Chinese civil aviation industry to meet the intensive and harsh challenges alongside the outbreak of the epidemic. One of the strangest contradictory sensations of the Trump era is the man's relationship towards and with the various U.S. intelligence agencies. In many cases, Trump's broad criticisms about the unaccountable and seemingly limitless scope of intelligence gathering are valid. Or would be, anyway, if the man actually cared about those issues for any reason beyond his larger tantrum over the way those agencies have undermined his ego. Or if he wasn't simultaneously trying to use that same wide jurisdiction to target his own political enemies. In other words, Trump's not necessarily wrong about the potential abuses of secret and/or warrantless surveillance (or "wiretapping" as he puts it). But he's only mad about those things because they can be used to threaten him and his friends, instead of reinforcing his hunches. Otherwise, illegal spying and invasions of privacy are totally fine with himas long as they target the right people. There are moments, then, where it becomes a case of "My enemy's enemy is my friend" except that "friend" is also an enemy of sorts, which further complicates the whole mess. Case in point: this recent Just Security post by Douglas London, a former CIA operative. In it, London talks about the way that the CIA's priorities have been forced to shift from general intelligence gathering to just kind of soothing Trump's ego, and retroactively justifying all of the man's random baseless instincts: The revealing and most disconcerting aspect of this episode was not that Pompeo presumed the worst from his workforce before getting the full story, nor his vicious dressing down of a dedicated senior official and decorated officer. Rather, it was what caused him to be so furious in the first place: The director was worried that the news would come to President Donald Trump's attention. Anything that could somehow embarrass the president, or make him appear weak, had to be avoided in order to insulate those in his orbit like Pompeo, who had his eyes on yet bigger and better things. The president's advisers knew their own political futures depended on staying in Trump's favor and providing him with so-called "successes." Therefore, Pompeo prioritized shielding Trump from news he didn't want to hear, an approach to the job that sometimes subjugated the country's interests to those of the president. Concerned more about his own standing with the president, Pompeo also refused to provide the CIA workforce with any words of support in the face of Trump's repeated attacks on it, fearing such encouragement would anger Trump. [] The first evidence of what it would be like under the new administration came with the White House's direction to change how the U.S. government referred to the Islamic State. CIA had used the standardization: the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or, ISIL, which was aligned with how the group saw and referred to itself. But, Trump didn't like that name, associating its use with his predecessor, President Barack Obama, and demanded we call it as he did, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. In a compromise, CIA used the Arabic for Syria, "al-Shams," to provide the president his preferred "ISIS" acronym. The episode was minor, but revealing of what was to come. That's all good and well or at least, I can understand why it would be frustrating, and why Trump's chaotic nature could be even dangerous than the CIA's more traditionally methodical activities. See also: Another example of the President setting the nation's security priorities from Fox News headlines rather than the most pressing threats of which our military, diplomatic and intelligence professionals warn. https://t.co/92KvNCXEiS Douglas London (@douglaslondon5) February 16, 2020 But I soon found myself doing a double-take, as London compares that Trumpian chaos to his rose-tinted view of the wonderful and thoughtful leadership of Gina Haspel, the notoriously skillful torturess. I believe Director Haspel has faithfully represented the CIA's reporting and assessments, as evidenced by the strong stand she took after Jamal Khashoggi's murder. She is smart, substantive, more interested in details than her predecessor, and open to receiving greater input. Still, like Pompeo, Haspel does not tend to include the participation of more substantive officers in briefings as other directors have done. But unlike Pompeo, Haspel is a voracious reader and savvy as both an intelligence consumer and practitioner. Still, while I'd like to believe that Haspel has not validated the president's damaging remarks about a Deep State that includes intelligence officials conspiring to undermine him, neither has she done much to correct them. I'll be honest: my brain is just not prepared to comprehend so many positive adjectives placed so adjacently to the woman responsible for so much extrajudicial torture and abuse. Another recent example of this bizarre double-take phenomenon comes from the New York Times' reporting into the Justice Department investigating of the CIA's choice to keep certain information about Russia close to its chest. Mr. Durham appears to be pursuing a theory that the C.I.A., under its former director John O. Brennan, had a preconceived notion about Russia or was trying to get to a particular result and was nefariously trying to keep other agencies from seeing the full picture lest they interfere with that goal, the people said. But officials from the F.B.I. and the National Security Agency have told Mr. Durham and his investigators that such an interpretation is wrong and based on a misunderstanding of how the intelligence community functions, the people said. National security officials are typically cautious about sharing their most delicate information, like source identities, even with other agencies inside the executive branch. On the bright side, Durham has a history of investigating the CIA for its abuses of power. Unfortunately, he's never actually held them accountable, either. So extrajudicial torture is fine. Entrapping terrorists that you framed and created is totally fine. But following clues into foreign interference in an election that may have favored the very same President who ultimately benefited from it? That's where the line gets crossed? Part of the problem here is the obsession that Trump and most of the GOP have with sorting things binaries. It's all black and white with us, or against us; good guy with a gun, or criminal; Democrat, or Republican. The problem with the CIA and the FBI and the NSA is not that they are part of an Obama-Clinton Deep State that is diametrically opposed to the Trump Agenda; the problem is that the Intelligence Community is loyal only to itself, and to maintaining the Status Quo by any means necessary. Their job is to keep the System running, and that can be good, or bad, depending. But Trump simply cannot fathom that there are more than 2 sides to any conflict. His team is the winner; and everyone who's not on his team is the loser. He thinks he can force the Intelligence Community to play for his team, in which case, he doesn't need to reign in any of their worse impulses, as long as they work in his favor. (Even stranger is the assumption that all Intelligence Agencies are working together and sharing information, like that the FBI would know if they were spying on someone who was allegedly a CIA informant. But that's a topic for another time.) Justice Dept. Is Investigating C.I.A. Resistance to Sharing Russia Secrets [Charlie Savage / New York Times] The C.I.A. in the Age of Trump [Douglas London / Just Security] Trump's war against the "Deep State" enters a new stage [Peter Baker / New York Times] Image: CIA / Flickr Up to 50,000 lecturers, technicians and library staff are beginning 14 days of strikes nationally, with a two-day stoppage Thursday and Friday. The strikes are the largest ever in the UK, with staff walking out at 74 universities. A series of rolling actions over the next three weeks will culminate in a week-long strike beginning March 9. University workers are opposing increased workloads, casualization and pay restrictions. They are resisting demands from employers that they increase their pension contributions. The strike was called after the University and College Union (UCU) failed to reach agreement following months of talks with the employers organisationsUniversities UK (UUK) and Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA). UUK represents universities over pensions and UCEA represents them in the pay and conditions dispute. A ballot of UCU members exceeded the 50 percent turnout to reach the legal threshold. Eighty percent of voting members backed strikes over pensions, while 76 percent voted for strike action over pay and conditions. The strikes show the determination of university workers to oppose the destruction of their pensions, pay, terms and conditions. The industrial action is the second this academic year, following an eight-day stoppage by staff at 63 institutions last November/December. In 2018, UCU members held a 14-day national strike against pension cuts at 64 institutions involving 50,000 lecturers and other university staff. Reflecting the growing resolve of university employees to fight, 14 more universities passed the 50 percent turnout threshold required for industrial action than in November. Workers at the 24 major public research Russell Group universities, the ex-polytechnics (the post-1992 universities) and at distance learning institutions, including the Open University, voted to strike. The UCU said around a million students were affected during the strike last November. With 14 additional institutions, that number is set to leap by another 200,000. From the moment the UCU leadership announced the strikes, up until the last minute on Wednesday, they were pleading with the employers to make an offer to avoid strike action. As it became clear that management were refusing to make any concessions, the UCU put out a statement Wednesday declaring, Blame for strikes lays squarely at door of university heads. University workers want the institutions to cover the cost of pension contribution rises that have been imposed on academic and other staff over the past year. After the refusal of the UCU to fight previous management attacks on pensions, staff now pay 9.6 percent of salary into their pension plan (up from eight percent in 2019). A typical university lecturer is paying about 30 a month more for the same retirement benefits. Just ahead of the strike, UUK announced that 84 percent of 111 employers who responded to a consultation did not want to make a new offer to the union. A survey by UUK of its institutions found that four employers wanted to offer only an additional 0.5 percent in employer contributions, while 14 employers wanted to offer between 0.6 and one percent. Just two employers were willing to offer more than one percent. Since 2009, the pay of staff has dropped by around 21 percent in real terms. The UCEA made a new offer in late January, which UCU General Secretary Jo Grady described as a big step forward though still falling short of the UCUs demands. University employers aim to set sector-wide expectations around the use of casual contracts, gender and ethnicity pay gaps and workloads. But the proposals did not include any movement on a pay offer of just 1.8 percent. The UCU Left factioncomprising members of a number of pseudo-left groups and dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP)describe the struggle by university workers as the Four Fights dispute because they claim four issues are at stake: casualisation, equality, pay and workload. They barely mention the fight to oppose the destruction of pension rights. In a statement last week, the UCU Left gave the 2018 dispute a one sentence mention, while declaring, The USS dispute must be fought now because the future of the pension scheme is in the balance. Unless we fight to put it on a sustainable basis, it may not survive. The UCU Left betray their nervousness over the issue of pensions because it is such a sore point in the aftermath of the betrayal of the 2018 strike. University workers face a concerted offensive on their pensions, pay and conditions because the UCU bureaucracy caved in and ended what was then the largest strike ever in higher education institutions. Even after staff voted to reject the cuts planned by the employersincluding organizing a nationwide rebellion against the UCU leadership trying to enforce a sellout dealthe union bureaucracy, with the assistance of the UCU Left, finally pushed through a deal which led to huge cuts in pension provision after retirement. By 2019, after eight years of attacks on their pension scheme, a typical USS member was being asked to pay 40,000 more into their pensions but will receive almost 200,000 less in retirementleaving them 240,000 worse off in total. The UCU Left never tires of promoting the UCU and calling on university workers to join it. But the UCU has never called all its 120,000 members out in a unified all-out stoppage and refuses to unite higher education staff with its substantial membership in the further education sector, who face the same onslaught on their pay, terms and conditions. The 14-day action is deliberately fragmented, with UCU members at some institutions striking over both disputes, while at other universities workers are striking on the basis of just pay and working conditions, and others just rising pension costs. The role of the UCU and its pseudo-left backers in dissipating every struggle was seen last November when the strikes were limited to eight days, resulting in the national stoppage abruptly ending on December 4. This was to ensure that the strike did not clash with a December 12 general election that Labours Jeremy Corbyn wanted to win based on his demobilizing any struggle by the working class. Had the Communications Workers Union defied the High Courts move to rule a strike ballot of postal workers illegal, Novembers higher education strike would have taken place at the same time as action by more than 100,000 postal workers. This would have represented a powerful movement against the employers and Boris Johnsons Conservative government, who are determined to tear up all gains won by workers in decades of struggle. UCU members must draw the lessons from their recent experiences at the hands of the UCU. The unions do not function as organisations that defend the interests of their members, but act to enforce the diktats of management. Workers should wrest the struggle from the suffocating confines of the unions and establish rank-and-file committees that operate independently of the bureaucratic apparatus. They must actively seek and appeal for support from all sectors of workers in the education sector and unify the struggles of educators and students throughout the UK against the rapacious demands of the universities. To discuss these urgent issues and to take the fight forward, we urge university staff and students to contact the Socialist Equality Party. AP Donald Trump was called out for his totally inappropriate tweets by the judge presiding over Roger Stones trial as she handed down a 40-month sentence for the presidents longtime friend, saying his crimes should cause universal dismay and disgust. The comments came just before he took to the stage in Colorado Springs for a "Keep America Great Again" rally, as a part of a string of events he is doing this week across the country. Colorado stands out as an important battleground state this year, with the Republican Senate majority potentially on the line as GOP senator Cory Gardner faces stiff competition in his reelection campaign. The president has meanwhile been live-tweeting attacks towards his Democratic 2020 rivals after the latest debates, as well as deriding them on the campaign trail in at an Arizona rally where he also called the FBI dishonest scum and complained that Conan, the US militarys war hero dog, got more publicity than him over the killing of Isis leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Mr Trumps rally coincided with the latest primary debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Michael Bloomberg was attacked from all sides, with Elizabeth Warren characterising him as a a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. Please allow a moment for our liveblog to load Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 04:14:05|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close JERUSALEM, Feb. 19 (Xinhua) -- Israeli researchers have warned of new cybersecurity risks to public health with the growing vulnerability of DNA sequencing repositories, Ben Gurion University (BGU) said Wednesday. In a first-of-its-kind policy paper published in the journal Eurosurveillance, BGU researchers say the dangers are unfolding as microbiology advances, and whole genome sequencing of pathogens is brought to the forefront of infectious disease diagnostics. In their study supported by Israel's Ministry of Science and Technology, the researchers note a new method, known as next-generation sequencing (NGS), identifies and characterizes pathogens in a timely manner and speed up treatment. As DNA sequencing has become cheaper, the next step is to move from the lab into the field and in the future even into homes. However, such a move exposes microbial test results and DNA sequence repositories to potential hackers. Therefore, the cybersecurity protective envelope must be developed as part of the products themselves and not tacked on as an afterthought, BGU researchers warn. The team highlights several potentially vulnerable points during the process, from sample processing and DNA sequencing to bioinformatics software and sequence-based public health surveillance systems. The researchers concluded that such attacks could have a deleterious effect such as false detection of significant public health threats or delayed recognition of epidemics. Minister Lich thanked Thailand for its support to Vietnam in the countrys ASEAN chairmanship year and its sharing of experiences in holding military-defence conferences and activities in 2020. For his part, the Thai General spoke highly of the host countrys preparations and the success of the retreat. He expressed support to Vietnam in the ASEAN chairmanship year and pledged to realise all the contents in the joint statement of the ASEAN defence ministers on cooperation against diseases and epidemics. Rejoicing at the fine development in the defence ties between the two countries, the sides agreed to continue implementing all the cooperation contents in an effective way in the time to come. General Lich also extended invitation to Thai defence firms to participate in an international exhibition on the defence industry and equipment to be held in Vietnam. WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Thycotic , provider of Privileged Access Management (PAM) solutions for more than 10,000 organizations worldwide, including 25 of the Fortune 100, announced today that it has been named a Best Place to Work by the Business Intelligence Group. This is the second year in a row that Thycotic has been named a winner in this award program, signifying a consistent commitment to employee wellness and providing team members with a fun, positive and rewarding workplace. "We are very proud to be honored for building and maintaining an enjoyable and challenging work environment for our team members," said James Legg, President and CEO of Thycotic. "Our people are what make Thycotic one of the most successful and fastest-growing tech companies. We are incredibly grateful for this recognition of our commitment to providing our employees with an excellent place to work." The Business Intelligence Group Best Places to Work awards program identifies companies that are actively working to improve their own performance through efforts to challenge employees in environments that make work fun and engaging. A crucial component of the evaluation process is an employee survey, conducted to analyze employee sentiment and the overall viewpoint of the workplace from those who work in it. "Congratulations to Thycotic for cultivating a great place to work," said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer of Business Intelligence Group. "After winning this award for the second year in a row, Thycotic has established an exceptional reputation for its positive work environment. The results of the employee survey show that this organization prioritizes its team members' welfare, opportunities and engagement." Heading to RSA Conference, February 24 28, 2020, in San Francisco? Visit Thycotic booth #655 in the South Hall and you could #DriveAwayFromRSA in the CEO's Jeep! Not attending? Join the conversation virtually with Thycotic CISO, Terence Jackson, on Tuesday, February 25, 2020, at 10:30 a.m. (PT), as he participates in the live video panel, " The Changing Face of Compromise ," presented by BrightTALK. For more information on Thycotic and its Partner Program, visit www.thycotic.com . About Thycotic Thycotic is the leading provider of cloud-ready privilege management solutions. Thycotic's security tools empower over 10,000 organizations, from small businesses to the Fortune 100, to limit privileged account risk, implement least privilege policies, control applications, and demonstrate compliance. Thycotic makes enterprise-level privilege management accessible for everyone by eliminating dependency on overly complex security tools and prioritizing productivity, flexibility and control. Headquartered in Washington, DC, Thycotic operates worldwide with offices in the UK and Australia. 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 and business award programs , business executives those with experience and knowledge judge the programs. 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. Thycotic Contact(s): Steve Kahan Jacqueline Velasco Thycotic Lumina Communications T: 202-802-9399 T: 408-680-0564 E: [email protected] E: [email protected] SOURCE Thycotic Related Links http://www.thycotic.com Hysteria around the coronavirus could lead to even more Chinese restaurants closing down around Australia unless diners return to their favourite local eateries. Some businesses are reporting a 50 per cent drop in customers as a result of unfounded fears around contracting the deadly coronavirus. The impact on Chinese restaurants across the country - with many forced to close their doors, including the long-established Shark Fin House in central Melbourne - has prompted a social media campaign urging Australians to pick up their chopsticks and dig in. Activist group Getup has launched 'I will eat with you' to encourage people to return to their favourite eateries. The impact of hysteria about coronavirus on Chinese restaurants across the country has prompted a social media campaign urging Australians to pick up their chopsticks and dig in Activist group Getup has launched 'I will eat with you' to encourage people to return to their favourite eateries Launching the campaign this week, the group urged people to take action and relieve some of the impacts the disease is having on the Australian economy. 'While other restaurants and public spaces are still buzzing, it is the Chinatown restaurants and Asian grocers that stand empty. Panic around the virus is unfairly impacting Chinese and Asian communities,' the campaign reads. 'If we don't take action people will lose their jobs, and their livelihoods.' Diners across the country are now showing their solidarity for business owners, pledging to support them in the wake of a tough few months. Diners across the country are now showing their solidarity for business owners, pledging to support them in the wake of a tough few months Melbourne mum Susie Cole pledged her support for Chinese community in a post on Facebook on Sunday. 'Last week our family (Mum, Josie, Mason & granddaughters Poppy & Daniella & me) ate at Harmony(Chinese) restaurant & had no qualms about coronavirus or anything else, but this week, iconic Shark Fin restaurant in Little Bourke St has closed after nearly 40 years & countless other family run Chinese restaurants are in peril because people are avoiding them for baseless fears,' she wrote. 'Please keep patronising the Chinese restaurants you love, please visit fire affected rural communities & spend money there, small businesses need customers to survive.' Melbourne mum Susie Cole pledged her support for Chinese community in a post on Facebook on Sunday. A social media campaign is aiming to help support struggling businesses by getting diners back through the doors Others were horrified to learn people had stopped going to eateries because of the hysteria- but said it seemed like the fear was greatest among the Chinese community itself. 'Deliberately ate at a Chinese restaurant in St Kilda. There were no Asian customers but quite a few non Asians. I queried the young Chinese cashier if this was normal, she said no and she confessed to being petrified having to work there,' the commenter wrote. 'The misinformation amongst the Chinese community is puzzling, especially if it means a number of restaurants going broke.' Getup: 'If we don't take action people will lose their jobs, and their livelihoods' Chatswood, in Sydney's Lower North Shore, and Eastwood in the north-west - which have large Chinese populations - have been bearing the brunt of the hysteria surrounding the disease, with some shops reporting that trade has slumped more than 70 per cent since the outbreak. The only shops that appear to be making money amid the health scare are chemists selling face-masks and hand-sanitiser. Owners of pharmacists and vitamin stores said they were busier than ever with some saying the demand for face masks has jumped by 300 per cent. Michael Lam, owner of Star Capital Seafood Restaurant on Chatswood's normally busy Victoria Avenue, has shut down his restaurant after seven years. Mr Lam previously told Daily Mail Australia he made the decision following weeks of poor sales as well as the Prime Minister's move to ban non-citizens from flying to Australia from China. 'Business has become terrible, usually by 11.30am the place is full and now we are lucky to get four or five people,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'As soon as the Prime Minister said flights from China were stopping, I decided to close.' Star Capital Seafood Restaurant on Chatswood's normally busy Victoria Avenue opened seven years ago but owner Michael Lam has decided to close the doors for good Star Capital Seafood Restaurant closed earlier this month after seven years of business Mr Lam said he had already been thinking about retiring, but Mr Morrison's announcement prompted him to make the decision earlier. 'This week we have been selling lobsters for $88 per kilogram, but last week they were $130 a kilo,' the business-owner said. 'The locals aren't coming out so we cannot sell, it's very, very bad.' Universities, schools, student accommodation providers, hotels, restaurants, tourist operators and airlines have been hit by ban, which may last for longer than a fortnight if the outbreak worsens. Education industry officials said the travel ban could cost their industry alone up to $8 billion in the worst case scenario. Local councils are pleading with customers to return to the usually bustling centres. The Star Capital Seafood Restaurant is practically empty of diners during a normally busy time at midday on a weekday Chatswood in Sydney's Lower North Shore has become a virtual ghost town with many residents wearing masks A worker at Tim's Barbeque Chatswood, who wished to remain anonymous, agreed that business wasn't very good in the area Chinese restaurants in Chatswood are practically empty as the suburb has turned into a ghost town Staff at Chatswood BBQ Kitchen said the situation was dire. 'There has been a big drop in business the last week,' worker Lee said. 'The manager says he wants to cry - there's no business and it's bad...and I've been noticing there's less people around.' A worker at Tim's Barbeque Chatswood, who wished to remain anonymous, agreed that business has taken a hit. 'It's very quiet in the area...business is not as good.' Just a few doors down at Chatswood BBQ Kitchen, staff said it is the same (Manager, Raymond, pictured) 'The manager says he wants to cry - there's no business and it's bad...and I've been noticing there's less people around,' worker Lee said. Despite small shop-owners admitting their business has dropped, pharmacists and vitamin stores are busier than ever It is a similar story in Eastwood where some shop owners have reported a downturn over more than 70 per cent since the coronavirus outbreak. Manager at Happigo Supermarket, Bobby, said the drop in sales was 'very quick' and business has been bad for nearly two weeks. 'The Chinese community has become very quiet...there's not many people on the street,' he said. 'People are scared of the coronavirus.' Manager at Happigo Supermarket, Bobby, said the drop in sales was 'very quick' and business has now been bad for one-and-a-half weeks Both areas are usually booming with a dense Chinese population, but the only stores that appear to be making money are chemists A worker at J & T BBQ, who wished to remain anonymous, also said business has been bad for the past three weeks. Owner of Nuzar Spicy Hot Pot, Jason, told Daily Mail Australia he had opened his shop just one-and-a-half weeks before the coronavirus outbreak occurred. 'The fear is spreading faster than anything...my business was here two weeks when it happened and my sales just dropped,' Jason said. 'My location is one of the best in the area, which comes with the highest rent... I can't even afford to pay my staff at the moment.' Jason said on Sunday he made a profit of only $200, and doesn't think it is going to get any better in the coming weeks. Ryde councillors are now launching an emergency 'Return to Eastwood' PR campaign to regenerate the area. Owner of Nuzar Spicy Hot Pot, Jason, told Daily Mail Australia he had opened his shop just one-and-a-half weeks before the coronavirus outbreak occurred Mayor Jerome Laxale and deputy mayor Simon Zhou have put forward a motion to promote local businesses to get owners back on their feet. The 'Eastwood Small Business Hardship' motion has called on the general manager to set up a $500,000 Small Business Hardship Fund to help Eastwood Town Centre. Part of the money will go towards subsidised gift vouchers to revamp the local economy. Mr Laxale said the main focus of the campaign was to educate people about coronavirus in the area to avoid misinformation being spread. 'Eastwood has been targeted with false information. The fact is Eastwood is safe and we want to educate the public and get the right facts out there,' he told the Northern District Times. 'The last three weeks it's been a ghost town and it's an incorrect perception of Eastwood. It's not good for local businesses and local employees. 'People are staying away from Eastwood and there is nothing out there to say Eastwood is not safe. I'm calling on the local MP Victor Dominello and the Premier to do the same.' There have been 14 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Australia, and more than 24,000 cases and more than 490 deaths globally. The cases have occurred in NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia. Ryde councillors are now launching an emergency 'Return to Eastwood' PR campaign to regenerate the area With US President Donald Trump claiming that India has not treated his country "very well" on the trade front, the Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday said the context in which the remarks were made was balance of trade and there have been efforts to address the concerns. Ahead of his India visit on February 24-25, Trump said that India has not treated his country "very well" on the trade front and indicated that a "very big" bilateral deal with New Delhi may not be signed before the American presidential election in November. Asked about the US President's comments, Ministry of External Affairs Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said it is important to understand the context in which the remarks were made. The context was balance of trade and efforts have been made to address concerns, he said. India is eagerly awaiting President Trump's visit and it will strengthen the bilateral global strategic ties, Kumar said. On how many agreements will be signed during Trump's India visit, Kumar said around five MoUs were under discussion. Asked whether the issues relating to H1B visa will figure in Modi-Trump talks, Kumar said they could come up. On the issue of eight Indians testing positive for the novel coronavirus on board the Diamond Princess cruise ship near Tokyo, Kumar said, "We are in touch with Japanese authorities." He also asserted that there is no ban on travel to or from China in view of the coronavirus outbreak. Asked about China's objection to Home Minister Amit Shah's visit to Arunachal Pradesh, Kumar said India's consistent position has been that the state is its integral and inalienable part. Objecting to visit to Arunachal by an Indian leader does not stand to reason, he said. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) But many of the people who cause problems are likely the ones who could benefit from a long-term city partnership with a mental health service provider. Jack Youngerman, a French-trained American artist whose profuse invention of abstract shapes in two and three dimensions opened up a new aesthetic vocabulary in the period immediately after Abstract Expressionism, died on Wednesday in Stony Brook, N.Y. He was 93. Janet Goleas, his studio manager and archivist, said the cause was complications of a fall. Mr. Youngerman, like many American artists in the late 1940s, studied in Paris on the G.I. Bill. Unlike them, he remained there, developing a distinctive style of abstraction based on organic shapes, drawing inspiration from the woodblock prints of Jean Arp and Wassily Kandinsky and, perhaps most decisively, the ink drawings of Henri Matisse. Mr. Youngermans fluid, emblem-like shapes embraced flatness and frontal views, leaping forward to meet the viewer with bold primary colors. The shapes, vaguely floral or leafy, flirted with representation but remained aloof, floating like mysterious essences in a timeless spirit world. Global Medical Imaging Market is forecasted to grow at 10.4% with factors such as increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and development of innovative medical imaging contrast agents. NEWARK, N.J., Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Data Bridge Market Research has added an exhaustive research study of the Global Medical Imaging Market detailing every single market driver and intricately analyzing the business vertical. The research report has abilities to raise as the most significant market worldwide as it has remained playing a remarkable role in establishing progressive impacts on the universal economy. The Research report presents a complete assessment of the Market and contains a future trend, current growth factors, attentive opinions, facts, and industry validated market data. Some are the key players taken under coverage for this study are Spectrum Health, RamSoft, Inc., InHealth Group, Radiology Reports online, Siemens Healthineers AG, Sonic Healthcare, RadNet, Inc., GE Healthcare (A subsidiary of GENERAL ELECTRIC), Alliance HealthCare Services, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Hologic Inc., Shimadzu Corporation, Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd and more. Medical imaging market is expected to gain market growth in the forecast period of 2020 to 2027. Data Bridge Market Research analyses that the Market is growing with a CAGR of 10.4% in the forecast period of 2020 to 2027 and expected to reach USD 265,334.23 million by 2027 from USD 120,237.71 million in 2019. Rising minimally invasive diagnostic and therapeutic interventional procedures and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases are the factors for the market growth. Get Sample Report + All Related Graphs & Charts @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/request-a-sample/?dbmr=global-medical-imaging-market How will the report help new companies to plan their investments in the Global Medical Imaging market? The Global Medical Imaging market research report classifies the competitive spectrum of this industry in elaborate detail. The report also mentions about the details such as the overall remuneration, product sales figures, pricing trends, gross margins, etc. Information about the sales & distribution area alongside the details of the company, such as company overview, buyer portfolio, product specifications, etc., are provided in the study. Visit to Report @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/reports/global-medical-imaging-market Key Pointers Covered in Medical Imaging Market Industry Trends and Forecast to 2027 Market Size Market Standards and Changes Market Trials in Different Regions Market Requirements in Different Regions Market Shares in Different Regions Recent Developments for Market Competitors Recent Market Value for Different Regions Sales Data for Market Competitors Key Vendors and Disruptors Study Supply Chain Competitiveness Value Chain Analysis Medical imaging can be thought of as a technique to create various internal images of the body for diagnosis and treatment of the disease. This technique is mainly useful in improving the health of people around the world, as it can help in the early diagnosis of some internal diseases and providing the right treatment for a particular disease. May also examine what has already been diagnosed with treatment. The technology of medical imaging is used at the numerous levels of patient management process, such as screening, diagnosis, therapy delivery, staging, and medical follow-up. For instance, According to the National Health Council, in America, approximately 133 million people were affected by chronic diseases in 2019 and it is estimated that in 2020 this number will grow up to 157 million with 81 million people having multiple conditions. Increasing technology advancements will also drive the market. Top Companies of Medical Imaging Market The major players covered in the report are Spectrum Health, RamSoft, Inc., InHealth Group, Radiology Reports online, Siemens Healthineers AG, Sonic Healthcare, RadNet, Inc., GE Healthcare (A subsidiary of GENERAL ELECTRIC), Alliance HealthCare Services, Koninklijke Philips N.V., Hologic Inc., Shimadzu Corporation, Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co., Ltd., CANON MEDICAL SYSTEMS CORPORATION, Carl Zeiss Ag, FUJIFILM Corporation, Hitachi, Ltd., MEDNAX Services, Inc., Carestream Health (A subsidiary of Onex Corporation), Teleradiology Solutions, UNILABS, ONRAD, Inc. among other domestic and global players. Market share data is available for global, North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa and South America separately. DBMR analysts understand competitive strengths and provide competitive analysis for each competitor separately. Grab Your Report at an Impressive 30% Discount! Please click here https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/inquire-before-buying/?dbmr=global-medical-imaging-market Global Medical Imaging Market Scope and Market Size Global Medical Imaging Market is segmented of the basis of type, modality, procedure, technology, patient age, application, end users. The growth among segments helps you analyse niche pockets of growth and strategies to approach the market and determine your core application areas and the difference in your target markets. Some of the Major Highlights of TOC covers: Chapter 1: Methodology & Scope Definition and forecast parameters Methodology and forecast parameters Data Sources Chapter 2: Executive Summary Business trends Regional trends Product trends End-use trends Chapter 3: Medical Imaging Industry Insights Industry segmentation Industry landscape Vendor matrix Technological and innovation landscape Chapter 4: Medical Imaging Market, By Region Chapter 5: Company Profile Business Overview Financial Data Product Landscape Strategic Outlook SWOT Analysis Download Details TOC @ https://www.databridgemarketresearch.com/toc/?dbmr=global-medical-imaging-market The country section of the report also provides individual market impacting factors and changes in regulation in the market domestically that impacts the current and future trends of the market. Data points such as new sales, replacement sales, country demographics, regulatory acts and import-export tariffs are some of the major pointers used to forecast the market scenario for individual countries. Also, presence and availability of global brands and their challenges faced due to large or scarce competition from local and domestic brands, impact of sales channels are considered while providing forecast analysis of the country data. How will the report help new companies to plan their investments in the Medical Imaging market? The Medical Imaging market research report classifies the competitive spectrum of this industry in elaborate detail. The report also mentions about the details such as the overall remuneration, product sales figures, pricing trends, gross margins, etc. Information about the sales & distribution area alongside the details of the company, such as company overview, buyer portfolio, product specifications, etc., are provided in the study. Increasing Cases of Chronic Diseases and New Technology Penetration Global Medical Imaging Market also provides you with detailed market analysis for every country growth in medical device industry with medical imaging sales, impact of technological development in contrast agents and changes in regulatory scenarios with their support for the medical imaging market. Competitive Landscape and Medical Imaging Market Share Analysis Global medical imaging market competitive landscape provides details by competitor. Details included are company overview, company financials, revenue generated, market potential, investment in research and development, new market initiatives, global presence, production sites and facilities, company strengths and weaknesses, product launch, product trials pipelines, product approvals, patents, product width and breadth, application dominance, technology lifeline curve. The above data points provided are only related to the companies focus related to global medical imaging market. Many joint ventures and developments are also initiated by the companies worldwide which are also accelerating the growth of global medical imaging market. For instance, In December 2019, GE Healthcare (General Electric Company) and Affidea (a pan-European leader in advanced clinical imaging) has signed an agreement to develop digital technologies and imaging in the Affidea network. The agreement contains 40 CT scanners, 60 new MRIs, 30 X-ray machines and 50 ultrasound equipment over the next 3 years. This agreement helped the company to increase its credibility in the market. In May 2019, Carstream Health has launched new software, ImageView software. This software helps in the digital revolution in its mobile X-ray system with advanced features of Microsoft Window 10 which eases the collection of detector performance data. This new software helps the company to offer accurate information to the patient. 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 Data Bridge Market Research: An absolute way to forecast what future holds is to comprehend the trend today! Data Bridge Market Research set itself forth 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: Jamie Hale/The Oregonian If you're looking for bald eagles, head south to the border. The Klamath Basin at the border between southern Oregon and northern California has become well-known among birders, especially those in search of waterfowl and raptors bald eagles in particular. Every winter, the Klamath Basin hosts the largest concentration of bald eagles in the continental U.S., according to the Klamath Basin Audubon Society. The birds tend to hang around between late November and early March, with the largest numbers showing up in January and February. At first light every morning, they leave their roosts in southern Oregon's Bear Valley National Wildlife Refuge, and head to the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges in northern California, where they spend the day feasting on waterfowl. The Lower Klamath refuge is probably the best place to see the eagles, where miles of winding access roads allow plenty of opportunities to spot them perched in trees, on signposts and in the grassy wetlands that fill the basin. It's a stunning sight to see. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A bald eagle flies across the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, with Mount McLoughlin in the distance. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A hawk perches on a sign at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A golden eagle spreads its wings in the morning sun overlooking one of the refuge wetlands. Don't Edit Last week, I set off to see the bald eagles for myself. I left Klamath Falls before dawn and drove 30 minutes south to the refuge. As soon as I crossed into California, I turned east onto a highway that parallels the border, soon granting access to the wetlands. The sun had barely broken the horizon, but already the eagles were out. I could see their silhouettes on the bare branches of trees shadows that revealed their great, folded wings and menacingly pointed beaks. My primary focus was on getting good photos of the birds. I didn't have much experience with wildlife photography, and a previous visit to the refuge a couple years ago ended in frustration. Getting decent photos of birds, I learned, requires a few basics: patience, good timing and a very long camera lens. At Lower Klamath, the network of access roads offers something of a double-edged sword: Cars can act as very useful mobile bird blinds, but the sound of crunching gravel beneath tires can easily scare the birds off. (At the Tule Lake refuge, photographers can utilize real bird blinds on the lakeshore to spy discreetly.) However, I found taking pictures from the car to be mostly a success. Eagles in the trees didn't seem too perturbed as I rolled up beside them, and one hawk even stayed put mere feet from the window. Don't Edit Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian The sun rises over the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge on the Oregon-California border. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A bald eagle feasts in the grasses surrounding the Lower Klamath wetlands. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A wooden platform leads to the edge of one of many wetland areas at the Lower Klamath refuge. Don't Edit The best place to look for eagles is in the trees that dot the refuge. With a flat terrain, it's easy to spot them from afar. A few trees were rooted farther off the main roads on the edges of canals, but they were still accessible by a short trail, so I decided to try my luck getting photos on foot. This may come as no surprise, but it's extremely difficult to sneak up on an eagle. I tried creeping up slowly. I tried walking up at a casual pace. I approached with my camera at the ready. I walked up with the lens hidden behind my back just in case it might appear threatening. Nothing worked, and the eagles all flew off long before I could get close. Still, I ended the morning with what I had come for: several great photos of raptors. But the eagles also left a more lasting impression. As I stared through the lens, I communed with the creatures, looking them in the eye, getting a feel for their energy, watching how they moved and interacted with the world around them. Bald eagles show great strength and grace, rising above the earthbound plane into the sky where they reign supreme. If we take a moment to stop and watch, there's so much the eagles can teach us. To get to the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge from Klamath Falls, take U.S. Route 97 south to the California border. Just across the border, turn left onto California State Route 161. In 6 miles, look for a gravel access road into the refuge on the right. The main entrance is another 3.6 miles east down Route 161. --Jamie Hale | jhale@oregonian.com | @HaleJamesB SEE MORE PHOTOS BELOW Don't Edit Don't Edit Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian Birds flock to the wetlands, with Mount McLoughlin in the distance at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A bald eagle flies above the Lower Klamath refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A bridge crosses a small canal, leading to trails deeper into the wetlands at the refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian Tundra swans gather in the wetlands in the morning sun. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A hawk perches on a sign at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Don't Edit Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A golden eagle perches at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian Birds flock to the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A hawk stands among the grass at the refuge wetlands. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian Canada geese fly over the Lower Klamath refuge shortly after dawn. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A bald eagle perches on a branch overlooking the wetlands. Don't Edit Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian Birds flock to wetlands at the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge on the Oregon-California border near Klamath Falls. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian A bird tweets in the brush at dawn, at the Lower Klamath refuge. Don't Edit Jamie Hale/The Oregonian The sun rises on Mount Shasta, seen from the Lower Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge on the Oregon-California border near Klamath Falls. Portis, a former newspaper reporter who apparently learned enough to swear off talking to the media, had been suffering from Alzheimer's in recent years. His brother, Jonathan Portis, told The Associated Press that he died in a hospice in Little Rock, Arkansas, his longtime residence. Charles Portis was among the most admired authors to nearly vanish from public consciousness in his own lifetime. His fans included Tom Wolfe, Roy Blount Jr. and Larry McMurtry, and he was often compared to Mark Twain for his plainspoken humor and wry perspective. Portis saw the world from the ground up, from bars and shacks and trailer homes, and few spun wilder and funnier stories. In a Portis novel, usually set in the South and south of the border, characters embarked on journeys that took the most unpredictable detours. In ``Norwood,`` an ex-Marine from Texas heads East in a suspicious car to collect a suspicious debt, but winds up on a bus with a circus dwarf, a chicken and a girl he just met. ``The Dog of the South`` finds one Ray Midge driving from Arkansas to Honduras in search of his wife, his credit cards and his Ford Torino. In ``Gringos,`` an expatriate in Mexico with a taste for order finds himself amid hippies, end-of-the-world cultists and disappearing friends. The public knew Portis best for ``True Grit,`` the quest of Arkansas teen Mattie Ross to avenge her father's murder. The novel was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1968 and was soon adapted (and softened) as a film showcase for John Wayne, who starred as Rooster Cogburn, the drunken, one-eyed marshal Mattie enlists to find the killer. The role brought Wayne his first Academy Award and was revived by the actor, much less successfully, in the sequel ``Rooster Cogburn.`` Rooster was so strong a character that a new generation of filmgoers and Oscar voters welcomed him back. In 2010, the Coen brothers worked up a less glossy, more faithful ``True Grit,`` featuring Jeff Bridges as Rooster and newcomer Hallie Steinfeld as Mattie. The film received 10 nominations, including best actor for Bridges, and brought new attention to Portis and his novel, which topped the trade paperback list of The New York Times. ``No living Southern writer captures the spoken idioms of the South as artfully as Portis does,'' Mississippi native Donna Tartt wrote in an afterword for a 2005 reissue of the novel. Portis was born in 1933 in El Dorado, Arkansas, one of four children of a school superintendent and a housewife whom Portis thought could have been a writer herself. As a kid, he loved comic books and movies and the stories he learned from his family. In a brief memoir written for The Atlantic Monthly, he recalled growing up in a community where the ratio was about ``two Baptist churches or one Methodist church per gin. It usually took about three gins to support a Presbyterian church, and a community with, say, four before you found enough tepid idolators to form an Episcopal congregation.`` He was a natural raconteur who credited his stint in the Marines with giving him time to read. After leaving the service, he graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1958 with a degree in journalism and for the next few years was a newspaper man, starting as a night police reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal and finishing as London bureau chief for the New York Herald Tribune. Fellow Tribune staffers included Wolfe, who regarded Portis as ``the original laconic cutup`` and a fellow rebel against the boundaries of journalism, and Nora Ephron, who would remember her colleague as a sociable man with a reluctance to use a telephone. His interview subjects included Malcolm X and J.D. Salinger, whom Portis encountered on an airplane. He was also a first-hand observer of the civil rights movement. In 1963, he covered a riot and the police beating of black people in Birmingham, Alabama. Around the same time, he reported on a Ku Klux Klan meeting, a dullish occasion after which ``the grand dragon of Mississippi disappeared grandly into the Southern night, his car engine hitting on about three cylinders.'' Anxious to write novels, Portis left the paper in 1964 and from Arkansas completed ``Norwood,`` published two years later and adapted for a 1970 movie of the same name starring Glen Campbell and Joe Namath. Portis placed his stories in familiar territory. He knew his way around Texas and Mexico and worked enough with women stringers from the Ozarks in Arkansas to draw upon them for Mattie's narrative voice in ``True Grit.`` He eventually settled in Little Rock, where he reportedly spent years working on a novel that was never released. ``Gringos,`` his fifth and last novel, came out in 1991. Portis published short fiction in The Atlantic during the 1990s, but was mostly forgotten before admiring essays in Esquire and the New York Observer by Ron Rosenbaum were noticed by publishing director Tracy Carns of the Overlook Press, which reissued all of Portis' novels. Some of his journalism, short stories and travel writings were published in the 2012 anthology ``Escape Velocity.'' In recent years, the author lived in open seclusion, a regular around Little Rock who drove a pickup truck, enjoyed an occasional beer and stepped away from reporters. He did turn up to collect The Oxford American's Award for Lifetime Achievement in Southern Literature and was known to answer the occasional letter from a reader. But otherwise Portis seemed to honor Mattie's code in ``True Grit'' for how to deal with journalists. ``I do not fool around with newspapers,'' Mattie says. ``The paper editors are great ones for reaping where they have not sown. Another game they have is to send reporters out to talk to you and get your stories free. I know the young reporters are not paid well and I would not mind helping those boys out with their `scoops' if they could ever get anything right.'' Guiseppe Barranco/The Enterprise, Photo Editor No doubt about it, its been a good week for industrial expansion in Southeast Texas. In Jefferson County, Exxon Mobil said it will add 29 high-paying jobs at its Beaumont refinery and other local plants over the next five years. In Orange County, county commissioners gave Chevron Phillips Chemical the incentive it wants with a 10-year, 100% tax abatement deal for a proposed $5.6 billion investment. Thats what area residents want to read about more jobs now, and the promise of even more later. These petrochemical plants and others form the base of this regions economy, and have for decades. But as much as these facilities are appreciated, there seems to be a growing awareness that Southeast Texans want a different kind of relationship, one that meets long-term needs as well as short-term ones. ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A passenger in a car who shot and wounded an Anchorage, Alaska, police officer over the weekend was a 16-year-old boy, police announced Wednesday. A second officer fired back and killed the juvenile gunman, police said. The boys name was not released. The bullet fired by the teen struck the first officers badge and deflected into his body armour, police said. While each investigation is different, in this case we felt it was important to share with everyone how close we came to having an officer seriously injured or killed in the line of duty, police said in the announcement. The department released photos of the damaged shield. These photos are a stark reminder of the dangers our officers sometimes face while protecting our city, the department said. The shooting occurred early Sunday when officers with the Impaired Driving Enforcement Unit stopped a sedan at the main access point into downtown Anchorage from the north. The car carried a male driver and four male passengers, police said. As the car was stopped, a passenger in the back seat pulled out a gun and fired shots at the officers, police said. The officer hit by the bullet did not fire his service weapon. The uninjured officer, identified Wednesday by authorities as Officer Jason Cusack, a member of the department since 2015, fired at the teen, who was hit in the upper body and killed. The officer struck by the gunman sustained non-life threatening injuries, police said, due to the body armour. The state Office of Special Prosecutions will review Cusacks use of deadly force and determine whether it was justified. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-21 02:06:45|Editor: Shi Yinglun Video Player Close Policemen stand guard outside the London Central Mosque after a stabbing incident in London, Britain, Feb. 20, 2020. A man has been arrested at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder after reports of a stabbing in a mosque in London, the Metropolitan Police confirmed Thursday. (Photo by Ray Tang/Xinhua) LONDON, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- A man has been arrested at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder after reports of a stabbing in a mosque in London, the Metropolitan Police confirmed Thursday. Police were called to the mosque near Regents Park in London at 3.10 p.m. (1510 GMT) following reports of the stabbing, said the Metropolitan Police on Twitter. London Ambulance workers also rushed to the scene, where they found an injured man in his 70s, and treated him before taking the man to hospital. His condition has been assessed as non life-threatening. A Twitter user posted footage of a white man wearing a red top and jeans, sitting crossed-legged in the mosque, apparently being held in cuffs behind his back by a police officer. A crime scene has been put in place as inquiries continue. Detectives investigating the incident do not believe it to be terror-related, according to the police. "I'm deeply saddened to hear of the attack at the London Central Mosque. It's so awful that this should happen, especially in a place of worship. My thoughts are with the victim and all those affected," British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Twitter shortly after the incident. According to local media, the attacker was a regular visitor to the mosque. He stabbed the victim in the neck inside the mosque during afternoon prayers. The incident came after knife crime in London has risen to a new high amid a nationwide surge in blade-offending. According to the British Office for National Statistics, 15,080 knife offences were recorded in the capital during the 12 months to the end of last September. Knife crimes in Britain fell after 2009, but since 2014 there has been a gradual rise, according to official statistics. GATINEAU, Que. - Canada and its Western Hemisphere allies ended their latest summit on Thursday by calling on the rest of the democratic world to join them in inspiring downtrodden Venezuelans to peacefully replace their dictator. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Minister of Foreign Affairs Francois-Philippe Champagne speaks to reporters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on Sunday, Feb. 9, 2020. Canada is hosting the gathering of foreign ministers today from the coalition of Western Hemisphere countries who are trying to solve the Venezuela crisis. Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne is hosting the Lima Group in Gatineau, Que. today. The group is a coalition of regional countries, minus the United States. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick GATINEAU, Que. - Canada and its Western Hemisphere allies ended their latest summit on Thursday by calling on the rest of the democratic world to join them in inspiring downtrodden Venezuelans to peacefully replace their dictator. But beyond their expressions of solidarity, and a clear call for a new and fair and democratic round of presidential elections, they offered no practical steps on how to bring stability to Venezuela, now hobbled by a refugee crisis and economic collapse under a dictator they deem illegitimate. "We need to reinvigorate our efforts," Foreign Affairs Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne said Thursday as he wrapped the Lima Group meeting in Gatineau, Que. "Today, my colleagues from the Lima Group, we are issuing an appeal to all countries who share our desire to see a return to democracy, to join together." Canada hosted the gathering of foreign ministers and senior diplomats from the coalition of more than a dozen Western Hemisphere countries, minus the United States, who are trying to solve the Venezuela crisis. Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne removes a translation headphones as he listens to opening remarks at the start of a meeting of Lima Group ministers in Gatineau, Thursday February 20, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld The meeting was part of a new push for a presidential election in Venezuela, one aimed at ousting the country's dictator president, Nicolas Maduro. Canada last hosted the Lima Group one year ago, and that meeting resulted in a call to Venezuela's military to peacefully switch sides to the opposition, but that never happened. Canada and dozens of other countries recognize opposition legislator Juan Guaido as Venezuela's legitimate leader, and view Maduro as an illegitimate president who stole his country's last election in 2018. "The solution needs to be, in the first place, a Venezuelan solution with the support of the international community. This is part of the message ... We are sending a strong message of unity behind the only way to return Venezuela to democracy," said Peru's Foreign Minister Gustavo Meza-Cuadra. Guaido was not at the meeting at the Canadian Museum of History across the Ottawa River from Parliament Hill, but was recently in Ottawa as part of a multi-country tour of Europe and the U.S. to bolster support for this democracy-building efforts. "His international tour clearly demonstrated how strongly the world supports a return to democracy in Venezuela," said Champagne. Champagne said Guaido told him privately that he relies on the Lima Group to provide momentum to him and his people. The United Nations estimates that six million Venezuelans will have fled their country by the year's end, as its economic, health and education systems collapse. The exodus has fuelled concern among some UN officials that the migration out of Venezuela and into neighbouring countries might be irreversible as new migrants start new lives and Maduro clings to power in their hollowed-out country. Some fear that Venezuela, once oil-rich and prosperous, might be on a slide toward becoming a failed state. "We are extremely concerned on the political, economic and humanitarian situation inside Venezuela and also outside because of the big exodus of Venezuelans to the region and to the world," said Meza-Cuadra. Ben Rowswell, Canada's former ambassador there, said the Lima Group's decision appeal to the broader international community was a smart move given the lack of progress in the last year. "In order to do that, they're willing to narrow their set of demands to one critical issue: free and fair elections for both the president and parliamentary level," Rowswell, now the president of the Canadian International Council think-tank, said in an interview. "There are opponents of democratic transition in the international community who have successfully blocked international consensus. Russia is the most prominent example," he said, referring to its meddling in the recent re-election of Venezuela's parliamentary speaker, which he said was an attempt to undermine Guaido. "There is power in there being a wide swath of the international community being committed to free and fair elections." This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 20, 2020. Walmart Inc might finally have found the sweet spot in Japan's food market with a fast-growing venture ranked third in a nascent online grocery sector, as the brick-and-mortar stores it bought into two decades ago continue their search for profit. The barely year-old tie-up between the U.S. supermarket chain's Seiyu and local e-commerce firm Rakuten Inc clocked 30% sales growth for late October through December versus the same period a year earlier when Seiyu was going it alone, said Rakuten Seiyu NetSuper Chief Executive Tamae Takeda. "We're doing even better since the start of the new year," Takeda told Reuters. Concerns over the ongoing coronavirus epidemic may be encouraging people to try the service, she said. "People aren't really wanting to go out." The change in fortune is a boost for Walmart as it steps up its rivalry with Amazon.com Inc in its home market where retailers are racing to deliver online orders faster. It also demonstrates that greater confidence in online services and improved logistics can win over Japanese shoppers often considered too picky about freshness to buy produce through the internet, analysts said. Helping drive overall growth, Takeda said, was demand for time-saving solutions, particularly as an increasing proportion of mothers work. Government data showed over 70% of Japanese women with children under 18 work, versus 50% just 20 years ago. Helping the venture in particular is Seiyu's access to Rakuten's 99 billion members, expanding its reach beyond its 333 stores. Rakuten, in turn, has benefited from Seiyu's ties with local suppliers, helping it fight back against Amazon.com. Together, they are able to better ease the pressure of a shrinking labour market which has driven up delivery costs and prompted Seiyu's rivals such as Uny, owned by Pan Pacific International Holdings Corp , to abandon e-commerce. PROFIT IN SIGHT Seiyu entered e-commerce in 2000, an early start which analysts said helped propel it to third place in the online grocery sector. It trails only bigger supermarkets Aeon Co Ltd and Seven & I Holdings Co Ltd's Ito-Yokado, and is ahead of Amazon, showed a Statista consumer poll. Takeda declined to disclose user numbers or sales, but also placed the venture third. The former McKinsey & Co consultant said profitability was "in sight" although the venture would prioritise growth for another two to three years. That contrasts with Walmart's overall story in the country. The U.S. firm entered Japan in 2002 buying 6% of Seiyu, building up its stake before a full takeover in 2008. It slashed costs and closed unprofitable stores but has mostly recorded losses. Many expected it to go the way of foreign peers including Britain's Tesco PLC and France's Carrefour SA which bowed out of Japan. Last year, Walmart moved to end on-and-off speculation of an imminent exit, saying it hoped to eventually list Seiyu while retaining a majority stake. Meanwhile, growth online has prompted Seiyu's venture to plan a second logistics centre for this year to bolster scale and efficiency - considered crucial to offset delivery costs. Takeda said the company was discussing setting up more. That is in expectation of online shopping accounting for 10% of households' 60 trillion yen ($539 billion) grocery spending from around 2.5%, she said, without giving a time frame. "It is true that Japanese people appreciate fresh food. But people are realising you don't have to go to the supermarket to get fresh food," said Roy Larke at researcher JapaneseConsuming. "Long term, we will get there." Company prepares to bring Kuida CBD brand to Spain with receipt of "no objection" letter from TSXV, subject to complying with all regulatory requirements in Spain with receipt of "no objection" letter from TSXV, subject to complying with all regulatory requirements in As previously announced, Khiron has fulfilled E.U. cosmetic product regulatory requirements for seven Kuida products Expands on previously announced Kuida entry to the UK Company further prepares for Kuida to enter the Swiss market, conditional on TSXV approval, representing a skincare market of US$540 million in 2018 (Source: Euromonitor) in 2018 (Source: Euromonitor) Spain skincare market estimated at US$1.7 billion in 2019 (Source: Euromonitor) TORONTO, Feb. 20, 2020 /CNW/ - Khiron Life Sciences Corp. ("Khiron" or the "Company") (TSXV: KHRN ), (OTCQB: KHRNF), (Frankfurt: A2JMZC), a vertically integrated cannabis leader with core operations in Latin America, announced today its intent to bring the Company's Kuida CBD brand to the Spanish market. This follows receipt of a "no objection" letter from the TSXV specific to Spain, and is subject to meeting all regulatory approvals in that country. With the previously announced fulfillment of E.U. cosmetic notification regulatory requirements Khiron will prepare to commercialize Kuida to a combined skincare market of over US$6.0 billion. (Source: Euromonitor) "As our European operations ramp up, we are able to bring our unique products, consumer experience and scientific capabilities from Latin America into one of the world's fastest growing markets. Entry for our Kuida brand into Spain, and later Switzerland, will represent another milestone in the Company's strategy to serve consumers across multiple categories and markets," comments Tejinder Virk, President, Khiron Europe. Kuida, the first consumer brand of Khiron's wellness business unit, brings the benefits of cannabidiol (CBD) to a comprehensive portfolio of skin and body care products for women. Kuida was launched in Colombia in October 2018 through retail, wholesale and online channels and is now available nationwide and through e-commerce channels. As the Company expands Kuida distribution in Europe, an initial soft launch in the UK will be followed by a strategic marketing and retail campaign. Kuida will be a featured exhibitor at Cosmoprof Worldwide Bologna 2020, which attracted over 265,000 visitors in 2019 and is the largest such event for attendees to learn more about market leading products and to place orders. For more information on Kuida visit https://kuidaskincare.com/en/ About Khiron Life Sciences Corp. Khiron Life Sciences Corp. is positioned to be the dominant integrated cannabis company in Latin America. Khiron has core operations in Latin America and is fully licensed in Colombia for the cultivation, production, domestic distribution, and international export of both tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) medical cannabis. The company delivers best in class regulatory compliance, has the first approved set of CBD cosmetic products on shelf in Colombia, and is currently facilitating testing to meet and surpass all license requirements for commercial cannabis derived products. With a focused regional strategy and patient oriented approach, the Company combines global scientific expertise, agricultural advantages, branded product market entrance experience and education to drive prescription and brand loyalty to address priority medical conditions such as chronic pain, epilepsy, depression and anxiety in the Latin American market of over 620 million people. The Company is led by Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Alvaro Torres, together with an experienced executive team, and a knowledgeable Board of Directors that includes former President of Mexico, Vicente Fox. Visit Khiron online at www.khiron.ca and on Instagram @khironlife Cautionary Notes Forward-Looking Statements This press release may contain certain "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of applicable securities legislation. All information contained herein that is not historical in nature may constitute forward-looking information. Khiron undertakes no obligation to comment analyses, expectations or statements made by third-parties in respect of Khiron, its securities, or financial or operating results (as applicable). Although Khiron believes that the expectations reflected in forward-looking statements in this press release are reasonable, such forward-looking statement has been based on expectations, factors and assumptions concerning future events which may prove to be inaccurate and are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, certain of which are beyond Khiron's control, including the risk factors discussed in Khiron's Annual Information Form which is available on Khiron's SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com. The forward-looking information contained in this press release is expressly qualified by this cautionary statement and are made as of the date hereof. Khiron disclaims any intention and has no obligation or responsibility, except as required by law, to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. United States Disclaimer This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any of the 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 (as such term is defined in Regulation S under the U.S. Securities Act) unless registered under the U.S. Securities Act and applicable state securities laws or an exemption from such registration is available 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 press release. Investor Contacts: Chris Naprawa, President, T: +1 (416) 705-1144, E: cnaprawa@khiron.ca; Media Contact: Jon Packer, Vice President, Communications, T: +1 (416) 543-9179, E: jpacker@khiron.ca Share this article Whatsapp Facebook Twitter Linkedin Budi Sutrisno (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta Thu, February 20, 2020 12:02 692 7f440ff09e92db75a02bbad20659a1ab 1 Politics megawati-soekarnoputri,PDI-P,Politician,regional-elections,2024,2024-presidential-election,political-dynasty,Jokowi,SBY,Susilo-Bambang-Yudhoyono,Agus-Harimurti-Yudhoyono,puan-maharani Free Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) chairperson Megawati Soekarnoputri has said politicians should not force their children to join the 2024 general election, calling the practice annoying. In a speech in front of the PDI-Ps nominees for the upcoming regional elections, she said senior politicians should not force themselves to run for office and that it was time for political regeneration. Yes, we are old and fading away. It is the youth who have to advance and should be encouraged, Megawati said on Wednesday as quoted in a statement released by the PDI-P. She added, however, that this regeneration did not mean that the politicians children should be the ones to run in their place. If their children did not have the necessary skills, she said, they should not be forced. Its annoying me. Its as if we dont have enough people. [You should treat] the partys members as your own kids, too, you know, she said. If not their children, [politicians force] their wives or nephews and nieces [to run]. Megawatis daughter, Puan Maharani, is the current speaker of the House of Representatives, after previously holding the position of a coordinating minister during President Joko Jokowi Widodos first term. Megawati said, however, that Puan has reached political heights not because she had been asked or forced by her mother but because of Puans own hard work. There were people who said Puan becoming the House speaker was because of me helping her. How was that possible? It was because her voice was loud and nobody could ignore it, Megawati said. Megawati added that if the PDI-P wanted to develop as a party, it should not become just a group of families. This is the last time I will give opportunities to that persons child or this persons wife. In 2024, I hope that its all young people that run. Read also: Elections in 2020 likely to once again be marred by 'political dynasties' A number of political bluebloods are set to take part in the 2020 regional elections, including Jokowis eldest son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, who is looking to run in the Surakarta mayoral election in Central Java, and Jokowis son-in-law, Bobby Nasution, who has thrown his hat into the Medan mayoral race in North Sumatra. Vice President Maruf Amins daughter, Siti Nur Azizah, is also set to run for South Tangerang mayor in Banten, while Cabinet Secretary Pramono Anungs son, Hanindhito Himawan Pramana, recently announced his readiness to run in the Kediri regency election in East Java. Meanwhile, Democratic Party deputy chairman and the eldest son of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Agus Harimurti Yudhoyono, is widely considered to be among potential 2024 presidential candidates. When asked about whether he would run in 2024, Agus said he did not want to think about what-ifs. I just want to continue to prepare myself to carry out any duties that Insyaallah [God willing] will be given to me, he said recently as quoted by Antara. Qantas is reducing its flights from Australia to Asia as the coronavirus outbreak worsens and threatens to slash up to $150million from its earnings. With 2,000 dead worldwide and another 75,000 infected, including 15 Australians, the airline has announced it would cut its carrying capacity by 16 per cent until at least the end of May. The Sydney to Shanghai service, Qantas International's main route to mainland China, was suspended last week and will remain so, the flying kangaroo carrier said on Thursday. Flights from Sydney to Hong Kong will be halved from 14 a week to seven. Scroll down for video Qantas is reducing its flights from Australia to Asia as the coronavirus outbreak worsens and threatens to slash up to $150million from its earnings. The Sydney to Shanghai service, Qantas International's main route to mainland China, was suspended last week and will remain so, Qantas said on Thursday. Pictured is Shanghai's Pudong International Airport this month Direct services to Hong Kong from Brisbane will be reduced from seven to four while flights from Melbourne will be trimmed from seven to five. Chinese cities won't the only ones affected, with Qantas also announcing it will reduce by 250 the number available seats on Melbourne to Singapore flights. Passengers will be transported on smaller Boeing 787s instead a larger Airbus A380. Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said the coronavirus had dented demand for flights to Asia, and not just China. 'Coronavirus resulted in the suspension of our flights to mainland China and we're now seeing some secondary impacts with weaker demand on Hong Kong, Singapore and to a lesser extent Japan,' he said. 'Other key routes, like the US and UK, haven't been impacted.' Flights from Sydney to Hong Kong will be halved from 14 a week to seven. Pictured are people wearing protective masks in Hong Kong Chinese cities won't the only ones affected, with Qantas also announcing it will reduce by 250 the number available seats on Melbourne to Singapore flights. Passengers will be transported on smaller Boeing 787s instead a larger Airbus A380. Pictured is Chinatown in Singapore Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce said the coronavirus had dented demand for flights to Asia, and not just China Qantas has told the Australian Securities Exchange coronavirus threatened to wipe $100million to $150million from its underlying earnings. The airline's half-year earnings for the six months to December 31 2019 showed it made a statutory profit after tax of $445million, which was 3.9 per cent weaker compared with the same period in 2018. The airline's budget carrier subsidiary Jetstar is also battling the coronavirus and will cut its Asian seat capacity by 15 per cent until the end of May, affecting flights from Australia to Japan and Thailand. Like its parent company Qantas, Jetstar's Singapore, Japan and Vietnam carriers have also suspended flights to mainland China. China was Australia's fifth most popular overseas destination in 2019 with 608,000 trips made there, Australian Bureau of Statistics overseas travel data released this week showed. Despite the coronavirus announcement, the Qantas share price has climbed on Thursday morning, rising from $6.30 to $6.71 in early trade on the ASX. Ninety-nine per cent of cases have been in China, where tens of millions of residents are in lockdown to contain the escalating crisis Passengers will be transported on smaller Boeing 787s instead a larger Airbus A380 (like the one pictured) Three weeks ago, Mad Money host Jim Cramer raised eyebrows after claiming that the oil industry was in the death knell phase and that fossil fuel stocks are now like tobacco stocks. Im done with fossil fuels ... theyre just done. Were starting to see divestment all over the world, Cramer said. Youre seeing divestiture by a lot of different funds. Its going to be a parade. Its going to be a parade that says, Look, these are tobacco and were not going to own them, Cramer opined in his usual fashion. In the past, Cramer has received plenty of blowback about his stance on fossil fuels, and this time it was not any different. The polemic by the hard-hitting former hedge funder rubbed many in energy circles the wrong way, with some finding the claims flippant and outlandish. One aggrieved respondent was Chevron Corp. chairman and CEO Michael Wirth, who predictably came to the industrys defense. Oil Not in Terminal Decline Wirth said its unfair to compare the oil and gas industry to tobacco because oil actually plays a big role in the global economy, while tobacco can be more easily done away with. The reality is the world runs on the energy system that we have today, Wirth said Friday on CNBCs Squawk Box. I think the comparison to tobacco is not an appropriate one at all. If tobacco use were ceased today, I think the world would be just fine. If we ceased use of all hydrocarbon products today, the world would not be fine, and I think thats the reality. Which is obviously true. Tobacco and alcohol stocks are regarded as sin stocks because people will continue to happily consume these commodities even in poor economic cycles--their life-threatening side effects notwithstanding. Yet in the global north, the cigarette industry has been in terminal decline for decades now, with sales volumes recently tumbling in the double-digits. Incumbents like Phillip Morris and Altria are only barely hanging on after launching a series of RRPs (Reduced Risk Products) that can replace some of this lost business. Related: The Worlds Top LNG Producer Is In Trouble Further, tobacco products exhibit lower price inelasticity compared to energy products like oil and gas, meaning demand is more strongly influenced by price. One study done in 28 EU countries found that a 10% increase in the price of cigarettes resulted in a significant reduction in demand. The paper concluded by saying that all EU countries ought to levy higher tobacco taxes in order to increase consumer prices and in effect reduce cigarette consumption. In contrast, the demand for oil is relatively inelastic with respect to price, mainly because oil has few direct substitutes. Similarly, demand for oil is relatively inelastic with respect to income especially in the advanced economies If anything, oil demand is still rising mainly fueled by growing energy demand across the globe. In 2018, the IEA reported that worldwide energy demand grew 2.3% Y/Y, the fastest pace over the decade. Fossil fuels met nearly 70% of that demand growth with renewables meeting the rest. In 2019, oil demand grew sluggishly during the first half of the year before surging 1.1 million b/d during the third quarter. Supply growth, however, clocked in at more than 1.5 million b/d after Saudi Arabias situation normalized, which in effect kept the market oversupplied. The IEA sees oil demand continuing to grow into the 2030s, while peak oil forecasts--the theorized point in time when the maximum rate of extraction of petroleum will be reached before entering a terminal decline--range from the early 2020s to the 2040s. Its quite evident that whats ailing the oil and gas industry is not dramatically lower consumption--as is the case with the tobacco industry--but rather persistent oversupply mainly due to American shale. Can Oil Bounce Back? Wirth made a bold prediction that the sector can and will recover, and that the stocks will head higher once again. Weve been in a rough period of time. Commodity prices had a historic collapse last decade. Theyre still very low because weve got a well supplied market, and I think companies have had to re-size their investments accordingly, he said. Related: The New Must-Have For Energy Hedge Funds Like everyone else, we do not have any timelines when that might happen. However, Its blindingly obvious that supply/demand imbalances are mostly to blame and the divestments that Cramer is talking about here are likely to persist until oil and gas companies scale down production appropriately, i.e., the big shakeout. That said, oil demand could be sluggish at the moment but is bound to keep growing in the foreseeable future as the global economy bounces back. The clean energy industry is growing at an admirable clip, but not quite fast enough to meet the worlds energy demand, which is growing even faster. The belief that the fossil fuel industry is about to disappear forever can spook investors more than any old hat bearish argument ever could. However, its a big stretch to say that oil has already entered a terminal decline phase akin to the tobacco industry as Cramer has purported. By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com More Top Reads From Oilprice.com: It could have been written by any company board director. With mentions of investment, risk assessments and logistics, the document cited a board at war with each other, and the need to build mutual trust. The language was formal, polite and business-like. And that was exactly how Rohan Peter Arnold intended it, when he wrote to a man known only as Ivan in December 2017. Murrumbateman businessman Rohan Arnold was sentenced on Thursday. The letter feigned legitimacy, but its subject was anything but: a large-scale international drug syndicate was desperately seeking the return of 1.28 tonnes of cocaine, which had mistakenly landed with another criminal group on its way from China to Australia. By Neil Jerome Morales MANILA (Reuters) - Southeast Asia's holiday hotspots, hit by billions in lost business from Chinese tourists, are turning to markets closer to home to soften the blow from travel restrictions caused by the coronavirus epidemic. To make up for foregone revenues, firms in the region are dangling discounted airfares, hotel accommodation and tour add-ons in a bid to boost domestic travellers. Home to rich culture, white sand beaches, diverse marine life, lively nightlife and affordable tours, Southeast Asia is the favourite for Chinese tourists, the region's top foreign visitors. But travel restrictions on China, the origin of the new coronavirus, since late January have led to losses in the region's hospitality sector. In the Philippines, the government and tourism players last week launched a travel campaign led by President Rodrigo Duterte. "Come with me and be my travel companion. I'll be travelling around the Philippines," Duterte said in video address, offering assurances that the virus posed no risks to local tourists in their own country. Member firms of the Tourism Congress of the Philippines are offering discounts of up to 50% on hotels, free upgrades and complimentary items like breakfasts. Other firms are offering individual customers corporate or government rates for tours and hotel accommodation, which are 15% to 30% cheaper, Arwin Paul Lingat, president of a tourism officers group, told Reuters. Manila's Golden Phoenix Hotel has slashed its rates by two-thirds, its marketing director Christine Ann Ibarreta said. LOCAL SWEETENERS China's health authorities are reporting thousands of new cases daily of the coronavirus infection, which has killed 1,868 people, mostly in China. The flu-like virus' spread has also prompted countries to shut doors to Chinese travellers, who are a major source of growth for many Southeast Asian economies. Southeast Asia welcomed more than 29 million mainland travellers in 2018, up 15% from a year earlier, data from the ASEAN Statistical Yearbook 2019 showed. That was nearly double the entire European market and almost five times the number of North American tourists. Story continues Southeast Asian airlines are making fares attractive for cost-sensitive locals. Indonesia's biggest budget carrier, Lion Air, is reducing fares by up to 60% on select flights. Philippines' largest carrier, Cebu Pacific, which has refunded 1.5 billion pesos (22 million) to passengers, is offering seats on flights for as little as $2 before taxes while Philippine Airlines [PHL.UL] launched promotional discounts of 20% to 40%. Thailand, Southeast Asia's biggest market for Chinese tourists, is now offering special packages for local elderly, which allows their expenses to be used for their children's tax deductions. The Thai government is also providing tax breaks and soft loans to help slow job losses. Vietnam, the region's second-largest market for Chinese tourists, said it would waive entrance fees to some tourist attractions when the outbreak is over. It has also simplified visa procedures for some non-Chinese arrivals. The coronavirus epidemic could wipe $5.9 billion to $7.7 billion from Vietnam's tourism earnings in the next three months. Indonesia, Southeast Asia's largest economy, has also pledged to boost spending and incentives to soften the virus's business impact. Bali, Indonesia's main tourist magnet because of its aquamarine water, white sand beaches and majestic cliffs, has seen 20,000 cancellations, said Hariyadi Sukamdani, head of the country's hotels and restaurants association. In Kuala Lumpur, a 3,600-member industry group has planned for April its first ever "Cuti Cuti Malaysia" (Holiday in Malaysia) travel fair, exclusively focused on domestic tourism. "Individual hotels, airlines, travel companies, theme parks, dive resorts, have reduced their normal rates, some by 20% and 30%," Tan Kok Liang, the industry group's president, told Reuters. Despite the big push, industry experts do not expect local business to do much more than cushion the hit to the region's tourism sector. In the Philippines, government and industry officials say domestic tourism can realistically only recoup 10%-20% of the estimated 22 billion pesos ($435 million) in monthly foregone revenues. "The domestic, to be honest, will not make up for what the international market brings here," Tourism Congress President Jose Clemente told a congressional hearing. "Our objective right now is just to survive the storm...What we're trying to do is to have some cash flow." (Reporting by Neil Jerome Morales in Manila; Additional Reporting by Orathai Sriring in Bangkok, Phuong Nguyen in Hanoi, Liz Lee and Krishna Das in Kuala Lumpur, Maikel Jefriando and Gayatri Suroyo in Jakarta, and Makiko Yamazaki in Tokyo; Writing by Neil Jerome Morales; Editing by Martin Petty, Matthew Tostevin and Sam Holmes) Refresh this page throughout the Democratic debate for live updates Six Democratic presidential candidates meet in Nevada for the third debate of 2020, held days before the state holds its caucus on Feb. 22. The third Democratic debate of 2020 is scheduled to start at 9 p.m. on NBC and MSNBC. It will be held at the Paris Theater in Las Vegas and is also hosted by The Nevada Independent. The debate will stream live on NBC News NOW, NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News mobile app, NBC News and MSNBCs Facebook pages and online at The Nevada Independent. The candidates take the stage at tonight's #DemDebate in Las Vegas. Live blog: https://t.co/co8dXPv7dF pic.twitter.com/OTRtT2NEzC NBC News (@NBCNews) February 20, 2020 The event will also be broadcast live in Spanish on Universo, the Telemundo mobile app and website and Telemundos Facebook page. Former Vice President Joe Biden, U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; former mayor of South Bend, Ind. Pete Buttigieg and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will take the stage. Democratic presidential candidates, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., right, speaks as former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg looks on during a Democratic presidential primary debate Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC. (AP Photo/John Locher)AP Are billionaires bad? Moderators asked Democrats whether billionaires should exist, bringing up a topic from a previous debate that finds new relevance with Bloomberg on stage. Sanders says there is a grotesque distribution of income in the United States and said Bloombergs wealth -- estimated to reach $63 billion -- is immoral. Bloomberg said he worked hard for his success and taxes should be raised on the richest Americans. Bloomberg said hes giving all his money away to make the country better and support Democrats. Sanders said Bloomberg and other billionaires used their wealth to support Republicans that lowered their taxes. WATCH: Bloomberg: "I can't think of a way that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get re-elected than listening to this conversation." #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/xtt8qNh8jH NBC News (@NBCNews) February 20, 2020 Bloomberg said Americans wont go for Sanders democratic-socialist policies. He also highlighted Sanders millionaire status, calling him a hypocrite for owning three houses. This is ridiculous," Bloomberg said. "Were not going to throw out capitalism. We tried that. Other countries called that. It was called communism and it just didnt work. Klobuchar said the tax code is tilted against the average American. As the lone person onstage whos not a millionaire, let alone a billionaire, I think its time that the voices of people that havent been heard in Washington actually be brought to Capitol Hill. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/Rcxl5lOEh0 Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) February 20, 2020 Klobuchar defends forgetfulness Klobuchar took responsibility for being unable to name Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in a recent town hall, saying she experienced momentary forgetfulness. Klobuchar touted her support for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a rewritten North American trade deal approved this year. Buttigieg scoffed at the idea Klobuchar wouldnt know who is leading the country directly south of the United States. Youre on the committee that oversees border security, he said. Youre on the committee that does trade. Youre literally in the part of the committee thats overseeing these things. And were not able to speak to the first thing about the politics to our south. Klobuchar asked Buttigieg if he suggested she is dumb or mocking her. Warren jumped in to defend her, saying Klobuchar simply made a mistake. Democratic presidential candidate, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg speaks during a Democratic presidential primary debate Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC. (AP Photo/John Locher)AP Bloomberg says tax returns will be out soon Democrats called on Bloomberg to release his tax returns immediately, though the New York billionaire said its not that easy. Bloomberg said his large fortune makes it difficult to compile the necessary documents. "We're releasing them, they'll be out in a few weeks, and that's as fast as I can do it," Bloomberg said. Bloombergs opponents said the lack of transparency is comparable to Trumps refusal to release his tax returns. When it comes to tax returns, everyone up here has released their tax returns, except Mayor Bloomberg. It is a major issue because the President of the United States has been hiding behind his tax returns, even when courts order him to come forward those tax returns. #DemDebate Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) February 20, 2020 Warren also called on Bloomberg to release former employees from non-disclosure agreements that allegedly keep them from speaking publicly about workplace sexual harassment they experienced. Bloomberg said that the agreements were made consensually," but Warren says hes keeping women muzzled. We have very few nondisclosure agreements," Bloomberg said. "None of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didnt like a joke I told. Warren criticizes opponents health care plans Warren argued she is the only candidate with a solid plan to deliver a better health care system for Americans. Her Medicare for All plan proposes moving all Americans into a government-run system that would eliminate private insurance. Buttigieg has proposed a Medicare for all who want it alternative, which would give people the option to join the government system if they so choose. Warren slammed Buttigiegs plan, saying it was thought up by his consultants. She also said Klobuchar has no real plan, calling it a post-it note, insert plan here. Warren said Sanders support for Medicare for All is a good start, but criticized him for not explaining how he would pay for it. Buttigieg condemns abusive Sanders supporters Buttigieg said Sanders needs to be held accountable for some of his toxic supporters. Sanders said he disowns supporters who levied vicious attacks against his Democratic opponents online but said they come from a small minority of people on social media. They are not part of my movement," he said. Buttigieg said that doesnt go far enough. Leadership is about what you draw out of people. Its about how you inspire people to act, Buttigieg said. I think you have to accept some responsibility and ask yourself what it is about your campaign in particular that seems to be motivating this behavior more than others. Sanders gets the first shot at Bloomberg Sanders received the first question of the night, an opportunity to contrast himself with Bloomberg. The Vermont senator said Bloombergs stop and frisk policies as mayor of New York went after black and Latino voters in an outrageous way and wont bring those voters out in 2020. Bloomberg countered that Sanders Medicare for All proposal will turn off people who want to keep their health insurance. He said if Sanders gets the nomination Trump will win. Warren also came out swinging against Bloomberg. She called him an arrogant billionaire who demeans women, referencing recently resurfaced comments Bloomberg allegedly made before running for president. Id like to talk about who we are running against," Warren said. "A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians. And no I am not talking about Donald Trump. I am talking about Mayor Bloomberg. Buttigieg said Sanders and Bloomberg are the two most divisive candidates on the stage. He said Sanders wants to burn the party down while Bloomberg wants to buy it out. Democratic presidential candidates, former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, left, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., talk before a Democratic presidential primary debate Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2020, in Las Vegas, hosted by NBC News and MSNBC. (AP Photo/John Locher)AP Which Democrat has the most delegates? Nevada will be the third vote to hold its primary contest on Feb. 22. Sanders and Buttigieg leads the delegate count after the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary earlier this month. Buttigieg picked up 13 delegates in Iowa and nine in New Hampshire, putting him at the top of the field. Sanders earned 12 delegates in Iowa and nine in New Hampshire. Trailing behind are Warren, who earned eight delegates total, Klobuchar, who has seven, and Biden, who has six. Warren and Biden did not pick up any delegates in New Hampshire. There are 36 delegates up for grabs in Nevada. Polls taken in Nevada between Feb. 12 and Feb. 18 show Sanders in first place with 30%, followed by Biden (16%), Warren (14.5%) and Buttigieg (12.5%). South Carolina will vote on Feb. 29, the last state before Super Tuesday on March 3, when the most delegates are up for grabs on a single day. Democrats have started campaigning in delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like California, Texas, North Carolina, Virginia and Massachusetts. NASHVILLE, TN - FEBRUARY 12: Democratic presidential candidate former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg delivers remarks during a campaign rally on February 12, 2020 in Nashville, Tennessee. Bloomberg is holding the rally to mark the beginning of early voting in Tennessee ahead of the Super Tuesday primary on March 3rd. (Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images)Getty Images All eyes on Bloomberg Democrats will get their first chance to challenge Bloomberg, who has mounted an unprecedented effort to flood the airwaves with advertisements and build his campaign presence in states voting on or after Super Tuesday on March 3. Bloomberg is skipping the first four primary contests to focus on delegate-rich states that will vote later in the year, including Michigan. Bloomberg has spent nearly $336 million on television ads, in addition to $100 million on Facebook and Google ads. The ads cast him as a pragmatic public servant who is uniquely positioned to take on President Donald Trump. Tonight is about who can win in November. Now isnt the time to gamble on the nomination. We cannot afford another four years of this. I will provide calm, collected leadership that gets results. Most importantly: I will make Donald Trump a one-term president. #DemDebate Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 20, 2020 Bloomberg, who is worth an estimated $64 billion, essentially has an unlimited amount of money to spend on the campaign. His rivals have accused the billionaire activist of trying to buy his way into the election. Since launching his campaign in November, Bloomberg swiftly rose to third place in national polls, behind Sanders and Biden. Bloomberg earned 16% in an average of national polls taken since Feb. 12. Bloombergs opponents are poised to use his first debate appearance to put a dent in his recent surge in the polls. Candidates have criticized his past backing of Republican candidates, support for racist stop and frisk police policies as mayor and recently resurfaced sexist comments Bloomberg made before running for president. "Mike Bloomberg is a flawed man, he does not come into this perfectly... We'll be on the debate stage tonight to answer for Mike's mistakes but net-net, Mike Bloomberg is a very principled public servant" - @TimOBrien w/ @NicolleDWallace pic.twitter.com/1w6Gs68rQp Deadline White House (@DeadlineWH) February 19, 2020 Bloomberg was a lifelong Democrat before running for New York mayor as a Republican in 2002. He registered as a Democrat last year. Bloomberg will not be on the ballot in Nevada, which holds its Democratic caucus on Feb. 22. Rules requiring candidates to receive a certain number of individual donations had barred Bloomberg from past debates since his campaign is self-funded. The Democratic National Committee removed donor qualification rules for the Feb. 19 debate, allowing Bloomberg to participate. The change sparked some criticism from Bloombergs opponents, who accused him of trying to buy his way into the election. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., speaks during a campaign event at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2020, in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)AP Sanders health concerns linger Sanders said Tuesday he doesnt plan to release additional information about his health after suffering a heart attack on the campaign trail in October 2019. The 78-year-old Vermont senator had two stents implanted after the incident, which temporarily suspended his campaign. Sanders, the oldest candidate in the race, had pledged to release his health records last year. His campaign provided three letters from doctors last December, but scrutiny of his fitness lingers. The campaigns national press secretary said requests for additional records is a smear" during a Wednesday CNN interview, comparing the criticism to skepticism campaigns that have been run against a lot of different candidates in the past, questioning where theyre from, aspects of their lineage. "I would look to the Obama standard of releasing not just a letter from a doctor, but actual results from a physical. That's what we're planning to do, and I think every candidate should hold themselves to that same standard." - @PeteButtigieg pic.twitter.com/8q8ulQ9U3B Matt Corridoni (@mattcorridoni) February 19, 2020 Bloomberg, 78, and Warren, 70, released letters from their doctors to indicate their health. Warren also included four pages of lab test results. Biden released a letter from his doctor, which covered the 77-year-olds history and recent checkups. Sanders won the New Hampshire primary and finished closely behind Buttigieg in Iowa. He leads the Democratic field in national polls and is expected to perform well in Nevada due to his support among Hispanic voters in the state. What is the Democratic debate lineup? Six candidates have qualified, including: Former Vice President Joe Biden U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn. U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Ind. Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York City Candidates had to win at least one delegate in the Iowa or New Hampshire contests, or receive 10% support in four polls, or 12% in polls from two early-voting states. Billionaire activist Tom Steyer did not qualify for the Nevada debate. U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, is still running for president but hasnt qualified for a debate since November 2019. Businessman Andrew Yang dropped out since participating in the previous debate in New Hampshire. Five journalists who will moderate the primary debate in Las Vegas, including NBC Nightly News and Dateline NBC anchor Lester Holt, Meet the Press moderator and NBC News political director Chuck Todd, NBC News Chief White House Correspondent and host of MSNBC Live Hallie Jackson, Noticias Telemundo senior correspondent Vanessa Hauc and Jon Ralston of The Nevada Independent. When is the next February debate? The final Democratic debate in February is scheduled for Tuesday, Feb. 25. It will be hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, CBS and Twitter, broadcast from Charleston, South Carolina. Read more debate coverage on MLive: February Democratic debate 2020 recap January Democratic debate 2020 recap Its the economy stupid, reminds Tom Steyer at Democratic debate Buttigieg defends Biden family at February Democratic debate Warren calls for national law to protect abortion rights at Democratic debate By Michael Martina and Tim McLaughlin MANCHESTER/DIXVILLE NOTCH, N.H., Feb 11 - As the sun rose over New Hampshire, Democratic presidential hopefuls hit the streets as they faced a last chance on Tuesday to persuade the state's voters that they were the party's best bet to take on President Donald Trump in November. Recent state polls showed U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a progressive from neighboring Vermont, leading the crowded field, followed by moderates former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar. U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and former Vice President Joe Biden will also be angling for the support of voters who pack into schools, churches and city offices where ballots are cast. New Hampshire is the second contest of the U.S. presidential nominating cycle, and while few votes are on offer, it gives candidates a chance to build momentum for their campaigns in a crowded field. Here are some scenes from the campaign trail on Tuesday: 'THE ONE WHO CAN BEAT TRUMP' Buttigieg's supporters greeted him at a Manchester school before dawn, waving blue and yellow "Pete 2020" campaign signs and chanting "President Pete." The 38-year-old military veteran shook hands and took selfies with the enthusiastic crowd. Less than five minutes later, he headed back to an SUV, a walk slowed by the throng of media cameras surrounding him. "It feels good out here," he said, smiling as reporters asked how he thought he would fare in Tuesdayas primary. Voter Sara Lutat, 60, emerged from the school soon after, having cast her vote for Buttigieg. "I think he's the one who can beat Trump," she said, adding that he was grounded and had progressive ideas but nothing "too far out there. "Actually, I don't care who wins as long as he's not in the White House," Lutat said, referring to Trump. "I wish the Democratic Party would get it together. Otherwise, we're going to be stuck in limbo another four years. Frankly, it's too scary." Story continues Rebecca Balzano, a 38-year-old cook at a local restaurant, called Buttigieg "too new, too young" and said she voted for Sanders. "Everything he says, I'm all for," she said. "We need the Bern man in office." BLOOMBERG MICROBOOST Democratic voters in the state are faced with a lengthy ballot listing 33 names -- including top-tier candidates, former hopefuls who have already dropped out of the race and some contenders who never attained a national profile. One name not on the list is former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a late entrant to the race who is skipping the first four contests. That didn't stop voters in the mountain hamlet of Dixville Notch from picking the billionaire founder of the media company that bears his name as a write-in candidate when they voted just after midnight on Tuesday. He won three of the five ballots cast. Les Otten, a registered Republican who is redeveloping the ski lodge where the vote took place, said he voted for Bloomberg because he is a moderate and his agenda addresses climate change and the ballooning federal budget deficit. "I did what I had to do," Otten said. (Reporting by John Whitesides, James Oliphant, Simon Lewis, Amanda Becker and Tim McLaughlin in New Hampshire, writing by Scott Malone; editing by Chizu Nomiyama) A 6-year-old girl who disappeared from her home was killed by a neighbor who then killed himself, authorities ruled Tuesday. According to a previous report from Latin Post, Faye Marie Swetlik, 6 years old, disappeared from outside her home in the afternoon of February 10. Her body was then discovered by police in the wooded area between her home and a parts store around 11 am on February 13. Police released the autopsy result Tuesday where it says Faye Swetlik died of asphyxiation a few hours after she was taken from her home. Lexington County Coroner Margaret Fisher refused to comment if Swetlik was strangled or suffocated. Investigators had searched the home of the suspect, Coty Scott Taylor, the day before he killed himself. Authorities said they saw nothing to suggest the girl was ever there. Shortly after the girl's body was found, authorities were called to the scene of another death. Police found Taylor, 30, dead on his back porch, covered in blood. Authorities released his cause of death after Tuesday's news conference, saying Taylor slit his own throat. During the initial investigation, police found no connection between Taylor and Swetlik. He was not a relative or a friend of the family. Taylor also bore no criminal record, save for multiple traffic violations from February 2018 in Lexington County and at least four between 2013 and 2015 in Richland County. He also won a case against City Garage and Body Shop over a dispute about payment. Faye's mother fetched her from a bus stop at 2:50 pm on February 10. Swetlik went inside their home to get a snack before she went outside to play. Her family began searching for her at around 3:45 pm. The authorities were called in around 5 pm. More than 100 officers joined in on the search after they received the mother's call. FBI jumped in the next day with more than 250 officers. After three days, authorities cracked the case when they found clues in Taylor's trash can. Inside his can, they found a rain boot matching one Faye Swetlik was wearing. They also found a ladle full of dirt. Authorities focused on area 100 to 150 feet away from Faye's front yard. A search of the area revealed Swetlik's body which was "moved in the shadow of the night." Taylor shared his home with a roommate who, at the time of the crime, was not home. Police said the roommate appeared to not know about the abduction, saying Taylor is the sole perpetrator of the crime. Swetlik was last seen wearing flower print shorts, polka dot boots, and a black t-shirt with neon colors. She had just started school at Springdale Elementary in August. A candlelight vigil was held in her honor Tuesday evening at Cayce City Hall. More than 100 people came out despite the pouring rain. Principal Hope Vrana of Springdale Elementary shared the impact Faye made in her school. She also said Faye "brought sunshine into the school." A public memorial will be held at 7 pm Friday at Trinity Baptist Church in Cayce. Shamima Begum was born and bred in the UK. This is the country where she was groomed and radicalised before joining Isis in Syria. Many of the group which has come to be known as the Jamaica 50 arrived in the UK as minors (as young as two, five, seven and 11 years old). This is the country where they committed offences sometimes minor and were imprisoned. Their cases are, of course, very different. Begum was a British citizen, whose citizenship was revoked while she was abroad. The Jamaica 50 were Jamaican nationals, who were detained in the UK and scheduled for deportation (thanks to legal action, only 17 were deported). In both cases, however, the British governments response was the same we dont want you here. So far, the law has been on the British governments side. Begum could be stripped of her citizenship because, according to the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, she is also a Bangladeshi citizen, and therefore not rendered stateless. The Jamaica 50 can be deported relying on the immigration rules, which, broadly speaking, mean that anyone convicted of an offence of more than 12 months is liable for deportation. Something being legally correct, however, does not make it morally right. Before externalising responsibility for those individuals, the government should look at the background of the offences and the offenders. Begum is a British citizen, who was groomed and radicalised aged 15, in the UK. Some of the Jamaica 50 stories are also worth noting. Tayjay arrived in the UK aged five. He was groomed in county lines in the UK, and, aged 19, was sentenced to a drug-related offence for which he was sentenced for 15 months, seven of which he spent in prison. He was released five years ago and has not reoffended since. Reshawn Davis was convicted for robbery 10 years ago under the joint enterprise rule, since deemed unlawful, and spent two months in prison. He arrived in the UK aged 11. Others scheduled to be deported grew up in care. These have to be seen against a context where social exclusion has been found to be linked to radicalisation, and where 30 per cent of second generation migrants feel discriminated against. A context where Bame defendants are consistently more likely to plead not guilty than white defendants, and therefore more likely to face more punitive sentences than if they had admitted guilt, primarily because of a lack of trust in the criminal justice system. A context where within drug offences, the odds of receiving a prison sentence were around 240 per cent higher for those who are Bame. A context where black people are three times more likely to be arrested than white people. A context where local authorities may not realise that some children in their care are entitled to British citizenship, because the rules surrounding British citizenship are so complex. A context where children who are and know to be entitled to British citizenship can still not apply for it because the fees are too expensive. When looked at this way, the externalisation of responsibility for those individuals can simply not be morally justified. Group of 17 convicted criminals deported from UK to Jamaica arrive in Kingston The response of the government that these individuals are a threat to public security is just not tenable. Many simply cant be said to pose a threat, having served their sentences, been released from prison, and not having reoffended since. Even for those who do pose a threat to public security, there is a system to protect the public, and it is the criminal justice system. Those who have offended can, and have, been punished by being imprisoned. Begum can, and should, be brought back and trialled here. Perhaps more importantly, externalising responsibility for these groups is both shortsighted and counterproductive. The message it sends to current and future generations of black and ethnic minorities is that they are second-class citizens who can be deprived of their nationality and who can be deported to countries they have no recollection of. It sends a message that this country is not and never will be their home. It fuels sentiments of marginalisation and distrust in the system which, in turn, may increase risks of radicalisation. Before externalising responsibility, the UK should look at itself in the mirror and accept its share of the blame. It must respond by tackling systemic racism in the criminal justice system and beyond. It must nurture its citizens, punish them when needed, but then take responsibility for their rehabilitation and ultimately let them know that, if this is the country where they grew up, this is their home. Crucially, it must do so for current as well as future generations of black and ethnic minorities. Nath Gbikpi is an Immigration solicitor at Wesley Gryk Solicitors Job Title: Program Management Assistant Organisation: United Nations Volunteers (UNV) Duty Station: UNEP, Kampala, Uganda About US: The United Nations Volunteers programme is a United Nations organization that contributes to peace and development through volunteerism worldwide. Volunteerism is a powerful means of engaging people in tackling development challenges, and it can transform the pace and nature of development. Key Duties and Responsibilities: Under the direct supervision of UN Environment GSP Project Manager the national UN Volunteer will undertake the following tasks: Engagement as a resource person in national, regional or international training workshops and seminars Support to the countries by consultation in developing terms of reference (TOR) for climate change consultancies Developing guidance documents Reviewing draft reports Webinar presentations Assisting countries to develop national MRV systems and institutional arrangements Managing Communication and providing technical support to the regional MRV networks Qualifications, Skills and Experience: The ideal candidate for the United Nations Volunteers Program Management Assistant job must hold a Bachelors Degree in economics, finance, engineering, environmental science or a related discipline or a relevant bachelors degree with relevant experience. Any post-graduate training on climate change and energy A master Degree in the above areas will be an added advantage A minimum of two years of professional relevant experience that includes development of technical reports or guidelines on climate change topics; Proficiency in report writing; conducting research; and providing consulting or advisory services; Area of expertise: Energy and environmental economics, carbon market mechanisms, Climate change mitigation and mechanisms for technology transfer, Other energy, environment and climate change related experience Proficiency in report writing; conducting research; and providing consulting or advisory services; Experience using IPCC guidelines for national GHG inventory development; CGE and/or US-EPA GHG inventory and inventory management systems training materials; Demonstrated competence in the development of national level GHG inventories, mitigation reports, Vulnerability and Adaptation Assessments Familiarity with developing national MRV systems Familiarity with developing national institutional arrangements Experience working in an international setting, in particular with Non-Annex I Parties is highly valued. Preferable to be listed as a technical expert in the UNFCCC GHG inventory review programme for Annex 1 countries, or/and have served/actually serving as a CGE (UNFCCC Consultative Group of Experts) member Competencies Values: Accountability, Adaptability and Flexibility, Ethics and Values, Integrity, Knowledge Sharing, Leadership, Planning and Organizing Language skills: English (Mandatory), Level Fluent How to Apply: All candidates for the United Nations UNV job should apply online at the link below. Click Here Deadline: 27th February 2020 For more of the latest jobs, please visit https://www.theugandanjobline.com or find us on our facebook page https://www.facebook.com/UgandanJobline An unfaithful property tycoon who claimed he had no cash and told his ex-wife to sell her engagement ring to pay for her upkeep has been ordered to hand her 5.7m after being spotted boasting of his 'beautiful life' on social media. Preston Haskell IV and ex-model wife, Alesia, enjoyed a lavish lifestyle during an 11-year relationship, but their marriage was blighted by his 'serial infidelity' and drink and drug use, a court heard. Party-loving Mr Haskell threw 1m parties and socialised with the rich and famous, while his wife was a member of the exclusive 5 Hertford Street club, where Prince Harry and Meghan Markle had their first date. He made his 160m fortune in the property and restaurant business. Preston Haskell IV, pictured leaving the High Court in London, pictured, has been ordered to hand over 5.7 million to his estranged wife Alesia The High Court heard Haskell's marriage to Alesia Vladimirovna, pictured, collapsed due to his unfaithfulness and 'abuse of cocaine and alcohol' The marriage collapsed in 2016 due to his unfaithfulness and 'abuse of cocaine and alcohol,' a judge said, sparking a bitter court war over his millions - or lack thereof. Mr Haskell supported his wife for two years after their split, but last year when he realised they were not going to get back together he denounced her as a 'gold-digger,' said the judge. He claimed he had nothing to give his ex-wife, who he said he had given a 'Cinderella life', because he owed 55m to others, and was only getting by due to bail-outs from his super-rich dad. But after a week-long court battle, top family judge Mr Justice Mostyn has now ordered Mr Haskell to shell out sums totaling about 5.7m to the mother of his three children. The ruling came after the judge saw social media posts, including one of the tycoon boasting about his 'beautiful year' and posing with a 400 bottle of vintage red wine. Mr Justice Mostyn, sitting in the Family Court in London, said that despite Mr Haskell's claim to have no ready cash, the evidence painted a picture of a man enjoying a high standard of living. The judge also slammed the husband, saying it was 'bordering on the grotesque' for Mr Haskell to have asked his wife to sell her 100,000 engagement ring to pay for her upkeep. The court heard that the tycoon, 53, and his 39-year-old wife had met and married in Moscow in 2003 The court heard that the tycoon, 53, and his 39-year-old wife had met and married in Moscow in 2003, but in latter years had a 3.3m family home in Chelsea. Mr Haskell, whose father built a US construction empire, and his wife, who works as a personal style consultant, moved to London in 2013. 'After their arrival in London in September 2013, the parties enjoyed a superior lifestyle dwelling, in high-quality rented accommodation,' said the judge. 'Unfortunately, the marriage was blighted by the husband's serial infidelity and abuse of cocaine and alcohol. 'The wife issued a divorce petition on 24 November 2016 and commenced her claim for financial remedies on the same day. 'On 21 December 2016, the parties physically separated, and although they discussed reconciliation they never cohabited again.' The judge said Mr Haskell had continued supporting his ex, while himself enjoying a 'high lifestyle' during 2018. But he continued: 'In January 2019, the husband reached the conclusion that a reconciliation was not going to work and announced that the parties would proceed to a divorce. 'At that point, everything changed. His attitude to the wife became unremittingly punitive. The couple moved to London in 2013 and moved into a 3.3 million home in Chelsea, pictured 'He denounced her as a gold-digger and began a process of financial attrition which has led to the present dire situation where the wife and children are shortly to be evicted from their home in central London and made homeless.' Mr Haskell began claiming he had no money and their lives would have to change, as re-focusing of his business interests had left him without ready cash. In January last year alone, he cancelled the lease on their home - leaving her now only a month from eviction - told her she had to get her own phone contract and cancelled her membership of the exclusive 5 Hertford Street club. 'In contrast, his American Express statement records that, in the month up to 22 January 2019, he had spent on that card alone nearly $19,000,' said the judge. Mr Haskell had displayed 'insidious coercive control,' demanding that she account for everything she spent and get his written permission before withdrawing money from her account, he added. In March last year, a High Court judge ordered that he pay her 45,700 per month in maintenance, more than double what Mr Haskell had offered to give. But he failed to stump up all the cash and, by the time of the hearing of the divorce battle last month, owed her 310,000 in unpaid back maintenance. Ruling that she should receive lump sums totaling nearly 5.7m from her ex, the judge said Mr Haskell's business affairs may be in a state of flux, but rejected his claim that he is in a 'dire' financial situation. 'What was the husband doing, or not doing, from March until December 2019?' he said. 'He did not sell any of his assets. Nothing has been disposed of. He continued to enjoy his high lifestyle. 'Thus, the wife was able to establish by looking at the husband's postings on social media that he was on holiday in South Africa in April (when he posted a picture of himself paragliding with the caption 'life is beautiful'); in Turkey in May; in St Tropez in June; in Ibiza in July; in Switzerland in July in order to attend a party hosted by the US ambassador to that country; and in December...at his beautiful home in Cape Town. 'On 31 May, 2019, he posted a picture of himself holding a bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion 1966 with the caption: 'It was a beautiful year'.' Through companies and a trust, he owns a 'magnificent' 6.5m villa with 'outstanding' ocean views in Cape Town and another 'fine villa' worth about 1m in Johannesburg, the judge added. 'No attempt has been made to sell either of these properties,' he said. 'If the husband's financial position was really as dire as he proclaims, these would be the first to go under the hammer. 'The husband maintains an office in Moscow where he employs numerous members of staff. Not one has been let go in this supposed time of crisis.' He continued: 'I do not take into account any value of the wife's engagement ring. The husband was very keen that I should do so, asserting that it was worth perhaps 100,000. 'It is bordering on the grotesque that the husband should be expecting the wife to liquidate this ring.' Mr Haskell has to pay his ex 647,732 by the start of next month and another 5.181m in March 2022, when the judge said Mr Haskell's business interests should have come to fruition. PARADISE, Calif. - The Rebuild Paradise Foundation is now offering "Missing Middle Grants" to make rebuilding more affordable for those who may not qualify for other help based on income. Additionally, the deadline to submit hazardous tree removal program documents is on Friday, Feb. 21. Find more information below. Statistics Update 811 Building Permit Applications Received 610 Building Permits issued 47 Homes Rebuilt (certificate of occupancy issued) Other Update Missing Middle Grants: A grant to make rebuilding more affordable, The Missing Middle Grant offers up to $4,000 to help qualified middle class and lower-middle-class residents with some pre-construction costs: up to $1,000 for survey costs, up to $2,000 for architecture/engineering fees and up to $1,000 for water-related expenses. The grant is for those who may not qualify for other help based on income. Find out more information and apply on the Rebuild Paradise Foundation website, www.Rebuildparadise.org. Police Officer Association Grant: The Police Officer Association was granted $10,000 by Farmers Insurance to go towards new trail cameras in Paradise. These cameras will be helpful in deterring crime on properties that may be uninhabited and help provide police with the ability to be in more places at once. They hope to have the project moving ahead in March. Home Builders Resource Connection: Rebuild Paradise, Paradise Chamber of Commerce, Butte College, Paradise Realtors Association, Chico Builders Association, and Valley Contractors Exchange invite you to join them Friday, February 28th from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. at the Paradise Alliance Church. This is a special opportunity to connect with local agencies, realtors, architects, general contractors, lenders, insurance agents and more. The address of the event is 6491 Clark Road. RELATED: Trail cameras to benefit Paradise police and locals Rebuild Advocates at the BRC: Advocates are available at the BRC to residents of the Town of Paradise and Butte County to help navigate the process of rebuilding and be on hand to help guide people through the rebuilding process. They can also help guide residents through the financial resources available to make rebuilding more affordable such as help people apply for loans and connect with contractors. You may call 530-872-6291 ext. 411 to schedule an appointment. Please reach out, they are here for you. Butte County Museum Weekend: The event was created to promote and celebrate history, art, and culture through Butte Countys museums and cultural centers. All participating locations will be open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., on both Saturday and Sunday, for free, so visitors can have full access to the wide range of Butte Countys cultural offerings. There will be a complimentary shuttle looping between museums in both Chico and Oroville. For more information go to www.explorebuttecounty.com/museum-weekend. Annual Valley Contractors Exchange Crab Feed: All-You-Can-Eat Crab, Shellys Famous Clam Chowder, Snapshots Photo Booth and Cigars on the House! Back again this year is Dog House for your musical enjoyment. Visit the Chico Elks Lodge on Friday, Feb. 21. For more information, check out www.vceonline.com/events/. RELATED: Paradise Rebuilding and Recovery: Over 800 building permit applications received Businesses Opening Soon: Foothill Lumber: 1698 Wagstaff - Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Proframe Construction, Inc.: Ribbon Cutting, Thursday, Feb. 27, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Hazard Tree Removal: Property owners may enter the Government Tree Program to have the trees removed by the State at no out-of-pocket cost. 99.7% of properties are eligible for the State Program. Enrollment in the Government Tree Program requires a Right-of Entry form. Property owners may also identify and remove hazard trees themselves but must submit an inspection form so an inspector may verify the removal of the hazard trees from the property. Property owners may also call the Tree ROE Center directly at (530) 552-3030 or submit Tree ROEs by email at TreeROE@buttecounty.net. The Tree ROE is available for download online at www.ButteCountyRecovers.org/treeremoval. ROE forms may also be picked up at the Tree ROE Centers when they open. An ROE Center will be open at the Butte County Library's Paradise Branch Community Room on 5922 Clark Road, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 pm. Forms can also be submitted at the Tree Removal ROE Processing Center on 205 Mira Loma Drive, Suite 50 in Oroville. You can also submit them by email by sending it to TreeROE@buttecounty.net Upcoming Meetings & Events PID Regular Meeting When: Wednesday, February 19, 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Where: PID Boardroom, 6332 Clark Road Home Builders Resource Connection When: Friday, February 28, 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. Where: Paradise Alliance Church Gym, 6491 Clark Road Community Information Meeting When: Tuesday, March 3, 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Where: Paradise Alliance Church, 6491 Clark Road Valley Contractors Exchange 23rd Annual Crab Feed When: Friday, February 21, 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Where: Chico Elks Lodge, 1705 Manzanita Ave Butte County Museum Weekend When: Saturday, February 29 and Sunday, March 1, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Where: Locations throughout Butte County Various Locations Fridays for Lunch Free Lunch When: Fridays, noon to 1:30 p.m. Where: Paradise Lutheran Church, 780 Luther Drive Paradise Community Dinner [February 20, 2020] Sitetracker Named as One of the Best Places to Work PALO ALTO, California, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Business Intelligence Group today announced that it has recognized Sitetracker with a coveted Best Places to Work award. The Business Intelligence Group honors companies who help their employees accelerate their careers, knowledge and performance. "Building a great company starts with your team, that's why we have always taken employee satisfaction, inclusion and diversity so seriously," said Ethan Jayson, Senior Director of People Operations at Sitetracker. "Just like our product, our culture evolves and grows through candid feedback and iteration. This employee voted award reaffirms that the culture we are building is working." "Congratulations to Sitetracker for building an organization focused on employee engagement and performance," said Maria Jimenez, Chief Nominations Officer of Business Intelligence Group. "It was clear from analyzing the employee survey data that this is a great place to work and employee feedback is not only listened to but acted upon. Congratulations to the entire team." Already recognized by Comparably, Timmy Awards and Mogul in categories for diversity, leadership, profesional development and more. Sitetracker is currently hiring for over 20 roles across locations including London, Palo Alto, and Singapore. To see all open roles and learn more about positions, visit the Sitetracker careers page. About Sitetracker Sitetracker, Inc. powers the successful deployment of critical infrastructure. As the global standard for managing high-volume projects, the Sitetracker Platform enables growth-focused innovators to optimize the entire asset lifecycle. From the field to the C-suite, Sitetracker enables stakeholders to optimize how they plan, deploy, maintain, and grow their capital asset portfolios. Market leaders in the telecommunications, utility, smart cities, and energy industries -- such as Verizon, Ericsson, Fortis, Alphabet, British Telecom, and Vodafone -- rely on Sitetracker to manage millions of sites and projects representing over $19 billion of portfolio holdings globally. For more information, visit www.sitetracker.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 and business award programs , business executivesthose with experience and knowledge--judge the programs. 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. Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1092184/Sitetracker_award_photo.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/613805/Sitetracker_Logo.jpg SOURCE Sitetracker, Inc. [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] QUEENSBURY The former Glens Falls city assessor who lost her job several years ago after a pair of impaired driving arrests has won her lawsuit against the city over her termination. Lauren Stack will not get her job back, but state Supreme Court Justice Robert Muller scheduled a March 31 damages hearing to determine what compensation she should receive for a firing he deemed arbitrary and capricious. Muller found that the disciplinary process of having city Clerk Bob Curtis serve as a hearing officer deprived Stack of an independent, unbiased adjudicator." He also found that the city could not have taken into account a 1990s criminal conviction in its decision to fire Stack. Her lawyer, Sarah Burger, said Stack is entitled to back pay and interest as well as compensation for other factors, such as pension contributions and paid time off. She said initial calculations are in the six figures. We are in the process of gathering documentation and information to try to figure out what the numbers should be, she said. Burger said she didnt see a basis for an appeal by the city, but whether Glens Falls leaders plan to appeal was unclear Wednesday. City Attorney Ron Newell said a decision on that would likely be made after the March 31 hearing. Newell said he took issue with the decision, in particular the questioning of Curtis ability to render an unbiased decision as a hearing officer. I feel very strongly that Bob Curtis is an amazing public servant and a credit to the city, he said. The Supreme Court case had taken a number of legal twists and turns in recent years, including a dismissal that led to a successful appeal last year by Burger. Mullers ruling came days before Stack had a setback in a related criminal case for the convictions that led to her termination. She was sentenced to 10 days in Warren County Jail and had her probation revoked after she repeatedly violated its terms over the past 18 months. Stack reported to the jail Monday to begin serving the sentence. The 50-year-old Lake George resident was sentenced to 3 years of probation in late 2016 after she pleaded guilty in connection with two drunken and impaired driving arrests in 2014-15 that occurred while she was employed as the city of Glens Falls sole assessor. One was in Queensbury, the other in Lake George and both took place when she was off duty from her city position. Court records show that she violated probation when she was found to possess alcohol in 2018, but was allowed to continue probation. But a subsequent finding that she drove a vehicle without an ignition interlock device led to a declaration of delinquency that resulted in a resentencing to jail and a termination of probation. Her 2016 guilty pleas were to misdemeanor reckless endangerment and two reduced, noncriminal charges of driving while ability impaired. They resulted in a 90-day drivers license suspension that city officials said made her incapable of doing her job, and she was subsequently fired. Her lawyer on the criminal charges, William Montgomery, said there was confusion over how long Stack was required to have an ignition interlock device, with competing directives from the court and from probation. The court had required it for a year, but Stack was not aware that the terms of probation required her to use one after that. It really was an innocent misunderstanding on her part, Montgomery said. Under state law, inmates sentenced to terms in county jails are eligible for release after serving two-thirds of their sentence, which in Stacks case would amount to 7 days. She also had credit for three days served earlier in the case, so she is eligible for release on Friday. The impaired driving arrests occurred after city leaders learned in 2012 that Stack had been hired despite the fact she had been convicted of felony burglary in Florida in 1998. Don Lehman covers police and court matters, Warren County government and the outdoors. He can be reached at 518-742-3224 or dlehman@poststar.com Love 4 Funny 7 Wow 4 Sad 2 Angry 36 NEW HAVEN, Conn. and WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- As alleged in a Complaint filed Tuesday, February 18th in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, and as reported in the New York Times (J. Barnes, Ex-C.I.A. Asset, Now a Libyan Strongman, Faces Torture Accusations ) , in 2011 American citizen Khalifa Hifter left his Virginia home to lead the Libyan National Army, which under his command conducted a campaign of torture and extrajudicial killing against Libyan civilians. Hifter's victims include numerous members of two families in Benghazi, the Suyids and Krshinys. In October 2014, ten men from these families were imprisoned, beaten, electrocuted, or shot by Hifter's forces. These families will not receive due process in a country largely controlled by Hifter. Therefore, they seek justice in the United States courts under the U.S. federal Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. Counsel for these Plaintiffs will be available to take questions from the press Monday, February 24, at 10:30am at the National Press Club, 529 14th St NW, Washington, DC 20045, https://www.press.org/. Wiggin and Dana is a full-service firm with over 140 attorneys serving clients domestically and abroad from offices in Connecticut, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, DC. Wiggin and Dana's practice groups and attorneys consistently receive top accolades by, among others, Chambers USA, Benchmark Litigation BTI, and The Legal 500. For more information on the firm, visit our website at www.wiggin.com. CONTACT: Kevin Carroll, 202-800-2475, [email protected] SOURCE Wiggin and Dana Related Links www.wiggin.com Click here for updates on this story PHOENIX, AZ (KPHO/KTVK ) -- A Phoenix man is accused of feeding meth to his neighbor's two dogs. One of the two dogs did not survive. Jeremiah Allen Olp, 42, faces felony charges of intentional cruel mistreatment of an animal, and killing an animal without the owner's consent. Police say the incident happened on Wednesday afternoon in a neighborhood near Cave Creek Road and Union Hills Drive. According to the police report, Olp was seen reaching into his neighbor's yard and "giving something to her dogs." But when Olp noticed his neighbor watching, police say he ran inside his mobile home. The victim immediately noticed her dogs acting strangely, and she called police. When officers arrived, they found her two dogs in distress. A large brown and white dog was foaming at the mouth and couldn't stand, and a small grey dog was panting and foaming at the mouth. The dogs were rushed to an emergency vet. According to the police report, tests showed that both dogs had been given meth. The large dog later died. Olp's bond was set at $10,000. He is due in court Feb. 27 for a status conference and again on March 2 for a preliminary hearing. The police report indicates that Olp has 3 prior felony convictions. Six other times, police say he had failed to appear in court. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 17:55:33|Editor: yhy Video Player Close MANILA, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- More money flowed out of the Philippines in January, the Philippine central bank said on Thursday. The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) or the Central Bank of the Philippines said transactions on BSP-registered foreign portfolio investments for January this year yielded net outflows of 486 million U.S. dollars resulting from the 1.7 billion U.S. dollars outflows and 1.2 billion U.S. dollars inflows for the month. "This is higher compared to the 321 million U.S. dollars recorded net outflows in December 2019," the BSP said in a statement. The BSP said the 1.2 billion U.S. dollars registered investments reflected a 10.9 percent increase from the 1.1 billion U.S. dollars figure in December 2019. About 65.9 percent of investments registered during the month were in Philippine Stock Exchange-listed securities while the remaining 34.1 percent balance went to investments in peso-dominated government securities. According to the BSP, the Britain, the United States, Singapore, Luxembourg, and China's Hong Kong were the top five investors for the month, with combined share to total at 79 percent. The BSP said outflows for January 2020 were 20 percent higher compared to the 1.4 billion U.S. dollars recorded for December 2019. The United States received 62.1 percent of total outflows. In contrast, the BSP said net inflows of 763 million U.S. dollars were recorded for the same period a year ago. OECD Provides Update To G20 On BEPS Work by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels 20 February 2020 In a new report for G20 ministers, the OECD has provided an update on its work to tackle tax base erosion and profit shifting relating to multinational businesses. The report notes that the Inclusive Framework on BEPS decided during its January 29-30 meeting to move ahead with the two-pillar approach proposed by the OECD regarding reform to tax rules governing the digitalized economy at the tail end of 2019. Specifically, under pillar one, participants agreed to pursue the negotiation of new rules on where tax should be paid ("nexus" rules) and on what portion of profits that should be taxed ("profit allocation" rules). This work seeks to ensure that multinational enterprises (MNEs) conducting sustained and significant business in places where they may not have a physical presence can be taxed in such jurisdictions. Pillar Two (also referred to as the "Global Anti-Base Erosion" or "GloBE" proposal) calls for the development of a co-ordinated set of rules to address ongoing risks from structures that allow MNEs to shift profit to jurisdictions where they are subject to no or very low taxation. The report acknowledges concerns about the proposal from US Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin that Pillar One could be introduced on a "safe harbor" basis, which would effectively make it optional for countries to adopt. Previously, the OECD said the "safe harbor" issue has been included in the list of remaining work, but a final decision on this issue will be deferred until the architecture of Pillar One has been agreed upon. In its new report, the OECD said: "This [digital tax] work continues not without difficulties, and some of the 137 members have divergent views on how best to address the tax challenges arising from digitalisation. There are still certain gaps that need to be bridged, one of which is a proposal from the United States as articulated in a letter to me by the US Secretary of the Treasury dated December 3, 2019, to make Pillar One be implemented on a 'safe-harbour' basis. In recognition of this, the G20/OECD Inclusive Framework (IF) noted in its statement that resolution of this issue is crucial to reaching consensus. In particular, many G20/OECD IF members expressed concerns that implementing Pillar One on a 'safe harbour' basis could raise major difficulties, increase uncertainty, and fail to meet all of the policy objectives of the overall process. However, they noted that a final decision on the matter will be taken only after the other elements of the consensus-based solution have been agreed upon." The plan reiterates the OECD's commitment to delivering a plan to achieve an international agreement by the end of 2020. Providing an update on its ongoing work, the OECD said: "In the coming months, more data on the economic analysis and impact assessment will be available for the G20/OECD IF to take informed decisions. This timeline is ambitious but failure to reach agreement would greatly increase the risk that countries will act unilaterally, with negative consequences on an already fragile global economy. Critical meetings will take place in the months ahead where difficult decisions will need to be taken on the technical design of both pillars. Although it will be challenging, with your continued political support, I remain optimistic that agreement on key policy issues that would form the basis of a political agreement can be found at the G20/OECD IF's next plenary meeting scheduled for July 1-2, 2020, in Berlin, Germany." The OECD highlighted the numerous achievements that have been achieved under the BEPS project, in the report. The OECD said the landscape is now more transparent in respect of the tax affairs of MNEs, with almost 30,000 information exchanges on previously secret tax rulings since 2016 (which is 5,000 more since last reported in October 2019); and with 84 jurisdictions having engaged in the exchange of country-by-country reports (CbCRs) on the activities, income, and assets of MNEs, which began in June 2018. Jurisdictions have also amended or abolished an important number of preferential tax regimes, which allowed MNEs to avoid tax on their international activities, the OECD said. Since 2015, almost 290 regimes have been reviewed and virtually all of the regimes that were identified as harmful have been amended or abolished. Finally multilateral co-operation to prevent treaty shopping has become a reality with the Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Measures to Prevent BEPS (the BEPS Multilateral Instrument), covering 94 jurisdictions, 41 of which ratified it. The OECD said: "At this stage, all treaty shopping hubs have signed the BEPS Multilateral Instrument and tax administrations are reporting that they can see meaningful behavioral changes among taxpayers. The year 2020 is a crucial year with the review of the BEPS Minimum Standards, which could lead to further improvements." The report also includes a progress update in the area of indirect taxes. The OECD's recommendations presented in the BEPS project in the area of value-added tax and goods and services tax were carried over to new OECD International VAT/GST Guidelines. They in particular look to establish a global approach on the taxation of electronic services provided by online retailers to consumers. The Guidelines recommend that foreign sellers register and remit tax on sales of e-books, apps, music, videos, and other digital goods in the jurisdiction where the final consumer is located. The Guidelines also include a recommended mechanism to ensure the effective collection of VAT by tax authorities from foreign sellers. The OECD reported: "Significant progress has been made in the implementation of the recommended solutions for the effective collection of VAT on online trade, following the 2015 BEPS Action 1 Report. In addition to supporting the implementation of these standards, detailed guidance has been developed to adapt the solutions to the emerging challenges of the digital economy. The guidance focuses on reporting and VAT collection obligations for e-commerce marketplaces and other digital platforms. Current work focuses on the sharing and gig economies" "Over 50 countries worldwide have already implemented these standards, with very positive results in terms of compliance and additional revenues collected. The European Union reported a constant growth of the VAT revenues collected from these measures, from EUR3bn (USD3.2bn) in 2015 to more than EUR4.5bn in 2018. Australia reported AUD728m (USD489m) of new revenues collected from the implementation of the OECD standards on online sales of services and digital products for the first two years of their operation. South Africa has raised ZAR3bn (USD210m) in the first five years of the introduction of the OECD standards on online sales of services and digital products." The OECD said: "To support developing countries wishing to implement these standards, the OECD Secretariat has committed to develop regional toolkits. These toolkits will provide further detailed, practical guidance for the implementation of the internationally agreed VAT standards and best-practice solutions, targeted at developing countries. The toolkits will be developed in an inclusive process, involving all interested tax authorities and all relevant international and regional organisations." The report concludes with sections on OECD-led efforts to improve tax transparency, including in the area of tax rulings, and capacity building efforts to support developing states to implement the BEPS recommendations. Facebook created "Project P" - for propaganda - in the hectic weeks after the 2016 presidential election and quickly found dozens of pages that had peddled false news reports ahead of Donald Trump's surprise victory. Nearly all were based overseas, had financial motives and displayed a clear rightward bent. In a world of perfect neutrality, which Facebook espouses as its goal, the political tilt of the pages shouldn't have mattered. But in a videoconference between Facebook's Washington office and its Silicon Valley headquarters in December 2016, the company's most senior Republican, Joel Kaplan, voiced concerns that would become familiar to those within the company. "We can't remove all of it because it will disproportionately affect conservatives," said Kaplan, a former George W. Bush White House official and now the head of Facebook's Washington office, according to people familiar with the meeting who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect professional relationships. When another Facebook staff member pushed for the entire list to be taken down on the grounds that the accounts fueled the "fake news" that had roiled the election, Kaplan warned of the backlash from conservatives. "They don't believe it to be fake news," he said, arguing for time to develop guidelines that could be defended to the company's critics, including on the right. The debate over "Project P," which resulted in a few of the worst pages quickly being removed while most others remained on the platform, exemplified the political dynamics that have reigned within Facebook since Trump emerged as the Republican Party's presumptive nominee to the White House in 2016. A company led mainly by Democrats in the liberal bastion of Northern California repeatedly has tilted rightward to deliver policies, hiring decisions and public gestures sought by Republicans, according to current and former employees and others who have worked closely with the company. Trump and other party leaders have pressured Facebook by making unproven claims of bias against conservatives amid rising signs of government action on the issue, including investigations by Congress and the Justice Department. Republicans also have leveraged Facebook's fears of alienating conservative Americans to win concessions from a company whose most widely shared news content typically includes stories from Fox News and other right-leaning sources. These sensitivities - in conjunction with the company's long-standing resistance to acting as "an arbiter of truth" - have affected Facebook's responses to a range of major issues, from how to address fake news and Russian manipulation of American voters on the platform to, more recently, the advertising policies that have set the political ground rules for the 2020 election, say people privy to internal debates. Such factors have helped shape a platform that gives politicians license to lie and that remains awash in misinformation, vulnerable to a repeat of many of the problems that marred the 2016 presidential election. Facebook, unlike Google and Twitter, also has refused calls to restrict politicians' access to powerful ad-targeting tools - which Trump used with particular relish four years ago - that allow messages to be tailored to individual voters, based on characteristics Facebook has gleaned over years of tracking user behavior. "I think Facebook is looking at their political advertising policies in explicitly partisan terms, and they're afraid of angering Republicans," said Alex Stamos, head of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a research group, and a former Facebook chief security officer. "The Republicans in the D.C. office see themselves as a bulwark against the liberals in California." The company says its decisions are guided not by political calculations but by global policy goals of expanding connections among users and protecting them from government overreach, in line with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's commitment to allowing speech on the social media platform to remain as unrestricted as possible. "After 2016, we made massive investments in new teams and technology to make our products safer and to secure elections," said company spokesman Andy Stone. "People on both sides of the aisle continue to criticize us, but we remain committed to seeking outside perspectives and building a platform for all ideas." Kaplan declined to comment for this article. But critics - both outside Facebook and within its ranks - see something more akin to corporate realpolitik, a willingness to accede to political demands in an era when Republicans control most levers of power in Washington. "Facebook does not speak Republican," said a former employee of Facebook's Integrity Team, which was created to ensure safety and trust on the platform, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely about a former employer. "This is what they know about Republicans: Tell them 'yes' or they will hurt us." In the 16 years since its birth as a website to connect students at Harvard, Facebook has emerged as perhaps the world's most far-reaching source of news and information, especially since it added the potent subsidiaries Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, creating a stable of globe-spanning communication tools with billions of users. Facebook's technology played a role in fomenting democratic revolutions across the Arab world and helping to rally domestic political movements such as Black Lives Matter. But the platform also was used to help fuel a genocide in Myanmar, a U.N. report concluded, and has been used to live-stream violence, including video of a massacre at a New Zealand mosque. Facebook's power is coveted by American politicians, who know that the vast majority of U.S. voters have accounts. Trump already has spent more than $32 million on the platform for his reelection effort, while Democratic candidates, collectively, have spent more than $107 million, according to Facebook's Ad Library, one of its transparency initiatives. Andrew Bosworth, a top corporate executive considered a confidant of Zuckerberg, said in a post in December that Facebook was "responsible for Donald Trump getting elected" in 2016 through his effective advertising campaign - a comment that underscored the stakes of the company's policy moves. Facebook's quest to quell conservative criticism has infused a range of decisions in recent years, say people familiar with the company's internal debates. These included whether to allow graphic images of premature babies on feeding tubes - a prohibition that had rankled antiabortion groups - or to include the sharply conservative Breitbart News in a list of news sources despite its history of serving, in the words of its former executive chairman Stephen K. Bannon, as the "platform for the alt-right." Breitbart spokeswoman Elizabeth Moore, citing the popularity of the news site and what she called a strong track record of accuracy, said, "It would be an insane oversight to disenfranchise our massive audience that uses Facebook and craves our news content." But its inclusion has sparked criticism among those who say the move was mainly to address Republican complaints about the company. "I don't think they do this as a conservative company. I think they do this as a scared company," said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at the City University of New York who has worked with Facebook on several media projects. The price has been high in terms of anger from Democrats, such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Mass., who has promised to lead efforts to break up Facebook should she win the presidency. Liberal financier George Soros, writing recently in the New York Times, called for stripping control of Facebook from Zuckerberg and accused the company of having "an informal mutual assistance operation" with Trump. Yet by at least one metric, Facebook's moves have succeeded - in appeasing a disruptive, unpredictable president. Just last month in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said of Zuckerberg on CNBC, "He's done a hell of a job." - - - Soon after Facebook's meeting on Project P, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski came to Facebook's Washington headquarters offering to advise the company on how to handle the new White House, according to people familiar with the meeting, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive internal matters. The shifting power in Washington was a serious issue for the company. Its employees had donated just $5,171 to Trump, compared with $1.1 million to fundraising committees affiliated with Democrat Hillary Clinton, with nearly half that amount coming from two of Zuckerberg's closest confidantes, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and then-chief product officer Chris Cox, according to the political analytics firm GovPredict. But the meeting with Lewandowski sparked outrage within an office still reeling from the election. Particularly upset were several Democrats, including director of U.S. public policy, Catlin O'Neill, a former chief of staff to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and the granddaughter of a legendary Pelosi predecessor, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, D-Mass., said people familiar with the visit and its aftermath. Facebook decided not to retain Lewandowski, who declined to comment on the details of the visit aside from saying by text, "Please be sure to include the facts that I have never worked for them or been paid by them - they solicited me for a meeting and I attended." But the encounter left many within the company uneasy about what Trump and his allies might do - or perhaps worse, what he might tweet. The company gradually implemented policies to combat false, misleading news reports through new transparency initiatives and a system of third-party fact-checkers, a move that upset some Republicans. It also adopted its first policy against "coordinated inauthentic behavior" - essentially using bots, fake accounts or other amplification tactics to manipulate the platform, as Russians and others had in 2016 - and bolstered its security team to police violations. Complaints eventually grew, however, that conservatives were being unfairly targeted by these moves and by long-standing content policies, such as the prohibition against hate speech. Moves to ban conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and right-wing media stars Milo Yiannopoulos in 2019 for being "dangerous," for example, generated allegations of censorship by "Big Tech" among more mainstream conservatives. As these and other complaints against Facebook grew among Republicans, Trump often amplified them over rival social media platform Twitter, where his following tops 72 million users. "Facebook was always anti-Trump," he tweeted on Sept. 27, 2017, amid the scandal over Russian efforts to use social media to help elect him. The following month, he added, "Crooked Hillary Clinton spent hundreds of millions of dollars more on Presidential Election than I did. Facebook was on her side, not mine!" Trump leveled similar charges against other technology companies, as he did in December 2018: "Facebook, Twitter and Google are so biased toward the Dems it is ridiculous!" But often Facebook bore the brunt of the president's wrath, as it did after a pair of pro-Trump social media personalities, "Diamond and Silk," accused the company of censoring them after they received a warning about posting "unsafe" content. (The company later said it had acted in error.) "The wonderful Diamond and Silk have been treated so horribly by Facebook. They work so hard and what has been done to them is very sad - and we're looking into" it, Trump tweeted in May 2019. "It's getting worse and worse for Conservatives on social media!" - - - The role of helping the company maneuver through this treacherous new political landscape became a core responsibility for Kaplan, Facebook's vice president for global public policy, who had joined the company in 2011, after eight years in the Bush White House and a stint as an energy lobbyist. The former Marine Corps officer had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and, despite supporting former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) for president, met with Trump in December 2016 after the White House expressed interest in having him head the Office of Management and Budget. Kaplan later played a key role in organizing support for Trump Supreme Court pick Brett M. Kavanaugh, a longtime Kaplan friend. As Trump came to office, Kaplan was a Republican in a company increasingly self-conscious about its oversupply of Democrats in its top ranks. This included Sandberg, who had worked in the Clinton administration and hired numerous friends and former colleagues into Facebook - creating a class of internal allies known informally as "FOSS," for Friends of Sheryl Sandberg. Kaplan, who had dated Sandberg when they were students at Harvard, managed to be both a FOSS and one of the only Republicans in the room when major decisions got made. The combination lent him credibility when he warned, as he often did, that a looming decision might inflame perilous relations with conservatives. The rising clout among Facebook's Republicans went beyond Kaplan. Katie Harbath, a onetime campaign aide to former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, gained increased prominence. Kaplan also dispensed with the tradition of having members of both major parties share power atop the Washington office by hiring a fellow Republican, former Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin, as his deputy - strengthening the conservative cast of the office at its highest levels. Kaplan proved to be adept at assuaging conservative concerns about Facebook. Even before Trump won the presidency, the company faced a crisis in May 2016 when tech publication Gizmodo published a story claiming that contractors managing Facebook's "Trending" module were suppressing conservative stories. Kaplan tapped a small team of Republicans, including Harbath, to organize a visit for prominent conservatives, such as political commentators Glenn Beck and Tucker Carlson, to Facebook headquarters. The meeting with Zuckerberg and Sandberg calmed the controversy - at least for a time - but conservatives soon would come back with other complaints. "It's the squeaky wheels who get the grease," said another person familiar with the company's effort to mollify conservatives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They were the squeaky wheels." As for the "Trending" topics feature, Facebook fired the contractors described in the Gizmodo story and gave the job for determining "Trending" topics to an algorithm. That allowed the feature to become a vehicle for spreading the false news reports that marred Facebook in the months leading up to the election. One recommended story claimed - falsely - that Fox News host Megyn Kelly had been fired for supporting Clinton. - - - Security researchers at Facebook found the first signs that Russians were seeking to influence the U.S. election months before the 2016 vote, discovering accounts apparently under control of foreign military hackers. Those initial discoveries, although shared with the FBI, were not made public. But when U.S. intelligence officials announced in January 2017 that they, too, had detected Russian interference on social media, an internal debate developed within Facebook about what to reveal publicly and when. The result, after three months of wrangling, was a 13-page white paper in April that did not include the words "Russia" or "Russian." Instead, there was this oblique reference: "Our data does not contradict the attribution provided by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence in the report dated January 6, 2017." Several issues were at play in these debates, including whether Facebook's researchers had enough clear evidence to name Russia definitively, and company officials pushed to make sure the white paper was rigorous enough to be defended in the face of the expected Republican backlash. But some company employees found the resulting document incomplete, and the caution of company officials fueled complaints that they were acting in part to avoid inflaming tensions with a White House consumed with battling allegations that Russia had helped elect Trump. "If we say Russia, it will center us in this discussion and anger the administration," a person familiar with the political dynamics in Facebook's Washington office recalled hearing. Stone, the Facebook spokesman, said, "The goal of the white paper was to share our findings in a straightforward manner, which is why there was broad agreement with the security team's recommendation to refer to the Intelligence Community Assessment and not name any specific nations." The worry about political fallout grew in subsequent months as Facebook's security researchers discovered that the Internet Research Agency, whose owner was a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had used 470 fake accounts and pages to manipulate U.S. voters. When Facebook revealed this Russian interference in September 2017, the fears of angering the White House proved prescient. Trump soon began tweeting about the company, and conservatives in Congress used the resulting hearings to accuse Facebook of bias against conservative voices on the platform. Such complaints grew the following year, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke regarding the use of sensitive Facebook data to direct campaign messaging. Zuckerberg's visit to Capitol Hill in April 2018 to address the Cambridge Analytica scandal featured frequent allegations of bias. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) cited Facebook's warning to Diamond and Silk as exemplifying "a pervasive pattern of political bias." In a House hearing the next day, Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) asked Zuckerberg, "What is 'unsafe' about two black women supporting Donald J. Trump?" While Zuckerberg attributed the incident to "an enforcement error," the next month the company announced that it would conduct an audit of allegations of bias against conservatives at Facebook. Leading this inquiry was not an independent social media researcher but a prominent conservative lawyer, former senator Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.). The resulting interim report, completed in August, catalogued numerous complaints by conservatives but offered no concrete evidence of bias or any systematic, data-based review of the question. Still, it offered two concessions: Facebook would hire more staff "dedicated to working with right-of-center organizations and leaders." And the company would loosen a long-standing advertising policy against graphic medical photos; the result was to allow antiabortion groups to depict premature babies reliant on feeding and other medical tubes in political messaging. The audit and its concessions pleased many conservatives but rankled some on the other side of the political spectrum, who had begun to sense that, in their dealings with Facebook, they were on a losing streak to an organized, forceful and consistent campaign of pressure by conservatives. Civil rights leaders, for example, had been asking for an audit of racism on the platform for several years. It finally got announced the same day, in May 2018, as the conservative bias audit. "We've been in conversation with them, in some iteration, for four years, without much success," said Malkia Devich Cyril, a senior fellow for the activist group MediaJustice who was part of a Black Lives Matter delegation that visited Facebook in 2016. "As individuals they might have liberal or progressive leanings, but as a company their interests are being served by conservative economic policy." - - - The political stakes for Facebook became increasingly clear last summer. A major corporate initiative, a cryptocurrency called Libra, landed in Washington with a discernible thud. "Facebook Libra's 'virtual currency' will have little standing or dependability," Trump tweeted in July, making clear his intention to impose federal regulations on such an initiative. "We have only one real currency in the USA, and it is stronger than ever, both dependable and reliable. It is by far the most dominant currency anywhere in the World, and it will always stay that way. It is called the United States Dollar!" About the same time, the Justice Department began a broad antitrust review of major technology companies, including Facebook. Zuckerberg - who had lashed out at Warren over her calls to break up Facebook, telling employees in a July meeting that he would "go to the mat and . . . fight" any such effort - took a more conciliatory tone with Trump. As talk of federal investigations grew in September, Zuckerberg visited the White House. Trump tweeted, "Nice meeting with Mark Zuckerberg of @Facebook in the Oval Office today." Included was a picture of the young tech billionaire shaking hands with the president. Zuckerberg also hosted a group of conservatives at his home in Palo Alto, Calif., in June. One participant, longtime anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, praised the company for hiring staff specifically to work with conservatives. "There has been what seems to be a serious effort to reach out to us," said Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. Two important victories for Trump and conservatives came amid this outreach by Zuckerberg. The first was when Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president for global affairs and communications, announced in September that the company's system of third-party fact-checkers would not review claims by politicians. Although Facebook said this was merely the ratification of existing practice, the announcement provoked fury among Democrats weary from thousands of well-chronicled falsehoods, embellishments and misstatements by Trump and worried that he would exploit the loophole in the coming campaign season. An immediate test further underscored these fears: A Trump campaign ad made claims against former vice president Joe Biden, at the time leading in the polls for the Democratic presidential nomination, that independent fact-checkers called dubious. Biden's campaign demanded that the ad be removed, but Facebook refused, reiterating that it would not act against false statements from politicians. Those defending the decision, inside and outside the company, pointed to the traditional leeway given to political speech in the United States and to Zuckerberg's own reluctance to curb user expression in all but the most extreme circumstances. He said in a speech at Georgetown University in October that restricting political speech threatens "the ability to speak freely [that] has been central in the fight for democracy worldwide." But critics saw yet another effort by Facebook to steer clear of Republican wrath. "Right now Trump is president, and the company is obviously very attuned to the political winds," said Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a Washington-based umbrella group. "They all know [at Facebook] that the Justice Department and state attorneys general are sniffing around at regulations and litigation." The second victory for conservatives came soon after, when Facebook rebuffed calls to limit the ability of politicians to use advertising tools that allow the narrow targeting of individuals based on their home address, gender, education level, income, marital status, job or other characteristics. Brad Parscale, a digital adviser to Trump's 2016 campaign and now campaign manager for the reelection effort, had boasted of the power of these targeting tools and made clear his eagerness to use them again. Some Democratic political operatives and the Democratic National Committee also expressed concern to Facebook about losing access to such cheap, effective means for reaching voters. But other prominent Democrats, as well as politically independent technology researchers, warned that what they called "microtargeting" could threaten the sanctity of elections by undermining the accountability and transparency of political speech. These critics warned that voters had no way to know what messages reached their friends or neighbors, giving politicians license to tailor messages based on what people wanted to hear rather than what was best for the public overall. A lie delivered to just 100 carefully targeted people on Facebook, for example, was much less likely to be caught and corrected than one delivered on a billboard or in a television ad. Ellen L. Weintraub, a Democrat who then was chair of the Federal Election Commission, warned in a Washington Post opinion piece that such targeting had a history as "a potent weapon for spreading disinformation and sowing discord." For these reasons, Google prohibited politicians from using its most powerful targeting tools. Twitter decided to ban political ads altogether. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., urged Facebook to follow the lead of these other companies "rather than continuing to chase political advertising dollars." Facebook seriously considered such a move during a months-long internal debate that weighed several types of restrictions, including possibly banning political ads altogether, company officials said, pointing out that such advertising produces a very small percentage of its multibillion-dollar revenue streams while generating a disproportionate amount of headaches. But when news leaked that Facebook was considering such changes, Trump made clear his opposition. His campaign tweeted, amid red siren emoji, "IMPORTANT @facebook wants to take important tools away from us for 2020. Tools that help us reach more great Americans & lift voices the media & big tech choose to ignore!" Facebook ultimately announced in January that it would increase the transparency of ad targeting ahead of the 2020 election but impose no new limits for politicians. In a blog post, Rob Leathern, Facebook's director of product management, made clear that the company had heard the political clamor on the issue. "Unlike Google, we have chosen not to limit targeting of these ads," Leathern wrote. "We considered doing so, but through extensive outreach and consultations we heard about the importance of these tools for reaching key audiences from a wide range of NGOs, nonprofits, political groups and campaigns, including both Republican and Democratic committees in the US." - - - The Washington Post's Josh Dawsey contributed to this report. This weeks question was asked by friends. QUESTION: Why did Nazi Germany want tungsten? ANSWER: Nazi Germany coveted tungsten for making machinery and for armor-piercing missiles. The German name for tungsten is wolfram. Portugal had and still has sizable deposits of tungsten. Spain has some. Both were neutral countries in World War II, although Franco in Spain was very cozy with Hitler. In the 1930s and 1940s, Germany was using tungsten carbide in its machining industry while the United States was using the inferior molybdenum-tipped tools for drilling, cutting and shaping metals. The Nazi lust for tungsten was greater than their lust for gold, which they got by stealing from Jews and wrenching gold teeth from gassed Jews. During the 1930s, Germany stockpiled as much tungsten as it could get its hands on. When stockpiles dwindled by 1941, they turned to neutral Portugal, who shipped it through Fascist Spain. Portugal plied both Allied (United States, Britain, Russia) and Axis (Germany, Italy, Japan) powers. The price increased from $1,100 per ton in 1940 to $20,000 per ton in 1941. Portugals dictator, Antonio Salazar, made a bundle. Decades later, bank officials in Portugal deny they knew any of the 44 tons of gold stored in their vaults was tainted with the blood of murdered Jews, even though swastikas were stamped on many gold bars. Finally, realizing that Nazi Germany was using tungsten to deadly effect, the United States put the screws on Portugal, which stopped shipping tungsten to Germany on June 7, 1944, the day after D-day. Tungsten is valuable because it has a melting temperature of 6,200 degrees Fahrenheit. That makes it good for light bulb filaments. It gets so hot, it gives off light, yet wont melt. Tungsten also is the hardest metal known, so adding it to steel for drill bits and saw blades gives machinists a big edge. Tungsten is 19.3 times denser than water, making it one of the heaviest metals around. Regular-sized missiles, say antitank rounds, tipped with tungsten, can penetrate armor, the so-called kinetic energy penetrators. Modern army tanks use depleted uranium from nuclear power plants. The idea of armor penetration is to concentrate the force of a shell into as small an area as possible, sort of a giant dart. Depleted uranium is almost twice as dense as lead and about the same density as tungsten, and much cheaper. Recall that story about Edison trying to find a perfect filament for his electric light bulb. He is said to have tested several hundred materials. Edisons people toyed with tungsten but found it too hard to machine. They ended up with a carbonized cotton thread filament that burned for 15 hours, which was sufficient to apply for a patent. By 1906 his company, General Electric, developed a process for making pure tungsten flexible enough to draw into a coiled wire. A few years later, all light bulbs burned with tungsten, which became the standard for over 100 years. Tungsten is prized as an alloy for steel used in rocket nozzles and turbine blades, radiation shielding, arc welding, jewelry, high-quality darts, cello strings and fishing lures. Tungsten oxides are employed in ceramic glazes, fluorescent lighting, and scintillation detectors in nuclear medicine, ballast or counterweights in keels of yachts and Formula One race cars. Send questions and comments to: lscheckel@charter.net. Larry Scheckel is a retired Tomah High School physics teacher. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. Portland, OR, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- According to the report published by Allied Market Research, the global fluorochemicals market generated $21.4 billion in 2018, and is expected to generate $29.8 billion by 2026, portraying a CAGR of 4.2% from 2019 to 2026. The research provides a detailed analysis of changing market dynamics, key investment pockets, detailed segmentation, and competitive landscape. Increase in demand for products of commercial refrigeration from different countries and surge in implementation in electrical & electronic applications fuel growth of the global fluorochemicals market. However, hazardous effects related to fluoropolymers on the environment hinder the market growth. On the other hand, rise in demand from the industrial maintenance industry create lucrative opportunities in coming years. Request Report Sample at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/5850 On the basis of type, the fluorocarbons segment held more than one-fourth of the total market share in 2018, and is estimated to maintain its leadership position throughout the forecast period. This is due to rise in refrigerant demand from emerging countries including Asia-Pacific and LAMEA. However, the fluoroelastomers segment is projected to grow at the fastest CAGR of 5.1% during the forecast period. This is due to rise in adoption from the chemicals industry owing to the excellent performance in high-temperature and corrosive work conditions. On the basis of end use, the chemicals segment accounted for the largest market share of the global fluorochemicals market, holding nearly one-third of the total share in 2018, and is expected to maintain its dominant position based on revenue by 2026. This is due to preference for fluorochemicals chemical processing due to its superior qualities such as high flexibility, tensile strength, chemical resistance, temperature resistance, reliability, and durability. Contrarily, the electrical & electronics segment is estimated to register the largest CAGR of 4.8% from 2019 to 2026. Based on region, Asia-Pacific held the largest market share, accounting nearly half of the total share in terms of revenue in 2018, and is projected to dominate during the forecast period. North America accounted for the second-highest market share in 2018. However, Europe would maintain the fastest CAGR of 5.4% from 2019 to 2026. For Purchase Enquiry at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/5850 Leading market players analyzed in the research include Arkema S.A., DuPont, Daikin Industries, Ltd., Halocarbon Products Corporation, Dongyue Group Co., Ltd., Kureha Corporation, Honeywell International, Inc., Solvay SA, Pelchem SOC Ltd., and The 3M Company. Access Avenue (Premium on-demand, subscription-based pricing model) @ https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/Avenue-Membership-details Avenue, a user-based library of global market report database, provides comprehensive reports pertaining to the world's largest emerging markets. It further offers e-access to all the available industry reports just in a jiffy. By offering core business insights on the varied industries, economies, and end users worldwide, Avenue ensures that the registered members get an easy as well as single gateway to their all-inclusive requirements. 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. 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 L.A. renters say a new state law intended to prevent evictions has a major flaw: It gives landlords the option to remove tenants based on vague remodeling plans. Local lawmakers are trying to close what they see as a "loophole" in the law, AB 1482, which took effect Jan. 1. The law bans some previously allowable forms of eviction, but lets landlords remove tenants to "substantially remodel" a building. The L.A. City Council voted Wednesday to move forward with a plan that would require landlords to first obtain permits for remodeling work before giving tenants notice to leave. The move comes after Long Beach's City Council voted Tuesday to enact a similar requirement. The news is welcome for renters like Rose Serna, who received a letter earlier this month telling her to leave her Highland Park apartment within 60 days. The reason given on the form was an unspecified plan for her apartment to be "substantially remodeled." "I was not provided with any details," Serna said. "I know nothing about the repairs that they're talking about." Serna has been living in Highland Park for 15 years. She pays $900 per month for the one-bedroom she shares with her daughter, who is in second grade. Serna doesn't want to change her daughter's school, but she said finding a comparably priced apartment nearby would be impossible. Similar units in her building are now going for $1,800 per month and up, according to online listings. The building's owner, Interstate Equities Corp., did not respond to LAist's calls and emails seeking information about its remodeling plans for Serna's unit. 'THE LATEST LOOPHOLE' This isn't the first time Serna has been told to leave. She previously participated in a rent strike at this building after new owners gave her and other tenants double-digit rent hikes. She received a 60-day notice last year that was later overturned by a city moratorium on such evictions. "I think this is just the latest loophole that they've found," she said. "I don't believe that they have plans to fix anything that would take more than 30 days or make this uninhabitable." Renters in Long Beach described similar situations at a recent City Council meeting there. Jonathan Jager, a housing attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, said his organization has heard from dozens of households affected by these evictions. He said many renters are finding themselves in a precarious position when looking for a new place. "We deal with very low-income tenants who often don't have the cash on hand to pay first and last month's rent" when searching for a new place, Jager said. The new state law requires relocation assistance for evicted tenants, but landlords can comply by waiving their last month's rent. STALLED REPAIRS? Landlord groups urged lawmakers to hold off on requirements to obtain permits before proceeding with evictions. They argued the rules could have unintended consequences, potentially stalling much-needed repairs in aging buildings. "There is no evidence at this time that any illegal activity as it relates to rehabilitation is taking place," said Fred Sutton, senior vice president for the California Apartment Association, in an emailed statement. "It often makes sense to have the unit vacant prior to engaging in needed rehabilitation," he said. "Obtaining a permit is a process in these cities. It can take several months and there are expirations to the permits. What the City is now saying is: you can have a permit for the work but can't actually start." REMODEL RULES WILL BE RETROACTIVE Officials in both Los Angeles and Long Beach sought to fast-track the new rules because tenants given 60-day notices at the beginning of the year are coming up on the deadline to leave their apartments. The cities are making their ordinances retroactive to Jan. 1. Nicole Donanian-Blandon is hopeful that L.A.'s new requirement will let her stay in her Koreatown apartment, at least for now. She received a 60-day notice in January. "I'm very happy that they passed this motion," she said. "I think at the very least there should be transparency between landlords and the tenants. If they have intent to remodel, then I think they should have a plan." James Dalton Medical Office Angels Camp Grand Opening Feb 19 2020 View Photos View Video Angels Camp, CA The long-awaited grand opening of a nearly $8 million health care complex was graced in equal parts by a bright sun, recounting of promises made and kept and a surprising pledge. Several speakers addressed the sizable audience who turned out Wednesday morning ahead of the ceremonial ribbon cutting for the 10,000 square-foot James Dalton Medical Office that culminated with much enthusiasm and assistance by Calaveras Chamber of Commerce (CCC) and Angels Camp Business Association (ACBA) members. Mark Twain Medical Center (MTMC) spokesperson Nicki Stevens, who served as mistress-of-ceremonies, spoke heartfully about the legacy of the facilitys namesake, whose vision and that of the Mark Twain Medical Center Foundation helped bring the years-in-the-planning project to fruition. Making a timely appearance in the wake of the Feb. 1 Dignity Health-CHI merger to become CommonSpiritHealth, a $29 billion system with a footprint in 21 states, Central California Division President Jon VanBoening was clearly in a celebration mode, lauding the big day in kidding contrast to posted signs he remembered back in 2013 about the clinic coming soon to the area. As if to reassure and remove any doubts in the audience as to his companys long-term commitment to Calaveras County, VanBoening emphatically pledged that moving forward, CommonSpiritHealth is solidly invested in the future of the regions rural health care system with much more to come. The newly merged company with a focus on bringing the expertise of a national health care system to neighborhoods across the country constitutes the largest not-for-profit hospital in the country with services touching one in four patients. Following VanBoening, MTMC President/CEO Doug Archer thanked the crowd that turned to celebrate a pretty cool day, and many by name who both played a part and partnered through the project. He gratefully acknowledged what has become a strong and dedicated partnership with MTMC Health Care District and its recently opened Valley Springs Health and Wellness Center and referred to development underway towards open another expanded health care office in Copperopolis at The Square at Copper Valley. More Kumbaya Moments He ended his comments, passing the microphone to MTMC Clinics Medical Director Dr. John Krpan. A popular local physician who relocated his family from Alaska to the county back in 2002, Krpan shared of his nearly immediately forged friendship with Dalton and his enthusiasm now years later to serve among the primary care providers at the Dalton Medical Office. You can hear some of their remarks by clicking the video link in the image box. Other dignitaries who shared unique perspectives about the new facility and the expanding humankindness of local health care included former Mayor of Angels Camp and current Council Member Amanda Folendorf; District 4 County Supervisor Dennis Mills; ACBA spokesperson Jeff Johnson; and MTMC Chaplain Dick Brown, who also provided an official blessing. Representatives for U.S. Congressmember Tom McClintock, State Senator Andreas Borgeas and State Assemblymember Frank Bigelow also presented and read letters of commendation. The Dalton Office, which quietly opened for business last week, is focusing on providing expanded primary and orthopedic care, features 16 exam rooms, a medications/injections room, and a procedure room for minor treatments equipped with a crash cart. There is dedicated space for telepsychiatry visits with an offsite specialist in tandem with an assigned nurse as well as appointments with local behavioral health care staff. According to Clinic Operations Director Marina Bowlin, in addition to relocating the existing doctors and staff from the current clinic location at Angels Towne Center and other nearby offices, the new complex will offer at least two more primary care providers. Incorporated into the facilitys design is a large multi-purpose room with a separate exterior entrance that can be locked off from the medical areas that will provide community event or conference space as well as serve as a staff break room. To view event photos click into the image box slideshow. MUSIC LESSONS CLICK TO ENLARGE DID YOU KNOW? Hurling is one of the fastest field sports in the world. It came to Ireland with the Celts, and oral histories have referenced it being played at Tara going back as far as 1200BC. WEATHER A cloudy start will clear to a mostly sunny day. Temperature up to 8deg in light breezes from the south. On this day in 49BC, Julius Caesar led his army across the Rubicon river in Northern Italy, plunging Rome into civil war from which he emerged victorious and dictator for life. DIARY PODCASTS SPECIAL NOTICES CLICK AD FOR DETAILS THE CAMINOS THE BRIDGE ONLINE WHAT'S ON AROUND Here is a link to a Calendar of upcoming events in Kilcullen. If you have an event you want listed, email the Diary. EMERGENCY 112/999 Take a minute to play this, it might help you save a life! BUSINESS IN TOWN OTHER VOICES BOOKS Also available on iPad; go to iBooks Store and do a search. ; go to iBooks Store and do a search. TEXT ALERT Kilcullen Garda District Text Alert The Grocery in Calverstown, Kilcullen Garda Station , Kilcullen Credit Union , and scheme committee members. Please encourage neighbours and friends to join. Forms for joining thescheme are available fromin Calverstown, Kilcullen, Kilcullen, and scheme committee members. Please encourage neighbours and friends to join. The Kilcullen & Gormanstown Parish Lotto D raw is held at 9pm each Tuesday in the Parish Centre. This is a public event to which all are welcome. There's a prize draw each night for those attending. Details of previous Draws are here. EMAIL THE DIARY kilcullendiary@gmail.com . Comments, contributions, requests always welcome. AROUND TOWN Kilcullen Town has its own Facebook Page . Keep an eye on it. Email notices to us, or text 086 8267104. PEOPLE OF THE HOLLY BUSH Another subject has been posted in the 'People of the Holly Bush' Kilcullen profiles project by Kieran Behan and Brian Byrne. He is Martin Murphy Plus, Bill's Message of the Day, we are living in the United States of Propaganda. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Delhi Minister Gopal Rai on Thursday announced that the capital will host a Pariyavaran Sammelan on February 27. The Minister also reviewed the work being done by his department to tackle the menace of pollution in the city. "Experts, agencies, NGOs and others working for the will be invited in the Pariyavaran Sammelan. In this meeting, the action plan for the next five years will be taken," Gopal Rai told ANI. A high-level meeting was also held today with the officials in the Ministry to review the work done in the past 5 years to tackle the pollution in Delhi, he added. "At today's meeting the officials shared the data on the work done to tackle the menace of pollution in the capital," he said. This meeting was the first held since the AAP had a landslide victory in Delhi Assembly polls earlier this month. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Jamia Coordination Committee members on Thursday held a protest outside Uttar Pradesh Bhawan here demanding the release of doctor Kafeel Khan, who was detained by the Uttar Pradesh police under the Security Act (NSA) last week. The protestors seen holding placards and raising slogans against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), were rounded up by police here. Speaking to ANI, one of the student protestors said, "We demand an immediate release of Dr Kafeel Khan and all the cases that have been registered against him should be closed." Dr Kafeel Khan was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force last month from Mumbai after making inflammatory statements at the Aligarh Muslim University during a protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act on December 12, 2019. He was on February 14 charged under the Security Act (NSA). (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) A court of appeal in Abuja has ordered Okon Abang, judge of a federal high court in Abuja, to withdraw from the trial of Gabriel Suswa... A court of appeal in Abuja has ordered Okon Abang, judge of a federal high court in Abuja, to withdraw from the trial of Gabriel Suswam, a former governor of Benue state. Suswam, now a senator, is being tried alongside Okolobia Okpanachi, a former commissioner of finance in Benue. In a unanimous judgment on Tuesday, a three-man panel ordered that the case file be returned to Ahmed Mohammed, the judge who handled the case from inception. In 2015, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission ( EFCC) had arraigned Suswam and Okpanachi before Mohammed on a nine-count charge, bothering on money laundering and diversion of funds to the tune of N3.1 billion. However, the case was reassigned to Abang following Mohammeds recusal from the trial. Mohammeds withdrawal in 2019 was the second after he announced a similar decision on June 6, 2016, but Ibrahim Auta, the then chief judge of the federal high court, returned the case to him. Mohammed had said he pulled out of the case because he was being accused of receiving bribe to favour of the former governor. Chinelo Ogbozor, Suswams counsel, had challenged the reassigning of the case to Abang, arguing that she was not aware of the judge disqualifying himself from conducting the trial as no prior notice was issued. She added that it amounted to breach of the defendants right to a fair hearing. Although the appellate court in its judgment commended Abang for conducting the trial, the court held that Mohammed was wrong to have rescued himself from conducting the trial. The court explained that its decision to return the case to Mohammed was to correct the error made by Adamu Kafarati, the immediate past chief judge of the federal high court. Agim held that Kafarati did not apply his discretion correctly when he re-assigned the case to Abang, instead of directing Mohammed to continue with the trial. Unfortunately, the chief judge did not exercise his discretion correctly. The re-assignment of the case to Justice Abang amounted to a transfer in a matter that was part heard, the judge who read the judgement said. Four witnesses had already testified and an accused person is entitled to a trial within a reasonable period of time. The action of the chief judge is an administrative one and therefore, proceedings by justice Abang cannot amount to a nullity. The federal high court is one court and the Judges are the same. It is within the administrative powers of the chief judge to re-assign cases and any judge has the jurisdiction to hear to cases assigned to them by the Chief Judge of the court. Our decision is merely to correct the error by the chief judge. justice Abang was right to assume jurisdiction since he has the statutory duty to obey the chief judge. Justice Abang has no powers to challenge or question the chief judge. He has a duty to take a case assigned to him and deal with it. He did what the law allowed him. In fact, if the ruling of Justice Abang did not touch on the reasons given by justice Mohammed to rescue himself, this appeal would have no life. Abang has shown commendable diligence in the trial. But since Justice Abang went to determine the propriety of Justice Mohammeds recusal from the case, the appeal has live issues. Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, February 20) Justice Secretary Menardo Guevarra has ordered the National Bureau of Investigation to investigate the killing of top Bureau of Corrections lawyer Fredric Santos, whom he said was possibly killed due to his links in the 'freedom for sale' controversy. Guevarra on Thursday said that while the probe is still ongoing, it is "very likely that it might have something to do with the GCTA issue." Santos, who was ambushed in Muntinlupa on Wednesday, previously testified in the Senate's inquiry into the alleged Good Conduct Time Allowance (GCTA) scheme at the New Bilibid Prison. He was also set to "tell all" the irregularities in the GCTA implementation, but Senate President Tito Sotto III said Santos backed out. The Office of the Ombudsman suspended Santos in September for six months after finding that he, along with 29 other officials of the bureau, allowed the questionable release of prison convicts in violation of the expanded GCTA policy. Santos is the fifth BuCor employee to be killed after Faeldon was appointed to the helm of the prisons bureau in November 2018. Senate Blue Ribbon committee chairman Richard Dick Gordon, who led the probe on supposed anomalies in the BuCor, said Santos is the 15th BuCor official to be killed within the vicinity of its headquarters in Muntinlupa since 2011. Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson said the pressure is on for the NBI and the Philippine National Police to solve the murder of Santos, adding the burden is on them to find the solution to the culture of impunity. "The manner in which Santos was killed shows how cheap life has become in the government's war on drugs, be it stage-managed or perpetrated by drug syndicates," he said. SAN FRANCISCO (BCN) A former San Francisco jail inmate who had a romantic relationship with a sheriff's deputy has been sentenced in federal court to two years and six months in prison for illegal possession of her gun. Antoine Fowler, 34, was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg in San Francisco and ordered to self-surrender to begin serving his term on March 31. He pleaded guilty last year to a charge of being being an ex-felon in possession of a gun. Fowler and former Deputy April Myres had a relationship that began while he was in jail on a gun conviction and continued when he lived with her for two months after his release in January 2016, according to court documents. MORE: Man declared incompetent in San Francisco pier killing case When the couple broke up after a fight, Fowler ended up with her Sheriff's Department-issued Glock pistol. Prosecutors contended in a sentencing brief that it is uncertain whether he obtained the gun by consent or theft, while defense attorney Kenneth Wine said Myres gave him the gun for his protection after telling him he was in danger of being targeted as an informant. Fowler was arrested with the gun 10 months later. Myres, 56, of San Francisco was separately convicted in a jury trial last year of wire and mail fraud in connection with insurance claims for items she said were stolen on March 24-25, 2016, the night of the couple's breakup. Several of items she claimed, including the gun, belonged to the Sheriff's Department. She was sentenced by Seeborg to one year and two months in prison. Wine argued in a defense sentencing brief that Fowler was a victim of sexual abuse, manipulation and abuse of government power by Myres. Prosecutors argued that no matter how Fowler obtained the gun, he "made a deliberate and criminal decision to possess the firearm for his own purposes for nearly a year after the end of his relationship with Deputy Myres." Copyright 2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. TORONTO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Arete Incident Response, an elite team of cyber security experts and incident responders, announced today the addition of key personnel for its Canada operations. Together, the new team members bring years of experience leading challenging, cyber incident response and forensic investigations for hundreds of Canadian organizations of all sizes and industries. "As the cybersecurity skills gap becomes more acute, organizations are struggling to deal with the velocity and sophistication of ransomware, advanced cyberattacks, and the fall out of data breaches. This is driving tremendous demand for our elite incident response and forensics teams," said Joe Mann, CEO and founder, Arete Incident Response. "This incredible team could not have joined Arete at a more opportune time. Their unique blend of talent and professionalism will augment the Arete leadership structure and help us continue to grow the business by providing excellent security services to our customers." The five cybersecurity experts will lead our incident response team in Canada guiding customers through forensic investigations and remediating on-going attacks. Joining the Arete team are: Shelly Ma, Director of Digital Forensics & Incident Response As an engagement director, Ma's core focus is to assist companies going through cyber events by rapidly addressing security incidents and threats within an organization. Shelley manages a highly skilled team of first responders and digital detectives to pit the wits against cybercriminals, investigating traces of complex digital crimes. She is an EnCE-certified investigator and specializes in ransomware investigations, breach investigations and litigation forensics. Shelley has over 5 years' experience in digital forensic investigations. Prior to embarking on her cyber career, she worked in traditional forensic science solving murders in South Africa. Ma was awarded the Fulbright scholarship to pursue her graduate education at the George Washington University, where she earned her Master's in Science in Digital Forensics. Jaycee Roth, Associate Director of Digital Forensics and Incident Response Roth specializes in ransomware investigations, digital forensics and incident response. Throughout her career, Jaycee has conducted and/or supervised over 250 ransomware engagements and cyber breach investigations. She has expertise in dealing with extortion events, including communication with attacking parties, acquisition of decryption tools and post-incident mitigation and remediation. A speaker at various cybersecurity conferences and events, Jaycee is an experienced cybersecurity incident management professional who honed skills at a globally recognized managed security service provider as a lead analyst and supervisor of the security operations center. Dan Lownsbrough, Technical Deputy and Senior Forensic Investigator Lownsbrough specializes in ransom negotiations and conducts forensic analysis. Dan is highly specialized in the areas of ransomware and business email compromise. He holds a BSc degree in Computer Science from Trent University and an Advanced Diploma in Computer Security and Investigations from Fleming college. He is also an avid programmer and enjoys developing new tools to assist with forensic analysis and incident response. Faith Magcalas, Senior Forensic Analyst As a Senior Forensic Analyst, Magcalas, has dedicated her life to reading the footprints that threat actors leave behind in a victim's environment. She is especially focused on ransomware and recognizes the importance of keeping up to date on attackers' evolving methodologies. After graduating from university with a major in Computer Science, Faith thought it would be meaningful to apply her technical know-how to the field of information security. She has worked in managed security services as an analyst, where she investigated security events for a wide variety of clients and configured their security monitoring systems. She gained experience with ransomware at a previous firm, where she performed forensic analysis and negotiated with attackers. Aaron Whelan, Digital Forensic Investigator Whelan's focus is delving into the forensic artifacts and analyzing logs to identify suspicious or malicious activities within a network, whether it be for a client hit with a ransomware attack or a business email compromise. Aaron also specializes in threat actor communications for ransom negotiation and malware analysis. As a serious Threat Hunter, he can be found fighting evil on client networks. Aaron moved to Canada from the United Kingdom and graduated with an Advanced Diploma in Computer Security and Investigations from Fleming college. "Canada is an important market for Arete. Our team is an ideal mix of experience, expertise and diverse skills. We are looking forward to expanding our presence in Canada, and we are confident this team will set the benchmark for excellence in incident response services," said Brookes Taney, VP of Global Sales, Arete Incident Response. About Arete Incident Response Arete Incident Response partners with clients to reduce the burden of preparing for, detecting and responding to cyber-attacks. Arete's elite team of cyber security experts have created unparalleled capabilities to address the entire cyber incident life cycle, from incident response readiness assessments to post-incident remediation. Their core skills include triage, digital forensics, malware reverse engineering, remediation and testifying expertise. Arete works with organizations to provide highly customized advice specific to their business size and industry. Arete's advisory services provide legally defensible, compliant cyber strategies that assist the C-Suite and Boards of Directors to continuously improve the organizations' cyber posture. Engaging Arete's team of experts gives organizations the confidence to respond to a data breach with access to the world's leading cybersecurity professionals anywhere in the world within hours. For more information, visit Areteir.com or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter. Media Contact: Brookes Taney (952) 607-5935 [email protected] SOURCE Arete Advisors Related Links https://areteadvisorsinc.com/ Throughout their almost eight-year relationship, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have proved time and time again that they are the perfect match. Though they have disagreements every now and again, the love these two have each other is so strong, that were pretty sure nothing could ever come between them. Kim Kardashian and Kanye West | David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images While it was pretty clear early on that Kardashian and West belong together, the reality star recently revealed that she had doubts about her future with the rapper early on in their relationship. Kardashian admits she was unsure of their future six months after being together Though Kardashian couldnt be happier being married to West, there was a time when she struggled picturing her future with the rapper. While recently speaking on the Alls Fair With Laura Wasser podcast, Kardashian West revealed that though she was with West for six months, she questioned where their relationship was headed after discovering she was pregnant with their daughter, North. At the time, I didnt know were we gonna get married? Were we gonna have this baby? she said. It was all new territory to me, and I was so scared. Kardashian West goes on to reveal that she experienced the scare of her life when she thought she was having a miscarriage while filming Kourtney and Kim Take Miami. I thought I had a miscarriage because I was really heavily bleeding and in so much pain in Miami, the reality star continued. I went in to see my doctor and there was no heartbeat. He said, You had a miscarriage.' Kardashian then recalls her doctor telling her to come into their office so that she could have a D and C which is a surgical procedure that removes the contents of the uterus after a miscarriage. It was Thanksgiving morning and my doctor said, Come in in the morning, and well do it Thanksgiving night so no one will see you. I was so worried people would find out. It was the first time I ever was pregnant. I was so nervous, she said. However, when Kardashian went in to have the procedure, she learned that she didnt have a miscarriage and was still carrying her baby. And then Thanksgiving morning I came in to do it, and he said, Theres a heartbeat,' she expressed. And I was like, Oh my god, this is a sign! Its Thanksgiving morning. So we ended up, obviously, having North. Everything fell into place after that After discovering that she was, in fact, with child, Kardashian and West officially announced her pregnancy on New Years Eve 2012. Though she and the rapper were over the moon that they were becoming parents, Kardashians motherhood journey didnt get any easier from then on. Throughout her pregnancy with North, Kardashian experienced an array of complications that carried on into her second pregnancy with her son, Saint. In December 2019, Kardashian opened up about her pregnancy complications and shared that she had to undergo extensive surgeries to repair the damage that had been done to her body. I actually had to have five different operations within a year and a half to fix the damage that all of that did from the inside, she said in the promotional video for her Skims shapewear line. While she successfully delivered two healthy babies, Kardashian was told in 2016 that she wouldnt be able to safely carry another child. After learning of this heartbreaking news, Kardashian and West decided to use gestational surrogates for their third and fourth children. I opted to have a surrogate to use the last, two different surrogates, to use the last two embryos that we had, she continued. Kardashian and West have since welcomed their two youngest children and couldnt be happier with their family of six. Though she had doubts about how her future with West was going to turn out, Kardashian didnt let that stop her from taking a chance and seeing where things were headed. Now, she and West have four beautiful children, and couldnt be more grateful for their family. Thiruvananthapuram, Feb 20 : Twelve victims who were travelling on the ill-fated state-owned luxury bus that met with an accident near Avinashi in Tiruppur district in Tamil Nadu in the wee hours of Thursday have been identified, said a Kerala police official. Two Kerala Ministers - State Transport Minister A.K. Saseendran and Agriculture Minister V.S. Sunil Kumar will be coordinating for relief operations from the accident site. "In all, 20 persons are reported to be dead when a container lorry loaded with tiles collided with the luxury bus that was coming from Bengaluru to Kochi. Twelve bodies of people from Kerala including two women have been identified and the autopsies would be conducted and then the bodies would be handed over to the relatives," said Palakkad SP Shiv Vikram, who reached the spot. Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan termed the accident as shocking and said two of his ministers are on their way to accident site. "The chief secretaries of the two states are now coordinating everything and if need be even a medical team will be sent," said Vijayan. State Health Minister K.K. Shailaja said 20 ambulances have been despatched to the accident site and the entire expenses will be borne by the state. Karishma, a passenger on the bus, said she is yet to recover from the shock. "The entire right side of the bus has been completely damaged and the maximum casualties are from the right side. I was seated on the left side of the bus," said Karishma, who escaped unhurt. In all, 46 persons were on board the bus and the dead include both driver and conductor of the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation bus. The condition of two injured under treatment is serious. -- The story has been published from a wire feed without any modifications to the text Last nights Democratic debate brought to mind a dysfunctional family into whose midst a stranger barges, claiming to be a relative. The family unites and pummels the stranger. But soon the kids (here, Buttigieg and Klobuchar) are quarreling more vociferously than ever. Here are some additional observations about last nights session. PARENT ABUSE: Candidates kids sometimes play a role in debates, but not in this cycle. Most of the field is so old that no one wants to hear about their kids. Buttigieg is young enough to have cute kids, but he and his husband dont have any. Biden would like to talk about Beau, but that would risk making people think of Hunter. Parents, not kids, are a persistent topic in the debates. Last night, Biden launched a semi-coherent riff about how his father lost his job and the family had to move. He told the tale so quickly that it sounded like stream of consciousness. Perhaps this was a moment of therapy for a man whose lifelong ambition seems to be slipping away. Warren, too, offered a family hardship story. Something about a car being repossessed, I think. The hero of her story was Warrens mother, though no specific instance of heroism was described. Warrens father didnt figure in her story. Bloomberg didnt talk specifically about his family, but appeared to throw it under the bus. When criticized for his foul, sexually-charged workplace language, Bloomberg explained that he was brought up that way. Klobuchar didnt talk about her family during this debate. However, her volatile, alcoholic father has featured in several past debates. Sanders never mentions his parents. His father may have been even more radically socialist than Bernie is. I havent heard Buttigieg talk about his parents during a debate, though apparently he has mentioned his late father (a respected literature professor at Notre Dame) in tweets. THE MORALITY OF COMMUNISM: Last night, Bernie Sanders pronounced the distribution of income in the United States immoral. This raises the question of what distribution of income would be moral, and why. I can think of only two distributions that can be defended on moral grounds. One is perfectly equal distribution. The other is the distribution that would exist absent any redistribution of income or government interference other than neutral enforcement of basic criminal laws. I dont support either type of income distribution, and I doubt many Americans do. But without embracing one or the other, or describing a similarly grounded alternative, its hard to see how morality can be an arbiter of income distribution. But heres the real problem. When a politician claims the ability to declare particular income distribution results immoral, as opposed to simply undesirable, it opens the door to totalitarianism, including the persecution and possible elimination of those who possess an immoral amount of wealth. Its no accident that communism, the ideology that focuses heavily on how income should be distributed, invariably gave rise to totalitarian regimes. Its no accident that Bernie Sanders sympathizes with communism. Its no accident that many of Sanderss supporters resemble the thugs who make up the shock troops of totalitarian regimes. GOTCHA: A panelist who works for Telemundo, decided to attack Amy Klobuchar for not knowing (or maybe not remembering) the name of Mexicos brand new president. Klobuchar had her answer ready, but the fool from Telemundo found it wanting and pressed the matter. Naturally, Pete Buttigieg joined the attack, and Klobuchar had to dig deep into her talking points to fend off the assault. All of this allowed Elizabeth Warren to play the hero (and, believe it or not, the voice of sanity) by defending her fellow female Senator. Under pressure, Klobuchar struck one unfortunate note. She compared not knowing the Mexican presidents name to not knowing the number of members of Israels Knesset. This isnt a terrible point on the merits. But to the extent Latino voters have a problem with Klobuchar not knowing the Mexican presidents name (a small cohort, I hope), she dug the hole deeper by treating the matter as trivial. The attack on Klobuchar was unfair, but I dont feel sorry for her. The person I feel sorry for is the campaign staffer who prepped the Senator for the interview in which she failed to come up with the Mexican presidents name. There could be tens of thousands more potholes endangering drivers, cyclists and walkers if the Government fails to invest in roads, an analysis predicted yesterday. It said there will be 650,000 unrepaired craters in roads by 2030 unless Chancellor Rishi Sunak finds the extra 5billion for repairs and maintenance that were pledged in the party's election manifesto. The result will be increasing difficulty in keeping traffic running as well as dangers to road users, the report by economic consultancy Cebr and insurers Zurich UK said. The estimates piled pressure on the Government to meet its expensive manifesto pledge to 'launch the biggest ever pothole-filling programme'. There could be tens of thousands more potholes endangering drivers, cyclists and walkers if the Government fails to invest in roads, an analysis predicted yesterday (File image) Yesterday's report said that growing numbers of potholes risk damage to cars, dangerous manoeuvres by drivers trying to avoid them, and high chances of injury for cyclists and walkers. Based on RAC figures which counted 561,000 potholes across the UK last year, it said that if the 500million a year pledged in the Tory manifesto is found, numbers will reduce to 413,000 by 2030. However, it suggested there will be a 16 per cent increase to 651,000 without the cash. Ron Penman of Zurich UK said the pothole problem 'has been getting worse simply because government funding and council resources have not been sufficient enough to cope with the magnitude of the issue.' In the midst of a pine forest in Jabal al-Turkman, northeast of Latakia, heavily armed fighters stood proud of their victory. It was November 24, 2015, and a few hours ago, the Turkish air force had shot down a Sukhoi 24 (SU-24) on its way back from a combat mission. One of the two helicopters dispatched by Moscow to rescue the pilots was then caught by rebel fire. "Our comrades opened fire, we all did. The pilots died in the air, said a deputy commander of the Turkmen forces who spoke to the camera in Turkish. By then, the war in Syria had been going on for four years, but it was the first time that the spotlight was shone on this Turkish-speaking minority that had sided with the revolution and whose importance grew as Turkey became more invested in Syria. In 2016, Ankara launched operation Euphrates Shield in Syria with the stated objective of ousting the Islamic State from the city of Jarablos. Turkey's main aim, however, was to reduce the size of the territory conquered by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which it considers a terrorist group. To achieve its goals, Ankara had to rely on local fighters, and who could better serve its cause than Syrians, fluent in Turkish, who were ready to swear allegiance to Turkey? Even beyond the Syrian borders, Turkmen have been known to cooperate with Turkey, notably in Libya, where Ankara has deployed thousands of Syrian mercenaries in recent weeks, the majority of whom are Turkmen, to help the Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA), which is supported by the UN, in its war against the forces of General Khalifa Haftar, who in turn is supported by the Emirati-Egyptian-Saudi axis. However, the involvement of the Turkmen is still a taboo subject. Fighters on the ground or those returning from Libya, their relatives, and spokesmen for Syrian Turkmen groups refused to answer our questions. Speaking to LOrient Le jour, Abu el-Ez, a Turkmen spokesperson in the Turkish backed Syrian national army, denied sending soldiers to Libya, reiterating Ankaras official position. However, Nawar Oliver, a researcher and analyst at the Omran Center, a think tank based in Istanbul, said most of the Syrian fighters who left for Libya come from the Sultan Mourad and Sultan Mehmet groups, affiliated to the Syrian Turkmen brigades, nevertheless he explained that that there is no direct agreement between these groups and Ankara, but rather agreements are made through individual contracts. Jamil, a Turkmen from a small town near Jarablos, knows some of the men who were deployed in Libyas Tripoli as "security guards," not as "fighters," he said. Their contracts allowed them to earn more than ten times their monthly salary and perhaps even obtain Turkish nationality as recognition for their effort, according to some reports. "They have salaries that range between $ 2,000 and $ 2,500 for contracts ranging from three to six months. But when it comes to obtaining Turkish nationality upon their return, this is completely untrue," said Jamil. "The Turks trust the Turkmens and prefer to deal with them," confirms Majd *, a journalist from the Syrian opposition. This trust has its origins in old ties between the two peoples. Regarded as Turkish agents by Baathist Syria, the Turkmens saw in the 2011 revolution a historic opportunity to assert their rights and finally gain recognition. They have been Syrian for several generations, and do not disown their country or necessarily dream of living in Turkey. But throughout the Syrian conflict, they have relied on Turkey for protection. The Turkmens are the descendants of a nomadic people from Central Asia who arrived in Anatolia following the military campaigns of the great Mamluk conquerors and later on, they served the Ottomans. When Turkish troops left Syria at the beginning of the 20th century, many families stayed along the borders, mainly in the provinces of Latakia and Aleppo. "We have been in Syria since the Ottoman era. We consider ourselves Syrians, but we still have a fondness for the Turkish motherland, explains Jamil, a fifth year pharmacy student. We cannot dissociate the Turkmens from the Turkish nation, given the ties that unite us such as history, language, blood ties and a common destiny. We consider Turkey as a friend, a sister, said Tarek Sulo Cevizci, president of the Federation of Syrian Turkmen Associations, while acknowledging that he was a fully-fledged Syrian. The size of the Turkmen population in Syrian is another controversial issue, with the lowest estimates suggesting 800,000 and the highest several million. The Syrian government has never conducted an official denominational or ethnic census since the assimilation policy started under the French mandate has done everything possible to Arabize the minorities in the region. "In the absence of statistics from the Assad regime, we estimate the number of Syrian Turkmens at more than 3.5 million, because a large number of our people are still afraid to recognize their Turkmen origin due to a policy of marginalization adopted by the regime," explains Mohammad Vecih Cuma, President of the Turkmen Assembly, when interviewed by OLJ. Hafez el-Assad never considered the Turkmens as an ethnic minority, and notably they were prohibited from publishing in the Turkish language. Jamil, 32, studied the official curriculum in Arabic at school, but after the Syrian uprising, it was replaced by Turkish. "In college, we had the choice between English and French, but Turkish was completely prohibited. At home, most of our TV channels were Turkish. We felt like any Syrian citizen, except in the eyes of the regime," he lamented. "The Turkmens have been prevented from accessing important positions in power and have been excluded from political life. The Baathist regime has considered the Turkmen constituency an enemy, said Tarik Sulo Cevizci. The perception that they were second-class citizens provided fertile ground for the early anti-regime demonstrations in 2011. "The Turkmens were already rebels in spirit before the revolution even started," said Mohammad Vecih Cuma. The regions with large Turkmen populations had been used to counting on themselves long before the uprising, as services in Turkmen towns were neglected by the state. Turkey, which has never hidden its Pan-Turkism ambitions, was only able to concretely support the Turkmens at the start of the revolution, in particular by funding predominantly Turkmen brigades to defend areas traditionally considered to be Turkmen, and to fight the Syrian regime. Among them, Sultan Mourad is considered the most influential group in the region, especially due to its active involvement in the various Turkish offensives against the Kurdish YPG. Assembly in al-Rai In October 2019, Ankara launched operation Peace Spring that aimed to expel the SDF from its borders. During the offensive Turkmen forces participated as part of the Syrian National Army. "Four battalions have been dispatched to liberate the region from the YPG terrorist forces, and our participation has borne fruit," said Abou el-Ez, a military spokesperson. The Syrian Turkmen, like many of their Arab compatriots, rejected the Kurds aspirations for self-rule in northern Syria from the start. We lived in communion before the revolution. But when some of them joined terrorist groups linked to the PKK, the situation naturally became tense. For us, they are on the same level as Daesh, says Jamil. The two groups are almost viscerally hostile to one another. Last October, militiamen from Sultan Mourad brutally murdered Hevrin Khalaf, a Kurdish politician, as well as eight other civilians. The Syrian North has since become a vast arena of Turkish influence. There are Turkish teachers, police, and hospitals. We cannot say that this is a Turkish region, but they are very present, and it is clearly better than before," said Jamil. "The fighters of the Turkmen factions are deployed in all the liberated areas and get on well with the militant groups and the Arab population," said Abu el-Ez. Last summer, the Syrian Turkmen Assembly relocated its offices from Istanbul to al-Rai, a border town under the control of the Free Syrian Army. "The natural place of our Assembly is in Syria in order to participate actively in the real revolutionary political movement and to be as close as possible to our people," explains Mohammad Vecih Cuma. Nearly 400,000 Syrian Turkmen are currently in Turkey. "The Turkish state treats Turkmen people, whether in Syria or Turkey, like all other Syrians," said Tarik Sulo Cevizci, head of a federation of nine cultural, charitable and educational associations. Only 5,000 Syrian Turkmen out of a total of 110,000 Syrians of all backgrounds are said to have obtained Turkish citizenship. Jamil was naturalized 9 months ago after seven years of residence. "It is more difficult for a Syrian Turkmen to obtain Turkish citizenship than an Arab Syrian because Turkey wants us to stay in Syria. The authorities message is clear: you must stay there so that we can take advantage of your presence in Syria and we can protect you", said Jamil. (This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour on the 14th of February) Video PlayerClose Staff welcome workers returning from Yunnan Province by a chartered flight at Jinjiang Internation Airport in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, February 19, 2020. The chartered flight DR5345 of Ruili Airlines carried 101 returning workers from Mangshi City of southwest China's Yunnan Province to Quanzhou of southeast China's Fujian Province on Wednesday. It's the first chartered flight for returning workers that arrived in Fujian Province since the novel coronavirus outbreak. [Xinhua/Jiang Kehong] Workers returning from Yunnan Province arrive at Jinjiang Internation Airport by a chartered flight in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, February 19, 2020. The chartered flight DR5345 of Ruili Airlines carried 101 returning workers from Mangshi City of southwest China's Yunnan Province to Quanzhou of southeast China's Fujian Province on Wednesday. It's the first chartered flight for returning workers that arrived in Fujian Province since the novel coronavirus outbreak. [Xinhua/Jiang Kehong] A staff member leads workers returning from Yunnan Province by a chartered flight at Jinjiang Internation Airport in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, February 19, 2020. The chartered flight DR5345 of Ruili Airlines carried 101 returning workers from Mangshi City of southwest China's Yunnan Province to Quanzhou of southeast China's Fujian Province on Wednesday. It's the first chartered flight for returning workers that arrived in Fujian Province since the novel coronavirus outbreak. [Xinhua/Jiang Kehong] A staff member helps workers returning from Yunnan Province register at Jinjiang Internation Airport in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, February 19, 2020. The chartered flight DR5345 of Ruili Airlines carried 101 returning workers from Mangshi City of southwest China's Yunnan Province to Quanzhou of southeast China's Fujian Province on Wednesday. It's the first chartered flight for returning workers that arrived in Fujian Province since the novel coronavirus outbreak. [Xinhua/Jiang Kehong] Workers returning from Yunnan Province arrive at Jinjiang Internation Airport by a chartered flight in Quanzhou, southeast China's Fujian Province, February 19, 2020. The chartered flight DR5345 of Ruili Airlines carried 101 returning workers from Mangshi City of southwest China's Yunnan Province to Quanzhou of southeast China's Fujian Province on Wednesday. It's the first chartered flight for returning workers that arrived in Fujian Province since the novel coronavirus outbreak. [Xinhua/Jiang Kehong] (Source: Xinhua) Dont believe stories and dont believe polls, the president said, because the polls are worse than the stories. Mr. Trump spent a substantial amount of time regaling the crowd with stories of his 2016 campaign, calling Dan Scavino his social media manager and the most powerful man in politics, the president said up to the stage to hand him a stack of news clippings. The president read aloud from them individually, insulting journalists who had declared he had done poorly on the debate stage against Hillary Clinton, his Democratic opponent that year, and attacking Fox News personalities he considers too critical of him. I did great in the debates, Mr. Trump said. I became president because of the debates. At the Colorado rally, he was expected to try to bolster the fortunes of Senator Cory Gardner, a vulnerable Republican up for re-election in a state that is trending increasingly liberal. Youre going to help get Cory Gardner across that line because hes been with us 100 percent, he told the crowd. Democrats have pointed out that the presidents track record on lending support to embattled candidates is mixed at best. But Mr. Trump is practiced at trying to turn any anti-Trump words spoken by Democrats against them, as he did when he paid particular attention to remarks that Mr. Bloomberg delivered to supporters on Thursday morning at an event in Salt Lake City. Look, the real winner in the debate last night was Donald Trump because I worry that we may be on the way to nominating somebody who cannot win in November, Mr. Bloomberg said. If we choose a candidate who appeals to a small base, like Senator Sanders, it will be a fatal error. Mr. Bloombergs somewhat chastened reaction was the cherry on top for the president, who has spent most of the week drawing energy and money from enthusiastic supporters. According to a Trump campaign official, Mr. Trump has raised $17 million for his re-election efforts since arriving on the West Coast. America likes winners, not whiners, Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to the president and a former Trump campaign manager, said of his post-debate confidence. President Trump has survived every petty, partisan, pathetic attempt to remove him from office and is well positioned to do it one more time: on Election Day. Burma Myanmar Lower House Votes to Scrap Polling Stations on Military Bases A civilian polling station in Yangon's Tamwe Township on the morning of the 2018 by-election. / Htet Wai / The Irrawaddy YANGONMyanmars Lower House voted on Thursday to require that polling stations for military personnel and their family members be placed outside of military barracksa move that effectively abolishes military polling stations. The Union Election Commission (UEC) submitted a number of proposed changes to electoral by-laws in November last year, including one that would allow military personnel and their family members to cast their votes outside the barracks, in order to be able to cast votes together with civilian voters and to be transparent, where candidates, observers and party representatives can freely enter and monitor. Since the 2010 general election, military votersmilitary personnel and their family membersin many constituencies have been ordered to vote in military cantonments, under the eyes of their superiors. As Myanmar held a general election in 2015 and three by-elections in 2012, 2017 and 2018, independent monitoring of polling stations inside military compounds and the areas where military personnel live remained limited for security reasons. The situation led to concerns that military voters could not vote freely for the candidates of their choice. Some political parties and analysts said members of the military were intimidated into voting for the party that their superiors supported. In some cases, members of the military were given ballots that were already filled out, or were forced to let their superiors vote on their behalf. In previous elections, the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) saw landslide victories at military cantonment polling stations, with other parties garnering very few votes. Military-appointed lawmakers objected to the proposal, citing security reasons and what they said would be logistical difficulties. Brigadier-General Maung Maung told reporters on Thursday that it would cause security and transport problems in some places for military personnel and their family members to leave military barracks to vote. I think this is wrong. There was no problem with the military polling stations in the 2010 and 2015 general elections; the elections were free and fair and that is why the ruling party is in power today. There is no reason for it. A majority of Lower House lawmakers attending Parliament on Thursday voted in favor of the UECs changes. Kyaw Myo contributed reporting from Naypyitaw. You may also like these stories: Military Requests Slightly Higher Budget than Last Year for 2018-19 Two Myanmar Constitution Amendment Bills Agreed by NLD, Ethnic Parties Voter Turnout Sluggish in By-Election COLUMBUS, Ohio Prosecutors, rape survivors and other advocates were among those who testified at the Statehouse during an emotionally charged hearing for a bill that would eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual assault in Ohio. Speaking to members of the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee, Medina County Prosecutor S. Forrest Thompson shared details of two cases he called life-changing that hes dealt with since taking office in 2017. One beat the statute of limitations by months, leading to the identification of a man police believe is a serial killer. Another narrowly missed it, allowing a local man evidence identified as a rapist to remain free and uncharged, he said. Committee members were considering Senate Bill 162, which would eliminate the statute of limitations the legal deadline by which prosecutors must file charges after a crime is committed for rape and sexual assault. Since 2015, the statute of limitations on rape charges in Ohio has been 25 years, with an extra five years possible if DNA evidence is available. Wednesdays hearing was the second for the bill, sponsored by Democratic Sens. Nickie Antonio, of Lakewood, and Sean OBrien, of Trumbull County. Its co-sponsored by nine other state senators, including two Republicans. The bills would also eliminate spousal exemptions to rape, sexual battery and other sexual offenses. In one case described by Thompson, a 17-year-old girl was raped by a truck driver in 1997 while hitchhiking to Cleveland. Prosecutors declined to press charges at the time. But after DNA evidence was re-tested, prosecutors indicted Samuel Legg III in January 2019, within months of the statute of limitations expiring, Thompson said. Legg since has been tied to murders of four other women in Illinois and Ohio in the 1990s. In another case, a woman in Medina County was raped in 1993 after giving a man a ride home from a bar. The case was unsolved until 2013, when the state attorney generals office finally tested DNA from a rape kit collected by police. Investigators got a positive hit for a man who still lived in the area, Thompson said. But they cant charge or publicly identify him, since the statute of limitations had passed about four months prior, he said. We know who he is, but we cant do anything about it, Thompson said. I never want to do that again. The statute of limitations is arbitrary, outdated and it has no function under the law As demonstrated by the Legg case, a few weeks would have prevented us from bringing a serial killer to justice. In [the second case], a few weeks would have allowed us to bring a violent rapist to justice. Similar bills have been introduced in previous legislative sessions without passing. But the idea has picked up steam over the past year. Two prominent Ohio Republicans, Gov. Mike DeWine and Attorney General Dave Yost, have called for eliminating the statute of limitations on rape in the aftermath of an investigation into sexual abuse of male athletes committed by Dr. Richard Strauss, a former Ohio State University physician, between 1979 and 1998. He was never charged and killed himself in 2005. A Democratic-backed companion bill has been introduced in the Ohio House. But it hasnt gotten a hearing due to concerns from Republican House Speaker Larry Householder. Householder instead has been holding hearings on a narrowly-written bill that would apply only to the OSU case, paving the way for Strauss victims to sue the university. Householders threatened to pass the bill while pressuring the university to settle the lawsuits. The Senate committee hearing Wednesday allowed for proponents to speak in support of the bill. While questioning witnesses, some senators raised concerns whether eliminating the statute of limitations might lead to more false convictions, since memories and evidence fades over time. Others who testified included Rick Bell, special investigations chief for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutors Office. He detailed his offices practice of filing placeholder John Doe indictments against DNA profiles while prosecutors seek to buy time for rape kits to be tested. Some cases went untested for years, while in other cases, like his offices 2002 investigation of widespread sexual abuse by priests within the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, victims dont come forward for decades, Bell said. There has to be a better way than that, Bell said. This is a practice we use but its not widely-employed as a tool in the tool-belt by prosecutors across the state. Jeannette Crabb, the woman from the 1993 case described by Thompson, also testified Wednesday. The proposed law change would not affect her case, but she said she hopes future generations can be protected. Please eliminate the statute of limitations so that no matter how long it takes, we can punish these monsters, she said. Read other recent state news: Gov. Mike DeWine calls for expansion of Ohios distracted driving laws Ohio to use artificial intelligence to evaluate state regulations Republican Ohio secretary of state criticizes state GOPs steal the election rhetoric in fundraising email Proposed Ohio law seeks to prevent crashes by making Amish buggies more visible Jim Jordans name comes up during testimony on OSU abuse victims bill Fort Lauderdale, FL, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- via NEWMEDIAWIRE -- Veritas Farms, Inc. (OTCQB: VFRM) (Veritas Farms or the Company), a vertically integrated agribusiness focused on the production of full-spectrum hemp oil products with naturally occurring cannabinoids, is pleased to announce that it has expanded distribution of its Full-Spectrum CBD-Infused Orange Creme Lip Balm to 45 Bashas Supermarkets beginning in late January. Bashas Supermarkets is a family-owned grocery store chain located in Arizona. The lip balm will be merchandised in a Bashas lip care set alongside of all mainstream lip care products. Veritas Farms has experienced explosive growth in the full-spectrum hemp lip care segment, as the Orange Creme single is a top unit seller according to recent IRI data. Alexander Salgado, CEO and co-founder of Veritas Farms, stated, We are very happy to work with Bashas Supermarkets and distribute our Full-Spectrum CBD-Infused Lip Balm across Arizona. Bashas is known to offer some of the highest quality products on the market, and we are honored to have our product on their shelves. About Veritas Farms, Inc. Veritas Farms, Inc. (OTCQB: VFRM) is a vertically integrated agribusiness focused on producing superior quality, whole plant, full spectrum hemp oils and extracts containing naturally occurring cannabinoids. The Company currently owns and operates a 140-acre farm and production facilities in Pueblo, Colorado, and is registered with the Colorado Department of Agriculture to grow industrial hemp. The Company markets and sells products under its Veritas Farms brand and manufactures private label products for a number of leading distributors and retailers. Veritas Farms brand full spectrum hemp oil products include vegan capsules, tinctures, formulations for sublingual applications and infused edibles, lotions, salves, and oral syringes in a variety of size formats and flavors. All Veritas Farms brand products are third-party laboratory tested for strength and purity. The Company files periodic reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which can be viewed at www.sec.gov . About Bashas Supermarkets Bashas Supermarkets is a division of Bashas Family of Stores, a family-owned Arizona grocer founded by brothers Ike and Eddie Basha. With more than 100 grocery stores, it is one of the largest employers in the state and one of the Best Places to Work in Arizona. Since the companys inception in 1932, Bashas has given back more than $100 million to the communities it serves. For more information, visit www.bashas.com . Cautionary Language Concerning Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the U.S. Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, including those with respect to the Company's mission statement and growth strategy, are forward-looking statements. Although the Company's management believes that such forward-looking statements are reasonable, it cannot guarantee that such expectations are, or will be, correct. These forward-looking statements involve many risks and uncertainties, which could cause the Company's future results to differ materially from those anticipated. Potential risks and uncertainties include, among others, general economic conditions and conditions affecting the industries in which the Company operates; the uncertainty of regulatory requirements and approvals; and the ability to obtain necessary financing on acceptable terms or at all. Additional information regarding the factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements is available in the Company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The Company assumes no obligation to update any of the information contained or referenced in this press release. Veritas Farms, Inc. - Investor Contact 833-691-4367 (option 3) ir@theveritasfarms.com Boosted by a string of earnings beats, another record close on Wall Street, fresh stimulus measures in China and rekindled hopes for further rates cuts from the RBA, local shares powered to fresh highs on Thursday. The benchmark S&P/ASX 200 rose 17.9 points, or 0.3 per cent, to close at new record high of 7162.5, extending its gains so far this year to an impressive 7.2 per cent. After ambling higher in early trade, gains accelerated after the Peoples Bank of China reduced its benchmark Loan Prime Rate, delivering lower interest repayments to new and existing borrowers. Economists believe it wont be the last stimulus measure to help support the economy as it grapples with the coronavirus outbreak. We expect the People's Bank to continue loosening monetary conditions in the coming weeks, especially given signs that the coronavirus disruptions have started to weigh on employment, said Capital Economics senior China economist Julian Evans-Pritchard. The policy easing provided an additional tailwind for local shares, sending the Australian dollar tumbling to the lowest level since the GFC, supporting offshore earners. The move in the local unit mirrored a similar decline in the Chinese yuan. In late Asian trade, the Aussie dollar was down 0.4 per cent at 66.48 US cents. The local market was also given a boost by a surprise spike in Australias unemployment rate to 5.3 per cent in January, rekindling hopes for additional rate cuts from the Reserve Bank. Another solid session for corporate earnings cemented a second consecutive record close. Of those companies that reported, Southern Cross Media gained 13.9 per cent to $0.86, Coca-Cola Amatil 8.6 per cent to $13.07, LendLease 6.7 per cent to $18.60 while Qantas rose 5.9 per cent to $6.67. A strong earnings update and an upgrade from Bell Potter saw Perpetual shares soar 11.2 per cent to $47.27. Not all companies enjoyed such stellar gains on Thursday. Software provider WiseTech Global continued to crater after delivering an underwhelming interim profit result on Wednesday, sliding a further 11.8 per cent to $18.88. Domain Group skidded 6.3 per cent to $3.55 while Whitehaven Coal slumped 5.5 per cent to $2.23 after delivering disappointing results. A man wearing a face mask talks on his mobile phone in front of a poster about precautions against the novel coronavirus that originated in central China, at a subway station in Seoul on Feb. 10, 2020. (Jung Yeon-je/AFP via Getty Images) South Korea Reports 1st Coronavirus Death; Cases Spike A man who had been bedridden at a South Korean hospital for more than 20 years has become the first person in that nation to die from the new coronavirus, as the number of cases in the Asian country nearly doubled. The 63-year-old man died of pneumonia Feb. 19 at a hospital in Cheongdo, which is located in North Gyeongsang province, local outlet Yonhap News Agency reported Feb. 20, citing the Korea Center for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC). He tested positive for the COVID-19 virus posthumously. Yonhap didnt indicate why the man was bedridden. His death is the ninth COVID-19-related death outside mainland China. There has been one death reported each in France, the Philippines, and Taiwan. There have been two deaths in Hong Kong and three in Japan. There are 13 other confirmed cases of coronavirus at the same hospital. Also Feb. 20, KCDC announced 53 new casesthe largest number in a single day since the country reported its first confirmed case of the virus on Jan. 20. South Korea currently has 104 known cases of coronavirusthe highest among countries with confirmed cases outside mainland China. Of the 53 new cases, 51 are in Daeguwhich is 186 miles southeast of Seouland neighboring North Gyeongsang Province, according to KCDC. Daegu and North Gyeongsang are home to about 5 million people, according to South Korean media. The remaining two cases are in Seoul. The South Korean government announced that it will provide 2.5 billion won (about $2 million) in special funds to enhance safety measures in Daegu and North Gyeongsang, according to Yonhap. Twenty-three of the Daegu and North Gyeongsang cases are believed to be linked to a 61-year-old South Korean woman who tested positive Feb. 18. The woman, a resident in Daegu, has infected about 40 people, most of whom had attended the same church as the woman. With at least 90 people out of the more than 1,000 who attended the same church showing symptoms of the virus, Daegu Mayor Kwon Young-jin has asked city residents to stay indoors, Reuters reported on Feb. 20. We are in an unprecedented crisis, Kwon told reporters. Gen. Robert B. Abe Abrams, commander of the U.S. Forces Korea, announced measures Feb. 19 to protect American service members and their families. All service members who have been to the same church in Daegu since Feb. 9 will be placed under mandatory self-quarantine, while non-essential travel to and from Daegu will be prohibited, and off-installation travel minimized. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has named Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam as destinations with apparent community spreadmeaning that some people are infected without knowing how or where they became infected. Last month, the CDC issued a Level Three warning for all of China, meaning that Americans should avoid all nonessential travel to China. A Korean Navy sailor in his 20s on South Koreas Jeju Island also tested positive for the virus, Yonhap reported Feb. 20, citing government officials. The sailor visited Daegu from Feb. 13 to 18. He began showing symptoms of the virus after returning to his base in Jeju. It isnt known if the sailor has been included among the 104 known cases in South Korea. PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 15:01:45 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 836 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 TORONTO, ON / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 / Kontrol Energy Corp. (CSE:KNR)(OTCQB:KNRLF)(FSE:1K8) ("Kontrol" or "Company") a leader in the energy efficiency sector through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology is pleased to announce that Joanna Osawe has been appointed to its Board of Directors.Joanna Osawe is the Chair, President & CEO of Women in Renewable Energy (WiRE), a group which encourages and supports women to enter the renewable energy industry. WiRE is inclusive and educates on all renewable and emerging energy technologies with chapters in St. John's, Halifax, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Mississauga, Windsor, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatchewan and Vancouver and Kamloops. WiRE has expanded with its 1st International Launch in Istanbul, Turkey with the Canadian Embassy and as of 2019 WiRE has expanded to Tbilisi Georgia, Baku Azerbaijan and Amman Jordan. WiRE is expanding in the MENA regions currently. WiRE regularly organizes educational field trips, monthly networking meetings, an awards recognition program, student mentoring and bursaries, communications and engagement initiatives. Joanna also works at DMC Power as the Global Business Development Manager, Major Projects.Joanna studied languages at Western University, graduating with an Honours BA. Joanna has used her language skills on a focused, 15+ year management career at leading renewable and energy sector companies in Canada and the United States. By carrying complex projects through many stages, she has seen firsthand the vital role renewable energy and emerging technologies serve in moving the Canadian, American and Global energy mix forward."We are very pleased that Joanna has joined the Kontrol Board of Directors. Joanna has extensive experience in the alternative energy markets and a global reach through her fantastic work through Women in Renewable Energy (WiRE)," stated Paul Ghezzi, CEO of Kontrol Energy.Shares for DebtThe Company also announces that it has issued 173,586 common shares at a deemed price per share of $0.58 in settlement of $100,680 in outstanding debts (the "Transaction").About Kontrol EnergyKontrol Energy Corp. (CSE: KNR) (OTCQB: KNRLF) (FSE: 1K8) is a leader in the energy efficiency and smart building sector through IoT, Cloud and SaaS technology. With a disciplined mergers and acquisition strategy, combined with organic growth, Kontrol Energy Corp. provides market-based energy solutions to our customers designed to reduce their overall cost of energy while providing a corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.Additional information about Kontrol Energy Corp. can be found on its website at www.kontrolenergy.com and by reviewing its profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com Contact us at admin@ kontrolenergy.com Kontrol Energy Corp., 180 Jardin Drive, Unit 9, Vaughan, ON L4K 1X8 Tel: 905.766.0400, Toll free: 1.844.566.8123For further information, contact:Paul Ghezzi, Chief Executive Officerpaul@ kontrolenergy.com Kontrol Energy Corp.,180 Jardin Drive, Unit 9, Vaughan, ON L4K 1X8Tel: 905.766.0400, Toll free: 1.844.566.8123Neither IIROC nor any stock exchange or other securities regulatory authority accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Forward-Looking InformationCertain information included in this press release, including information relating to future financial or operating performance and other statements that express the expectations of management or estimates of future performance constitute "forward-looking statements". Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding possible future acquisitions, organic growth, the provision of solutions to customers and Greenhouse Gas emissions reductions, proposed financial savings and sustainable energy benefits and energy monitoring. Where the Company expresses or implies an expectation or belief as to future events or results, such expectation or belief are based on assumptions made in good faith and believed to have a reasonable basis. Such assumptions include, without limitation, that suitable businesses and technologies for acquisition and/or investment will be available, that such acquisitions and or investment transactions will be concluded, that sufficient capital will be available to the Company, that technology will be as effective as anticipated, that organic growth will occur, and others. However, forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, which could cause actual results to differ materially from future results expressed, projected or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such risks include, but are not limited to, lack of acquisition and investment opportunities or that such opportunities may not be concluded on reasonable terms, or at all, that sufficient capital and financing cannot be obtained on reasonable terms, or at all, that technologies will not prove as effective as expected, that customers and potential customers will not be as accepting of the Company's product and service offering as expected, and government and regulatory factors impacting the energy conservation industry. Accordingly, undue reliance should not be placed on forward-looking statements and the forward-looking statements contained in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by this cautionary statement. The forward-looking statements contained herein are made as at the date hereof and the Company does not undertake any obligation to update publicly or revise any such forward-looking statements or any forward-looking statements contained in any other documents whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as required under applicable securities law.SOURCE: Kontrol Energy Corp. Felicity Jones has been seen for the first time since announcing that she is pregnant, as she arrived in London on Thursday. The actress, 36, shielded her growing baby bump under a cosy black trench coat as she touched down at Gatwick Airport, more than two months after confirming that she is expecting her first child with husband Charles Guard. Felicity first confirmed her pregnancy news after debuting her baby bump at The Aeronauts premiere in New York City in December, 17 months after tying the knot with the director. Glowing: Felicity Jones, 36, has been seen for the first time since announcing that she is pregnant, as she touched down in London's Gatwick Airport on Thursday Felicity cut a stylish figure in a cosy black trench coat as she flashed a smile during her airport stroll. The star opted for a comfy jumper and leggings which flashed a glimpse of her growing bump and carried her essentials in a black leather cross-body bag. Pulling her brunette bobbed tresses behind a knotted headband, Felicity looked glowing as she strolled through the airport after jetting back to the UK. Flawless: The actress cut a casual figure in a cosy black trench coat which shielded her blossoming baby bump as she strolled through the terminal Relaxed: Felicity cut a stylish figure in her relaxed trench coat which displayed a glimpse of her blossoming bump Bumping along! The Oscar nominee opted for a comfy jumper and leggings which flashed a glimpse of her growing bump and carried her essentials in a black leather cross-body bag Out and about: Felicity completed her off-duty look with black lace-up boots as arrived back in the UK Expectant: Her outing comes two months after Felicity's representative first confirmed that she was expecting her first child Surprise! The Oscar nominee first debuted her growing bump at The Aeronauts premiere in New York City in December (pictured) Felicity's representative first confirmed that she was expecting to The Hollywood Reporter, after she debuted her bump at The Aeronauts premiere. The Theory Of Everything star dated Charles for two years before he proposed in May 2017, and they tied the knot in July 2018 at the picturesque Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds, Oxfordshire. Felicity and Charles are very private about their relationship and life together, but she did open up about her outlook on love in a 2014 interview with The Telegraph. 'I am definitely romantic, and I love romantic stories that's why I keep making romantic movies,' she said. 'It's funny how seeing a love story never gets boring, because it's the dream isn't it? It's the dream to have a true connection with another human being', she said in the interview, which occurred while she was single. Gorgeous: Felicity is expecting her first child with husband Charles Guard. The couple tied the knot in July 2018 at the Sudeley Castle in the Cotswolds, Oxfordshire Mr and Mrs: Felicity dated director Charles for two years before he proposed in May 2017 (pictured together in June 2019) Candid: In 2016, Felicity admitted she worried that having children may have an impact on her acting career Speaking out: She said at the time: 'Fortunately, I feel like we're in a new era, where it is empowering rather than limiting to have children' Pretty: The star pulled her brunette bobbed out of the way with a knotted headband, and opted for barely-there makeup to display her flawless complexion Before meeting her husband, who is best known for directing the 2009 thriller The Unknown, Felicity dated sculptor Ed Fornieles for 10 years after they met at the Ruskin School of Art. In 2016, Felicity told Harper's Bazaar she worried how having children might impact her career. 'Fortunately, I feel like we're in a new era, where it is empowering rather than limiting to have children,' she said. 'From what I can see from friends and relatives, women get stronger and more decisive from having children, they don't waste their time doing things they don't want to.' Open: In 2014, Felicity spoke about her outlook on love, saying: 'I am definitely romantic, and I love romantic stories that's why I keep making romantic movies' BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 20 Trend: Ruslan Mirsayapov, who left the post of the head of the State Committee of the Republic of Bashkortostan (Russia) on Foreign Economic Relations in February, which he has held since 2017, has been appointed to a new position. Mirsayapov was appointed trade representative of the Russian Federation in Azerbaijan upon the order of the Russian government, Trend reports referring to kommersant.ru. He was born in November 1977 in Ufa. Mirsayapov graduated from Bashkir State University (English faculty) and from Bashkir State Agrarian University (Economics and Management). Mirsayapov began his career in 1998 at the Ministry of Foreign Relations and Trade of the Republic of Bashkortostan as a leading specialist in the Protocol and Translation Department and then in the International Cooperation Department. In 19992010, he worked in the administration of Ufa. He completed his career at the city hall as the head of the department of foreign economic relations of the economy administration. In 2010, he headed the committee on foreign economic relations, then - the department of external and interregional relations of the presidential administration of the Republic of Bashkortostan. In 2013-2014, he headed the Autonomous Non-profit Organization "Office-Group for Support of Projects on Creating the Conditions for Holding SCO and BRICS Events in Ufa". Dame Julie Walters has said that Caroline Flacks death is a big example of how being at the mercy of opinion can make people ill. Former Love Island presenter Flack was found dead at her home in east London on Saturday, having taken her own life aged 40. Dame Julie told the BBCs Victoria Derbyshire show that she would have found the intensity of modern fame very difficult as a young actress. Dame Julie Walters reveals shes been diagnosed with Stage 3 bowel cancer. In an exclusive interview, the star tells me the diagnosis 18 months ago was a shock. She says her most recent scan shows shes all clear. Full interview 10am @BBCTwo https://t.co/xzrXWuwGI4 Victoria Derbyshire (@vicderbyshire) February 20, 2020 The veteran performer, who also revealed that she had been diagnosed with bowel cancer, said she did not need any Tom, Dick or Harry critiquing her. Asked how she would have dealt with the scrutiny of social media, the news and the showbiz websites, Dame Julie replied: It would be very difficult because I have nothing to do with social media. Im very private youre at the mercy of opinion enough without that, without any Tom, Dick or Harry coming up and saying, You look old or You look fat or Your acting is dreadful. I dont need that, thanks. I can question those things enough myself. Tributes placed outside Caroline Flacks former home in north London (Dominic Lipinski/PA) So if youre slightly fragile and youve got a wall of that coming at you, its unhealthy. Video of the Day It makes people ill. Poor old Caroline Flack is a big example of that. She also revealed that she had watched Love Island after waking from the operation to remove part of her colon. Flacks death prompted a wave of grief from celebrity friends and members of the public. Caroline Flack outside court (Jonathan Brady/PA) The TV star stepped down from presenting the current winter series after the alleged assault on her boyfriend Lewis Burton. She pleaded not guilty at a court hearing in December and was released on bail. But she was ordered to stop having any contact with Mr Burton ahead of a trial, which had been due to begin in March. The dating show did not air on Saturday or Sunday as a mark of respect to her family and returned on Monday with a tribute to Flack, who started hosting the programme in 2015. Emergency services work at the scene of a shooting in Hanau, western Germany, on Feb 20, 2020. (Photo: AFP/Yann Schreiber) Two bodies were discovered at the gunman's home in Hanau, a city east of the financial hub of Frankfurt where the shootings took place. One of the bodies was likely the gunman himself, said police. "There are no indications that other suspects were involved," police said in a statement. "One of the two dead people found is highly likely the perpetrator." In a press release on Thursday, police also confirmed that the two shooting incidents at the Heumarkt and Kurt Schumacher Platz areas killed at least nine people and left several injured. Police said their information suggested the gunman had committed suicide at his home after fleeing in a dark car, but the motive for the attacks is unclear. Mass-selling Bild newspaper said the man was a German citizen and that ammunition and gun magazines were found in his car. He had a firearms hunting licence, it added. The attacks targeted bars in Hanau, about 20km from Frankfurt, where armed police quickly fanned out and police helicopters roamed the sky looking for those responsible for the bloodshed. The first attack occurred at the Midnight bar in the centre of the city around 10pm on Wednesday (Thursday, 5am, Singapore time), police and reports said. Three people were killed in front of the building, local media said, with witnesses reporting hearing a dozen shots. The attacker, or attackers, fled the scene by car, according to police. There was then a second shooting at Arena Bar. A gunman reportedly rang the doorbell and shot people in the smoking area, killing five people including a woman, according Bild, adding that the victims were of Kurdish origin. "The victims are people we have known for years," said the bar manager's son, quoted by DPA news agency. Two employees were among the victims, according to the man, who was not at the bar during the shooting. "It is a shock for everyone." An AFP journalist at the scene saw around 30 police cars leaving Hanau police station. Witnesses said police officers with machine guns were deployed in the city. A silver Mercedes covered by what looked like a survival blanket could be seen behind a police cordon and surrounded by officers in front of Arena Bar, with shattered glass on the floor. "HORROR SCENARIO" The mayor of Hanau, Claus Kaminsky, told the Bild newspaper that it had been "a terrible night". "You could not imagine a worse night. It will of course keep us busy for a long, long time and remain a sad memory." MP for the region, Katja Leikert, said it was "a real horror scenario". "On this dreadful night for Hanau, I would like to express my deepest condolences to the relatives of those killed. I hope the injured will recover quickly," she said. Germany has been targeted in recent years by several extremist attacks, one of which killed 12 people in the heart of Berlin in December 2016. Far-right attacks have become a particular concern for German authorities. In October, a deadly anti-Semitic gun attack in the eastern city of Halle on the holy day of Yom Kippur underscored the rising threat of neo-Nazi violence. The rampage, in which two people were shot dead, was streamed live. Last June conservative politician Walter Luebcke, an advocate of a liberal refugee policy, was shot at his home. On Friday police arrested 12 members of a German extreme right group believed to have been plotting "shocking" large-scale attacks on mosques similar to the ones carried out in New Zealand last year. German-Turkish Islamic organisation Ditib, which funds around 900 mosques in Germany, called for greater protections for Muslims in the country, saying they "no longer feel safe" in Germany. Paul Biya discours a la Nation PRC Cameroons Head of State, President Paul Biya has ordered the disbursement of FCFA 50 million to assist 300 Cameroonians trapped in the coronavirus hit Chinese Province of Hubei, government has said. Felix Mbayu, Minister Delegate to the Minister of External Relations, in charge of Cooperation with the Commonwealth informed Cameroonians Thursday, February 20, 2020 that the Minister of Finance has been instructed by the Head of State to send FCFA 50 million to the countrys Embassy in Beijing. Minister Mbayu writes that: A census carried out by the Cameroonian embassy in China reveals that close to 300 Cameroonians are living in the province of Hubei and about 200 are actually present in the city of Wuhan which has been quarantined. Fortunately, to date, all of them are in good health. Considering the distress of our compatriots and the difficult living conditions in quarantine zones, the Head of State has instructed the Minister of Finance, as preliminary measure, to urgently make available the sum of fifty million (50 000 000) francs CFA, to enable the Cameroonian Embassy in Beijing, to provide assistance to Cameroonian citizens. Minister Mbayu says the Government of the Republic of Cameroon is monitoring the evolution of this epidemic, in concert with Chinese authorities, and will not fail to keep the public informed about subsequent initiatives aimed at bringing comfort to our compatriots. 21-year-old Cameroonian student, Kem Senou Pavel Daryl was the first African known to have been infected with the deadly coronavirus and the first to recover. He is currently under a 14-day self-quarantine in the Chinese city of Jingzhou. The Minister Delegate recalls that in the course of the past few weeks, the city of Wuhan, capital of the Hubei Province in China, has been the epicentre of a coronavirus epidemic whose rapid spread in some parts of the world has resulted in approximately 2,000 deaths and over 72,438 confirmed cases of infection. Most African governments, unable to evacuate their nationals trapped in the coronavirus hit cities, have resorted to providing them with support in the hope that the situation improves. Mohammed Saleem, visited Dargah Amanullah Shah and Jamia Masjid, Hameedullah Nagar, Sham-shabad and asked the officials to take action against locals creating hurdles in the protection of Wakf property. Hyderabad: Chairman of Wakf Board, Mr Mohammed Saleem, visited Dargah Amanullah Shah and Jamia Masjid, Hameedullah Nagar, Shamshabad and asked the officials to take action against locals creating hurdles in the protection of Wakf property. Mr Saleem said lands to the extent of 39-42 acres are attached with a particular Wakf institution. This is a prime land worth of crores of rupees, but land sharks are trying to encroach and take over. He instructed the officials to initiate action under the Wakf Act. He also instructed them to register criminal cases against those who are not allowing the Board to raise protection wall. He said a meeting would be convened of officials from Revenue and Police departments to ensure complete protection of the property. The CEO of the Board Mr Mohammed Khamar and other officials were also present. Almost 18 per cent of Australian children live in poverty, amid fears "the next generation is set up for failure," due to rising housing costs and stagnant income support. More than 13 per cent of Australia's overall population - or about 3.24 million people - live below the poverty line, according to an Australian Council of Social Service and University of New South Wales report released on Friday. About 774,000 children under 15, or 17.7 per cent of Australian children are in poverty. About one in eight Australians live in poverty, according to ACOSS's 2020 Poverty in Australia Overview. "We want to support each other. It's who we are as a nation. But our economy is leaving people behind, with persistently high poverty rates despite decades of uninterrupted economic growth," ACOSS chief executive Cassandra Goldie said. Dr Goldie said Australians living in poverty include young people trying to start their working lives, single parents and older people who came up against age discrimination. The Australian Energy Market Commission says policy makers need to pave the way for the rising number of electric vehicles on the nation's roads, warning if they don't drivers will wear unnecessary costs. In an issues paper released on Thursday, the AEMC noted global market share had been "growing significantly", with more than 5 million electric vehicles sold worldwide to date. Sales reached 1.13 million in the first half of 2019, up 46 per cent on the same period the previous year. The rise of electric vehicles must be accompanied by new policy, the AEMC says. Credit:Bloomberg Australia trails the world, with electric vehicles accounting for just 0.6 per cent of vehicles sold last year. But sales of electric cars, including hybrid plug-ins, more than tripled in the past year to 6718, from 2216 in 2018. The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics forecasts 60 per cent of new cars sales in Australia will be electric by 2046. AEMC acting chief executive Suzanne Falvi said policy makers "need to make sure that existing rules and regulations don't stifle innovation". Newark, New Jersey, Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Choose New Jersey's second economic mission trip to Israel delivered significant gains and built upon progress from Governor Murphys October 2018 trip strengthening economic ties, cultivating further investment opportunities in New Jersey, and deepening cultural connections between New Jersey and Israel. The trip, February 10 to 13, included visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, meeting with various industry leaders and entrepreneurs seeking growth opportunities in New Jersey. New Jersey and Israel continue to build upon an already rich, historic relationship, said Jose Lozano, President & CEO, Choose New Jersey. This trip delivered real results for both New Jersey and Israel, including jobs and partnerships that will improve business development and investment. Choose New Jersey was proud to lead this mission to help foster new relationships and strengthen our current ties. We look forward to seeing continued growth in our state and are excited to see these collaborations bear fruit. The business delegation included 16 of New Jerseys government, business and academic leaders, including: New Jersey-Israel Commission, New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness, Hackensack Meridian Health, McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter LLP, New Brunswick Development Corporation (DEVCO), Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Princeton University, Rowan University and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. The New Jersey delegation held key meetings with government and industry leaders, including representatives from cybersecurity, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), technology, life sciences and health care industries. Delegation members also engaged with international startups, Israeli venture capitalists and forged partnerships with university counterparts. Key moments of the mission trip include: Choose New Jersey Strengthens Partnership with Cross River Bank, Rowan University signs MoU with Jerusalem College of Technology Cross River, together with Choose New Jersey, hosted a reception to celebrate the historic bridge between Jerusalem and the State of New Jersey. Cross River, headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey, with a support team in Jerusalems high-tech park, will continue to be the leader in bringing technology jobs to Jerusalem and beyond, and announced its commitment to hire 100 employees in Jerusalem by the end of 2020, further demonstrating the companys rapid growth. In 2019, Cross River expanded to a 70,000-square-foot facility in Fort Lee and hired an additional 150 new employees. Rowan University also signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Jerusalem College of Technology to share interests in joint research. The partnership between Cross River and New Jersey truly exemplifies the relationship between a state and its role in economic development, growth opportunities and job creation, said Gilles Gade, Founder, CEO and Chairman, Cross River. Cross River has thrived in its home state and has been building the historic bridge between New Jersey and Jerusalem. Thanks to the support of Governor Phil Murphy and Choose New Jersey, we can continue to solidify this bridge and create more jobs on both sides of the ocean. Jewish National Fund Announced Winners of Summer 2020 Academic Fellowship Program Representatives from the winning universities, NJIT, Rowan University and Rutgers University, along with Choose New Jersey, New Jersey-Israel Commission and Jewish National Fund (JNF), announced the 11 faculty members selected for the Summer 2020 Academic Fellowship program. The fellowship is open exclusively to full-time university professors who will be paired with Israeli counterparts in their field of study to encourage academic exchange. Choose New Jersey, New Jersey-Israel Commission and Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA) Announced Bilateral Business Collaboration At a ceremony in Jerusalem, the JDA and New Jersey-Israel Commission announced a partnership to promote collaboration between private sector companies, academic institutions, and related government agencies in New Jersey and Jerusalem through business development assistance, exchanges, and professional consultation. The New Jersey Delegation Makes Inroads at Life Sciences and Tech Events The delegation participated in several innovation-focused events directly engaging Israeli companies on the states value proposition in healthcare and technology. At Sanara Ventures, the delegation conducted a roundtable discussion with Ohad Serok of Teva Pharmaceuticals, a global leader in biopharmaceuticals with dual headquarters in Israel and Parsippany, New Jersey. Delegation members also met with leadership from SOSA, a global innovation platform connecting corporations, governments and cities to innovative technologies and ecosystems in areas of cybersecurity and technology. SOSA startup residents and visiting startups from Spain and Australia, along with Israeli venture capitalists and medtech startups, were in attendance. At Hackensack Meridian Health, we are focused on advancing scientific innovation to transform healthcare regionally, nationally and globally. We recognize and welcome the outstanding opportunities to work with Israeli startup companies and the Hadassah Hospital - with a focus on joint clinical programs and partnerships through our Center for Discovery and Innovation, said James Blazar, Chief Strategy Officer and Executive Vice President, Hackensack Meridian Health. This trip was just the beginning of an extraordinary partnership. We look forward to the collaboration that will ultimately bring our synergistic goals to fruition. We were honored to be a part of Choose New Jerseys mission trip. It was a great opportunity to learn more about Israel and to have beneficial exchanges of insights and information in the cybersecurity market, said Diane Reynolds, Partner, McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter LLP. The State of New Jersey serves as a vibrant ecosystem for innovation, development, and cultural diversity, said Christopher Paladino, President, New Brunswick Development Corporation. We have long considered Israel as one of New Jersey's top business partners, and I look forward to building upon our strong relationships within the Israeli business community. I am optimistic this trip will yield promising investments in development for New Jersey as we continue to expand our innovation economy. This is another terrific example of the growing business and trade cooperation between New Jersey and Israel. This cooperation has resulted from the hard work and collegiality by both the Israeli and New Jersey teams and is a portend of even greater developments to come, said Mark Levenson, Chair, New Jersey Israel Commission. "The profound value and incredible potential of the New Jersey - Israel relationship was on full display during this trip which captured the innovative spirit of both states' communities and industries. We saw how our academic, industry, and government leaders can collaborate with their Israeli counterparts to share knowledge, generate business opportunities, and develop cutting edge technologies with global impact, said Andrew Gross, Executive Director, New Jersey-Israel Commission, New Jersey Department of State. This visit deepened the already significant relationship between the State of Israel and the State of New Jersey: a natural home for Israelis entering the United States." Its been gratifying travelling with our New Jersey higher ed colleagues and meeting with Israeli companies, said Coleen Burrus, Director, Corporate Engagement and Foundation Relations, Princeton University. Weve had beneficial conversations about the rich education and innovation environment of our state and explored possible research collaborations in support of Princetons mission to advance knowledge and discovery. Its been a really productive trip. It couldnt be any more evident. New Jersey has a wealth of talent and assets important to entities around the world, said Steven Weinstein, Executive Vice President for Policy and External Relationships/Partnerships, Rowan University. The agreements we reached and promises made not only benefit the institutions that attended, but more importantly, they position New Jersey as a state able to collaborate and partner internationally across a wide variety of sectors. This trip to Israel, and the earlier visit to India, presented the group with important and meaningful opportunities that we expect will grow into lasting partnerships, particularly in research, said Beena Sukumaran, Vice President for Research, Rowan University. Working with peers across the globe on common challenges often leads to new solutions and processes never considered before. As a research university deeply-rooted in its mission to improve lives and communities in New Jersey and beyond, we are committed to building collaborative academic and research partnerships with like-minded institutions to strengthen our innovation ecosystem and spur economic growth, said Dr. S. David Kimball, Senior Vice President for Research and Economic Development, Rutgers University. Through partnerships that we hope to forge with Tel Aviv University and Hadassah Hospital in New Jerseys Sister State, we can create research opportunities today that will lead to the discoveries that will change the world tomorrow. New Jersey and Israel have a lot more in common than our size. Our relationship has been strengthened enormously the last couple of years in a myriad of areas. The State continues to be a vital partner of Israel, and we cherish these collaboration efforts. I can only imagine where the next few years will take us," said Ambassador Dani Dayan, Consul General of Israel in New York. To learn more about Choose New Jerseys economic mission trip, you can view their activity on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram with the hashtag #NJIsraelMission. About Choose New Jersey Choose New Jersey is a privately funded 501(c)(3) nonprofit economic development organization. Our mission is to stimulate job creation and attract capital investment to New Jersey. We market New Jersey both domestically and internationally as the best place to grow your business in the United States. Our knowledgeable, experienced staff, supported by a network of State agencies and private partners, provide free, confidential assistance to guide companies in establishing operations here. By harnessing the power of business, labor, academic and government leaders, we enable growth across all sectors of our States economy. We aspire to build a stronger and more prosperous New Jersey for all. For more information, visit www.choosenj.com. ### Attachments KANSAS CITY, MO. (KCTV) --- Three people, including a 2-year-old child and a woman were injured in a crash stemming from a police pursuit on Wednesday evening. Kansas City police say they responded to a report of a disturbance involving a man that was armed and intentionally hitting cars in the area. PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 19:40:49 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 628 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 Second Consecutive Award for Alberta-based CompanyEDMONTON, AB / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 / In 2019, priMED Medical Products was selected as one of the companies featured in Alberta's Top Employers. The list, which is comprised of 75 companies in Alberta across a range of industries, recognises those organisations who offer the all-round best place to work according to specific criteria.For the second year in a row, priMED is again being named as one of Alberta's Top Employers in 2020.Not only does this accolade determine the employers who are leading the way in their industries, but it also recognizes specific achievements and areas of exceptional progress. From the layout and atmosphere of workspaces to aspects like employee benefits, skill development, and vacation policies; priMED strives for excellence across the board, showing employees how much they value their hard work and commitment."Ensuring we provide an environment in which our employees can flourish is at the core of what we do," says David Welsh, President and CEO of priMED Medical Products."This means we're always considering the best ways to support our young, ambitious and amazingly diverse staff further and further every day. Being named as one of Alberta's Top Employers for the second year in a row is confirmation we're right on track." At every level of operation, priMED's employees are encouraged to thrive in everything they do. A host of benefits, including employee wellness plans and scholarship programs, ensure every aspect of working life at priMED surpasses expectations. On top of this, the Alberta company has carefully crafted a fun and social environment which brings teams together in a culture of trust and innovation."The dividends speak for themselves," sums up David Welsh. "Our staff is comprised of trendsetters, boundary-pushers and talented individuals who are dedicated to raising industry standards under the priMED banner." priMED Medical Products is also leading the way in sustainable working facilities. The priMED Mosaic Centre, for example, is a net-zero energy commercial building which has received LEED Platinum Certification. One of the most environmentally-conscious buildings in Canada, the Mosaic Centre was also meticulously designed to be as bright and vibrant as possible, creating an atmosphere of positivity, inspiration and focus.Ultimately, there isn't a single aspect of priMED's business structure which hasn't been implemented with its employees in mind. By offering its staff a wealth of growth opportunities and pathways for further development, priMED is leading the way in providing a workplace in which employees can thrive while feeling truly valued.For more information:To learn more about what makes priMED one of the best places in Alberta to work, go to priMED.ca/careers HR Contact:Mark Kwan, HR ManagerMedia Contact:Craig Blackburn, Senior Manager, Brand and EngagementpriMED Medical Products#200, 2003-91 Street SWEdmonton, Alberta T6X 0W8Phone: 780 497 7600Web: priMED.ca About priMED Medical Products:Established in 1995, priMED Medical Products is a dynamic, global manufacturer specializing in high-quality medical products. As a leading Canadian medical product provider to hospitals, clinics and long-term care facilities, priMED also offers branded, co-branded and private label products and services to its customers and international partners.About Alberta's Top 75 Employers:First published in 2006, Alberta's Top Employers is an annual competition organized by the editors of Canada's Top 100 Employers. This special designation recognizes the Alberta employers that lead their industries in offering exceptional places to work. Employers are evaluated on eight criteria: (1) Physical Workplace; (2) Work Atmosphere & Social; (3) Health, Financial & Family Benefits; (4) Vacation & Time Off; (5) Employee Communications; (6) Performance Management; (7) Training & Skills Development; and (8) Community Involvement. Employers are compared to other organizations in their field to determine which offers the most progressive and forward-thinking programs. Learn more at CanadasTop100.com/alberta SOURCE: priMED Medical Products I appreciated Michael Gersons thoughtful Feb. 14 op-ed, Christian voters can be both anti-abortion and anti-Trump, about the reasons that people who oppose abortion could (and should) vote for a Democrat who supports a womans right to choose whether to reproduce. Another reason may be this: Which party or candidate is more likely to support policies that may very well reduce abortions, separate and apart from laws that limit or outright ban abortions? What about effective, accessible and affordable contraception? What about providing more and better options for the poor and middle class? What about higher-quality sex education in our schools? What about quality family leave, child care and health care? What about an emphasis on treatment, rather than criminalization, for those addicted to drugs? What about stronger interventions to stop and prevent domestic and sexual violence? When will we finally understand that abortion is the symptom, not the disease? Roger Stone, former adviser to President Donald Trump, leaves the Federal Court after a sentencing hearing in Washington, on Feb. 20, 2020. (Samira Bouaou/Epoch Times) Roger Stone Spokesperson Hints at Appeal, Calls on Trump for a Pardon Following the sentencing of Roger Stone on Thursday, a friend and spokesperson for the political operative hinted that he would appeal and ask President Donald Trump for a presidential pardon. Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison for lying to a congressional committee that was investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election. The conviction and sentencing drew criticism from Trump, for whom Stone had been an adviser. It falls on President Trump to use the power of a pardon as the final means of checks and balances to right this horrible wrong, said a statement from his spokesperson and friend, Kristin Davis, according to news outlets. The charges stemmed from former special counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and prosecutors later said Stone collaborated with WikiLeaks to release controversial Democratic Party emails in 2016. But, according to Daviss statement, the case featured serious undisputed juror misconduct and noted there were anti-Trump, anti-Republican, and anti-Stone tweets. The statement said that if Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, does not recognize the alleged bias, then Stone will likely appeal. Roger Stone accompanied by his wife, Nydia Stone (2nd L), arrives at federal court in Washington on Feb. 20, 2020. (Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo) The statement could be referring to Twitter and Facebook posts made by jury forewoman Tomeka Hart, who showed disdain for Trump. Trump hasnt said whether he would issue a pardon for Stone. Roger Stone continues to be gagged, stripping him of his First Amendment right and ability to make a living, Davis continues. By moving forward with sentencing and continuing to silence Stone it seems very clear that the truth doesnt matter. Stones lawyer had asked that he get no prison time. The 67-year-old Stone, who has been a friend and adviser to Trump for decades, was convicted on Nov. 15 on all seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering. He was not prosecuted, as some have complained, for standing up for the president. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president, Judge Jackson said. The defendant engaged in threatening and intimidating conduct toward the court, Jackson said. This is intolerable to the administration of justice. Jackson was referring to messages between Stone and his ex-associate Randy Credico, during which Stone said a number of things including Prepare to die and Im going to take that dog away from you. But defense attorney Seth Ginsberg said Stones career as a self-described dirty trickster overshadowed other aspects of a spiritual man who has served as a mentor, loves animals, and is devoted to his family. Mr. Stone is, in fact, not simply that public persona, but a human being, he said. Ginsberg said in court that Stone should not receive a longer sentence because that threat wasnt serious enough to trigger the guidelines, adding that he is known for rough, hyperbolic language, and Credico knew it was just Stone being Stone. When prosecutors made their sentencing recommendation earlier this month, Trump criticized them as corrupt and accused them of meting out a miscarriage of justice in Twitter posts. Around the same time, Attorney General William Barr intervened, and the Justice Department overruled the recommendation of seven to nine years in prison. Four prosecutors then resigned from the case. Reuters contributed to this report. Gospel DJ Reginald Utley Passes Away, Memorial Concert Planned Reginald Eugene Utley, one of L.A.s heralded gospel deejays, has left the broadcasting booth. Utley passed away from a heart attack in Los Angeles on Jan. 23, leaving thousands of ardent fans that he had accumulated in his 50+ years on the airwaves. He was 69-years-old. His homecoming services were held on Feb. 4, in his hometown of Nashville, Tennessee. According to his dear friend and protege, Nawania Perry-Lyles, a memorial concert is planned for Saturday, March 21, at 11 a.m., at Praises of Zion Missionary Baptist Church, 8222 San Pedro St., in Los Angeles. The Rev. Dr. J. Benjamin Hardwick is the host pastor. Utley made a lasting impact in L.A. Known by many handles such as The Gospel Ambassador and The Demon Slayer, he began his professional gospel radio career at KGFJ and went to worked at KMAX, KACE and KTYM. Utley also served as a TV program announcer for several Badami Productions shows including Gospel Music Presents and African American Short Films. ADVERTISEMENT In addition, he was the creator, producer and host of Gospel Newsbreak from Hollywood, which aired on BETs Dr. Bobby Jones Gospel Show as well as served as the news anchor for The Gospel Network. Perry-Lyles credited Utley as a mentor who introduced her to gospel broadcasting. Recalling their relationship, she said, He invited me to come to the radio station to assist him in choosing the songs to play on the air. Eventually, I became his assistant and later, the co-host of his morning show. Utley was also skilled as a technical engineer, program director and music director for various television and radio programs. Sharing another memory, Perry-Lyles said, Reginald was a perfectionist and masterful at his work. He was extraordinary when it came to putting it all together on a daily basis to do what needed to be done. He helped many unknown gospel artists become household names and get contracts with major record labels. He raised the standard to promote gospel music. Utley received many awards and commendations in acknowledgement of his contributions to gospel music. He earned a Stellar Award Announcer of the Year twice and Paul Award for Religious Announcer twice. He was also named the #1 Gospel Radio Announcer by Black Radio Exclusive magazine and bestowed the Christian Image Award for Community Excellence. In addition, several record companies including Light, Word, Intersound, Malaco and Savoy Records awarded plaques to Utley in recognition of his influential role in exposing new artists to radio audiences. He also received an honorary Doctorate of Theology degree from Next Dimension University. ADVERTISEMENT Perry-Lyles is the chief organizer of the Reginald Utley Memorial Concert in L.A. For details about the event, call (424) 279-3769. The House of Representatives has ordered its committee on population to investigate the complaints from Nigerians about difficulty in obtaining the National Identity Number (NIN). The House followed by tasking the government to synchronise data collected from various data collecting agencies to provide unique national identity for every citizen of the country. These decisions were made on Wednesday following a motion of urgent public importance moved by Ben Igbakpa (PDP, Delta), who raised concerns about NIN being a prerequisite for the 2020 Petroleum Trust Development Fund (PTDF) scholarship. He said the registration process for NIN laborious and slow nationwide, attributing this to inadequate facilities and manpower. The Director-General of NIMC, Aliyu Azeez, recently admitted in a national daily that they are overwhelmed with work because, whereas they need about 4,000 centres nationwide, they make do with only 1,000 centres at the moment. The lawmaker added that registration closes in a fortnight and making NIN a prerequisite for the Masters and PhD degrees scholarship would undermine efforts at developing the nations human capital development. The motion is about trying to save our manpower; NIN, as a prerequisite for PTDF scholarship, should not be supported and I urge the house to use other (officially) recognised means of identification. Resolutions On that note, the House resolved that instead of NIN alone, applicants can tender their local government certificate as proof of citizenship to obtain the scholarship. In reference to National Identity Management Commission (NIMC), Deputy Minority Leader, Toby Okechukwu, said there is a need to investigate why there are complaints about the unique number. Relaying his experience, he said attempts by him to renew his slip has proved abortive. This he said means someone is not doing their job and we have to investigate why it is difficult for Nigerians to register. On her part, Deputy Chief Whip, Onyejeocha Nkeiruka (APC, Abia), said the Houses investigation on NIMC was imperative because the nation cannot continue to suspend NIN as the slightest need for it. We have to go beyond suspending the use of NIN because the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) recently also had to suspend the requirement of NIN for registration of exams, she noted. Nigerians react Series of challenges have dogged the operations of NIMC. A 2017 investigation revealed that these challenges range from extortion of members of the public to blackouts at enrolment centres to staff apathy and a budget which caters for frivolous needs at the expense of vital ones. As of October last year, the commission said only 19 per cent of Nigerians had registered. Some Nigerians who have been rattled by the registration process have often taken their displeasure to the social media. The commissions latest registration of heavyweight boxer Anthony Joshua particularly brought to fore some of these complaints. Some believed Mr Joshuas status gave him an edge above them. They complained that they had applied long ago without getting their slips. Read some of their tweets below: NIN is easy to get na. Its the plastic card that you will wait years to get. I got my NIN the day I registered. https://t.co/Eglma1BPFM Mehd (@isaajibola__) February 19, 2020 Has anyone seeing this gotten or tried to get the NIN? How easy or quick or straightforward was it? dre! (@dre_daada) February 19, 2020 I've enrolled for this national ID card since 2014, and I'm yet to be issued a permanent ID card. All I've to show for it is the slip. But Anthony Joshua will most definitely get issued a permanent ID card before me. Nigeria is for the highest bidder. https://t.co/a3Sgfg2Wps Gentleman (@olajideobe) February 18, 2020 I have not even collected my National ID which I did in 2014 and your office sends me a message that my National ID had expired. pic.twitter.com/rJXT7yf6Cb QueenRudy (@gee_oshio) February 19, 2020 Do you mean the NIN slip could be gotten that same day. Unbelievable,@anthonyfjoshua should know that #Nigerians wait for days to get that slip, and years to get the Card. NB:@nimc_ng can confirm the information above, if they refuse or deny. #Nigerians will tell you the truth. #ForGodAndCountry #Nigeria (@TheShehus) February 19, 2020 Vano Merabishvili, the former Georgian prime minister and interior minister who was credited for reforming the nation's police force, was released from prison after serving nearly seven years for embezzlement and abuse of power. Immediately upon his release on February 20, Merabishvili announced that he will return to politics, vowing to push aside the current government led by billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili's ruling Georgian Dream party. Outside the prison where he spent six years and nine months in an isolated cell, Merabishvili thanked everyone who supported him while he was incarcerated, saying it "allowed me to preserve my strength, energy, and belief in order to continue fighting and remove the current regime [from power] already this year." Merabishvili emerged as a key government figure after Georgia's 2003 Rose Revolution that brought Mikheil Saakashvilli to the presidency. Merabishvilli served as Saakashvilli's interior minister from 2004 to 2012 before becoming prime minister. He was arrested in May 2013 soon after power switched from Saakashvilli's United National Movement (ENM) party to Georgian Dream, the latter of which was founded ahead of the 2012 parliamentary elections by tycoon Ivanishvili. Leaders of Georgian Dream began referring to Saakashvili's presidency as a "bloody regime." Merabishvili was subsequently accused of abusing his office, bribing voters, and ordering the beating of a person, for which he was found guilty. He was convicted again in 2017 of abuse of power. He and his supporters have said the charges against him were politically motivated. In June 2016, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the detention of Merabishvili was being used by Georgian officials for other motives in violation of the European Convention of Human Rights. Offaly County Council has released a statement after a meeting on the plans to open the old Marian Hostel on High Street as a Direct Provision Centre this month. In the statement the council says it received communications from the Department of Justice & Equality regarding the signing of a contract for the provision of an accommodation centre for applicants for international protection at the former Marian Hostel Centre in Tullamore, Co. Offaly on February 18. Thursday's meeting was attended by the Members of Tullamore Municipal District and Senior Management together with representatives from the Department of Justice and Equality, the HSE, the Education and Welfare Service of Tusla and the Department of Education. Representatives from Bridgestock Care Ltd, the company who own the Centre and have been contracted to manage same, were also in attendance. "The meeting provided an opportunity for an exchange of information with regard to the proposal," the council noted. "Members expressed their serious concerns in relation to a number of issues, particularly in relation to the lack of information and engagement in advance of the announcement. "Discussions centered around the location and extent of facilities to be provided and also arrangements for support services in terms of health, education and integration. "Details were also discussed in relation to the number of persons to be accommodated, the commencement of the arrival process, phasing and management arrangements. "These concerns and queries were made from both a local perspective and also with due regard for the asylum seekers who will be placed in the centre. "It was noted that the asylum seekers will be welcomed to Tullamore and that every effort will be made to assist in their settling and integration in the town. "However, the Members dissatisfaction with regard to engagement and information in advance of the announcement was re-iterated. As Offaly County Council do not have a function in relation to this matter, it was noted that all queries should be addressed to the Press Office of the Department of Justice at pressoffice@justice.ie. The Kerala govt has moved the Supreme Court challenging the move by Airport Authority of India to hand over Trivandrum airport to Adani Enterprises for 50 years. The state-run Kerala State Industrial Development Corporation (KSIDC) had participated in the bid till the last minute but Adani Enterprises quoted the highest and won the bid in February last year. Kerala has insisted that the state government had offered to match Adanis bid and run the airport, insisting that it deserved preferential consideration since it had the experience to run airports. The Pinarayi Vijayan government, which had earlier approached the high court, has also contended that the Centre was bound to consult the state government under a 2003 assurance before involving a private party. The Kerala govt had submitted in the high court that attempt on the part of the Airport Authority to grant of the right to operate, manage and develop Trivandrum International Airport to a private party with no experience in managing airports wasnt in public interest. It was also argued that the move violates the proprietary rights of the State Government since the land on which the Thiruvananthapuram Airport is situated, was given by the state government and the erstwhile Travancore state to airport authority from time to time free of cost. The Kerala High Court had dismissed the plea by the State on the ground that the case is a dispute between Centre and state and can be decided only by the Supreme Court under Article 131 of the Constitution. The Kerala govt has disputed this reasoning of the high court on the ground that airport authority is a necessary party to the case and a suit under Article 131 cannot be maintained if a private body is a party to the case. Emma Roberts has been a fixture in Hollywood since she was a child. Not only is she the niece of Julia Roberts, and she also started acting from a young age. These days, she is mostly known for her work in various seasons of American Horror Story. As with many popular actresses around, Roberts cannot escape the scrutiny of the tabloids when it comes to her relationships. She has made a lot of headlines in the past several years concerning her love life. One story in particular raised concerns about the fact that Roberts could have been the reason why a certain actor split from his girlfriend. It was alleged that Emma Roberts caused Hayden Christensen to end his relationship Emma Roberts | Rachel Luna/WireImage In October 2017, The Blast reported that Roberts had an inappropriate relationship with actor Hayden Christensen, which caused Christensen to end his relationship with his long-time partner, actress Rachel Bilson. Christensen is known for his role as Anakin Skywalker and Darth Vader in several Star Wars films. Roberts and Christensen were working on the movie Little Italy together at the time, and an alleged insider told The Blast that Bilson found text messages between Christensen and Roberts, which caused the couple to end their relationship. Christensen and Bilson first got together in 2007 while filming the movie Jumper together. They welcomed a daughter in 2014, but they announced their split in September 2017. None of the parties involved have commented on the report from The Blast, and it was never confirmed by a reliable source. Emma Roberts had an on-and-off relationship with Evan Peters In 2017, Roberts was in an on-and-off relationship with her Adult World costar, Evan Peters. They first started dating in 2012, but they went through several rough patches that were documented in the tabloids. Most notably, in 2013, Roberts was arrested after she and Peters were involved in a heated argument. Peters suffered from a broken nose, and the police detained Roberts on suspicions of domestic abuse. Nevertheless, Peters did not press charges against Roberts, and the two of them continued to stay together. They even released a statement saying that they were working together to move past it. In 2014, Roberts and Peters got engaged. However, the couple never got married and they parted ways for good in 2019. A source reportedly told Us Weekly that it was a mutual split with no hard feelings on either side: Emma and Evan were heading for a split and now are just friends. Evan has moved out. It wasnt a bad breakup. Emma Roberts is currently dating Garrett Hedlund A month after Roberts split from Peters came out, Roberts reportedly moved to date another actor, Garrett Hedlund. Roberts and Hedlund have mostly kept their relationship very private. They do not appear at events together the same way that Roberts did with Peters. Pictures of the couple usually came from paparazzi shots of them together. Roberts seems to enjoy keeping her relationship under the radar. She shared with Los Angeles Magazine in the fall of 2019 that she has no interest in parading her love life around with the world, especially after how much attention she and Peters got in 2013. Relationships are hard enough between two people, let alone two people and the entire internet, Roberts shared. People say, Whys it so hard for celebrities to have relationships? My answer? Do people photoshop their face over yours with your boyfriend? Its just a weird thing. Hey, I get it: When I was growing up, I was obsessed with celebrity couples. Its just not as fun when its you. A felony animal abuse case against an area man has been dismissed in Madison County. Jason Hampton, 56, of Farmington, had been charged in 2018 with a class E felony of animal abuse after allegedly injuring a dog and leaving the dog for dead on a rural road. The alleged crime took place in St. Francois County. However, the St. Francois County Prosecuting Attorney Melissa Gilliam requested recusal from the case and that a special prosecutor be assigned. During the time our office was handling the case, allegations were raised that we would not be fair in prosecuting the defendant because he was an employee of St. Francois County, explained Gilliam. This potential appearance of favoritism, coupled with the fact that one of our own employees worked directly with the shelter and organization involved in the rescue of Trooper, prompted our office to file a conflict in this case. A judge removed our office from the case and appointed a special prosecutor, without any conflicts of interest, to handle the case, Gilliam said. After that point, our office exercised no control at all over the case. The case was transferred to Madison County in September, but the charge against Hampton was dismissed Tuesday. As of press time, Madison County Prosecuting Attorney Dwight Robbins could not be reached for comment regarding the dismissal of the charge. According to court documents, Hampton was accused of intentionally causing injury to an animal by shooting a womans dog named Trooper, in the back and paralyzing it sometime between Jan. 29, 2018, and Feb. 19, 2018. The report stated that Hampton then hit Trooper over the head with a hammer in an attempt to kill him, but he did not succeed in his actions. Hampton then reportedly placed Trooper in a sack and dumped him on the side of Possum Hollow Road. Further stated in court documents is that Hampton told a deputy with the St. Francois County Sheriffs Department that he had intended to injure Trooper by shooting him in the leg instead of the back. Hampton was held on a $10,000 bond in the St. Francois County Jail but bonded out shortly after being booked. Trooper was rescued and eventually made a recovery, though it took several months. Missouri K9 Friends President Mandy Ryan said she was first contacted about Trooper when Katrina Campbell posted to Facebook pleading for help for an injured dog she found. We saw immediately that it was a severe medical case and since we usually take a lot of cases like that, we sprang into action, said Ryan. ...We just take the really bad cases and provide extensive medical care. Ryan said a couple of their board members went to the vet clinic where Trooper was taken and when they saw him, they all thought at first glance that he had a broken back and was hit by a car. He was paralyzed from the waist down and he had injuries on his head, said Ryan. It really looked like he was hit by a car at first, She said. All of the flesh on one side of his back end had been burned really badly ..." Ryan said the dog had head tremors, where his head was shaking really badly, and his pupils were dilating differently, which indicated swelling on the brain and head trauma. She said they didnt think he would make it through the first night. They even brought up euthanasia the first night, said Ryan. We told them no, he is a fighter. The fact that he was in that bad of shape and he was alive, we wanted to give him a chance. Ryan said they moved forward with tests and examinations to determine exactly what was going on. They did a full-body X-ray, which showed no broken bones. I immediately started thinking he wasnt hit by a car. This was a case of animal cruelty, said Ryan. By the next day, his head tremors stopped and his pupils started dilating the same. We were all shocked he had even made it through the night. So he was recovering through the head trauma. Ryan explained they had Trooper on IV fluids and he had tested positive for a tick-related illness, so they had him on medications for that. Trooper also had to have a procedure where they removed the skin on the one side where he had the burns. I decided I was going to start looking into what happened to Trooper, said Ryan. When I went to visit him, I noticed the marks on his head where he was hit and saw the bullet wound in between his shoulder blades in his neck. We definitely knew this was inflicted on him. Ryan said somebody reached out to them claiming to be the owner of Trooper and they were able to verify he did belong to them through pictures. She said they relinquished Trooper over to them and asked them to spearhead the situation. They were not the people who did this to Trooper and since we knew where he came from, it made it easier for me to find out who did this to him, said Ryan I was given the name and number of Jason Hampton and they said this guy knows everybody and if anybody would know, he would know what happened. So I contacted Jason. Ryan said when she talked to Hampton, he allegedly admitted to shooting Trooper and hitting him in the head with a hammer. She said she wasnt expecting a confession immediately. He told me that Trooper ran loose on his property a lot and that he had shot multiple dogs in the past, recalled Ryan. When dogs are on his property that shouldnt be there he shoots at them to get them off his property. Ryan said at one point, Trooper was over there chasing chickens and when his female dog would be in heat, Trooper would come over and bother her. He told me he was aiming for his foot to scare him and shot at him, but when he shot him, it landed in his shoulder blades somehow and it paralyzed him immediately, said Ryan. Then he told me he hit him in the head with a hammer, and once he did that, he drove his trailer to Possum Hollow Road and dumped him in a no dumping zone. Ryan said Hampton just put him in a ditch there and Trooper stayed in that ditch for a week lying in his waste until he was found. She explained the dog's waste is what actually caused the burning to his skin since he was in it so long. If it hadnt rained, he probably would have died from dehydration, said Ryan. You could see where he was chewing on the trash, but he was paralyzed, so he was pretty much stuck there, alive, with a horrible head injury, starving. Ryan said the owners gave up Trooper because they did not have the resources and means to care for a dog in this kind of condition. Trooper had less than a 5% chance that he would ever walk again. Trooper has since regained the ability to walk and now has a loving home. Bobby Radford is a reporter for the Daily Journal. He can be reached at bradford@dailyjournalonline.com Love 3 Funny 0 Wow 2 Sad 4 Angry 51 Sign up for our Crime & Courts newsletter Get the latest in local public safety news with this weekly email. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy. BEIJING - Chinese health officials expressed new optimism Thursday over the deadly virus outbreak while authorities in South Koreas fourth-largest city urged residents to hunker down as fears nagged communities far from the illness epicenter. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. Workers put up government propaganda to fight against the viral outbreak in Beijing, China on Thursday, Feb. 20, 2020. A viral outbreak that began in China has infected more than 75,000 people globally. The World Health Organization has named the illness COVID-19, referring to its origin late last year and the coronavirus that causes it. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan) BEIJING - Chinese health officials expressed new optimism Thursday over the deadly virus outbreak while authorities in South Koreas fourth-largest city urged residents to hunker down as fears nagged communities far from the illness epicenter. The confidence voiced by Chinas government came as it reported a reduced number of new infections. But doubts remained about the true trajectory of the epidemic as China again changed its method of counting and new threats emerged outside the country. "The downward trend will not be reversed," insisted Ding Xiangyang, deputy chief secretary of the State Council and a member of the central governments supervision group. Whatever promises were aired where the illness poses its biggest threat, countries around the world continued to grapple with the rippling effects. The latest front in the widening global fight against COVID-19 emerged in Daegu, South Korea, where the city's 2.5 million residents were urged to stay inside, wearing masks even indoors to stem further infection. Mayor Kwon Young-jin made a nationally televised appeal for those preventative measures, warning that a rash of new cases could overwhelm the health system. He pleaded for help from the countrys central government. Daegu and surrounding towns reported 35 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday. The flare-up came more than 1,400 kilometres (900 miles) from COVID-19s epicenter across the Yellow Sea in China's Hubei province and its capital of Wuhan, a sign of the risks the virus potentially poses to communities across the region and beyond. In this Feb. 18, 2020, photo, a medical staff member works near COVID-19 patients recuperating in a temporary hospital converted from an exhibition center in Wuhan in central China's Hubei province. The hospital, one of the dozen of its kind built in Wuhan, hosts COVID-19 patients with mild symptoms. (Chinatopix via AP) "Everything that is not known about this is causing concern," said Dr. David Heymann, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Though all but about 1,000 of more than 75,000 reported cases of COVID-19 have been recorded in China, scattered cases have erupted elsewhere. Iran announced three more infections Thursday, a day after it reported its first two deaths stemming from the virus, and South Korea reported its first fatality. Japan said two former passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship had died of the illness, bringing the death toll there to three. A total of 11 deaths have been confirmed outside mainland China, including two in Hong Kong and one each in France, the Philippines and Taiwan. The trajectory of the outbreak remained clouded by Chinas zigzagging daily reports of new cases and shifting ways of tallying them. The number of new cases in China declined again Thursday, to 394, a notable shift from the 1,749 figure released a day earlier. Another 114 deaths in China were linked to the virus. But those statistics came after yet another change in how cases are counted. Last week, Chinas National Health Commission said officials in Hubei would record new infections without waiting for laboratory test results, relying instead on doctors diagnoses and lung imaging. But on Thursday it returned to its prior way of counting, a decision sure to aggravate observers who say consistency is key to understanding COVID-19s path. The health commission said it was reducing its count of infections by 279 after lab tests found they had wrongly been included in the tally. Feng Yong, an official for health matters at the Chinese diplomatic mission in Geneva, said the reason for the reversal was that the country's laboratory capacity had improved dramatically so all patients can now be tested. Last week, when the methodology was changed, "we did not have enough capacity to give laboratory tests," Feng told The Associated Press. "So thats the reason we included all the suspected cases, in order to let them get treatment." 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. "Now we have the laboratory capacity, so now they can adjust the case definition again," he said. Cities in Hubei with a combined population of more than 60 million have been under lockdown since the Lunar New Year holiday. Authorities halted nearly all transportation and movement except for quarantine efforts, medical care, and delivery of food and basic necessities. "Wartime" measures were implemented in some places, with residents prevented from even leaving their apartments. The stringent moves have followed public fury over Hubei authorities' handling of the outbreak at its outset. The risk of human-to-human transmission was played down and doctors who tried to warn the public were reprimanded by police. Wuhan residents reported overcrowding in hospitals and futile attempts to seek treatment. Many countries have also set up border screenings and airlines have cancelled flights to and from China to prevent further spread of the disease, which has been detected in about two dozen countries. ___ Associated Press journalists Jamey Keaten in Geneva; Marilynn Marchione in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Aniruddha Ghosal in New Delhi; Katie Tam in Hong Kong and researcher Yu Bing in Beijing contributed to this report. Abhijit Iyer-Mitra The Supreme Courts judgment forcing the military to incorporate women, while salutary from a gender perspective, is deeply problematic operationally. Primarily because this reinforces Indias inability to organically develop legal positions based on ground reality. Rather we cut and paste anthropologically inappropriate solutions from the West onto a situation that cant absorb them with calamitous consequences later on. In the West there has been two main enablers of women getting full parity in the military. The first has been technology and the nature of war; the second and related to the first, has been a resolute focus on the human being especially CSAR (combat search and rescue) of stranded troops. As the then German Defence Minister Ursula Von Der Leyen (Now President of the European Union) herself a pioneer of women's representation in the military said in New Delhi at an event hosted by the Observer Research Foundation (ORF) on June 16, 2015, the only difference between men and women is sheer physical strength, otherwise, women bring a whole different perspective and different solutions to any combat situation. In practical terms Von Der Leyen is referring to studies that seem to suggest a particularly interesting trend: that women have an oblique approach to achieving desired outcomes. This is particularly relevant to modern combat which focuses not on bravery (which usually leads to disasters like the charge of the light brigade) but rather on achieving objectives with the least possible casualties. Now lets see how this intersects with modern combat. The West has decisively moved away from actual physical combat, preferring an air-centric model, which emphasises long distance, stand-off fighting. This of course has been a traditional balancing act starting from arrows versus swords to long spears and pikes versus swords.Today, as has been seen in the 1991 and 2003 Gulf wars, planes go in and remove and obstacles to ground forces. In short, ground forces have much reduced fighting to do. Even here the driver of combat is no longer sheer brute force, but intelligence. Knowing where ones enemy is coming from, what they intend to do, how much damage you've inflicted on them and where to hit next. These are the determinants of victory and these, in fact, skew the equation in favour of women, given their ability to pick up on subtle changes, multi-task and fuse information mentally. In short, in a western combat paradigm, giving women parity is not just a convenient token of gender equality, it is a critical operational imperative that significantly improves the probability of success. Contrast this with India, where intel and information management play a minimal role, we still rely on ground-centric warfare that results in heavy casualties and frequently require sheer brute physical strength (which as the German defence minister said is the only disadvantage that women face vis-a-vis men). For example, we are yet to get solid evidence of damage caused to the Balakot terror complex; we were taken by surprise the next day by the Pakistani counter attack; we still rely on ground forces for most of our combat (Balakot being the first exception) which required direct contact with the enemy; and finally during Kargil, our troops were forced to charge uphill with dreadful casualties and were made to drag enormously heavy equipment such as the FH-77B Bofors howitzers to heights. In short, we neither prioritise intelligent and information warfare paradigms where women shine, and depend heavily on physical strength where the German Defence Minister pointed out women are at a disadvantage. The next big development has been the evolution of Western CSAR to the point that few if any pilots shot down are ever captured. The consequences of capture by Islamic State are of course too graphic to describe but can be gauged from what was done to Muath Al Kasasbeh, a Jordanian Pilot captured by ISIS and Hevrin Khalaf, a female Kurdish councillor, captured by Turkey's Al Qaeda allies. Needless to say Pakistan and its proxies have done much the same to captured Indian troops as can be seen with Captain Saurabh Kalia. It was exactly these developments in CSAR, which have come about because it is the human that is prioritised (and not the plane that the human flies) that allowed the UAE to send in female fighter pilots in anti-ISIS operations. The main enabler of the UAE decision was that it fought as part of a western coalition with advanced CSAR capabilities. Sadly, being a low human development country, India still prioritises expensive platforms over the humans that operate them, and who are deemed disposable. To sum up, India's warfighting does not meet the western standards that have empowered women. To transpose a western paradigm onto what is essentially an obsolescent, pre-industrial military will have significant consequences down the line. The Congress on Thursday questioned the prime minister over the Gujarat government spending Rs 120 crore on a three-hour event for US President Donald Trump, saying diplomacy is serious government business and not a series of photo-ops and event management tactics. Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala posed a series of questions to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, asking him when was US President was invited for the visit and why was he claiming that he was promised a grand event by Modi with 7 million people in attendance. "Dear PM, Intriguing news from Ministry of External Affairs! Please state - Who is the President of Abhinandan Samiti? When was the invitation extended to U.S President and accepted? Why is President Trump then saying you have promised him a grand event with 7 million people," he asked. "Dear PM, Why is Gujarat government then spending Rs 120 crore for a 3 hour event organized by an unknown private entity," Surjewala asked on Twitter. "India values its visiting dignitaries but please note - Diplomacy is serious government business and not a series of photo-ops and event management tactics," the Congress leader said. India and the US are eyeing to ink around five pacts providing for cooperation in areas of intellectual property rights, trade facilitation and homeland security during President Donald Trump's maiden visit to India next week, the External Affairs Ministry said on Thursday. Boosting counter-terror cooperation, deepening engagement in the Indo-Pacific region, boosting defence and trade ties and India's concerns over H1B visas are expected to figure in talks between Trump and Modi, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said. "India is eagerly awaiting President Trump's visit and it will strengthen the bilateral global strategic ties," he said. Less than two lakh people are expected to line up along the 22-km route of the roadshow of US President and Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Ahmedabad on February 24, an official said in Ahmedabad. She's been keeping busy with her modelling duties in recent weeks, jetting across the US on jobs. And Stella Maxwell cut a trendy figure as she enjoyed Milan Fashion Week in Italy on Wednesday. The model, 29, donned a black T-shirt with a matching pair of trousers along with a black leather jacket with a bright red collar. Looking good: Stella Maxwell, 29, cut a trendy figure as she enjoyed Milan Fashion Week in Italy on Wednesday Sporting a pair of black boots, Stella accessorised with a matching handbag and a pair of shades. Styling her blonde locks into a half updo, the Victoria's Secret Angel completed her look for the evening with silver necklaces. Stella was joined by a male friend for her outing in the city where many A-list stars have descended to enjoy fashion week. The model made her Victoria's Secret debut in 2014 and became an angel the following year. Stylish: The model donned a black T-shirt with a matching pair of trousers along with a black leather jacket with a bright red collar During her career, she has also modelling for the likes of Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld, Tommy Hilfiger and Versace. In late November, Stella was granted a five-year restraining order against her stalker. Stella was sent dozens of threatening messages by a man named Ruben Velazquez over Instagram, TMZ reported. Ensemble: Sporting a pair of black boots, Stella accessorised with a matching handbag and a pair of shades The Belgium-born star said the messages included 'I'm thinking of burning your house', 'I will leave you in a wheelchair' and 'I'm going to be a serial killer'. One chilling message even included a picture apparently taken by Ruben just feet away from her front door, she claimed. He has been separately charged with criminal threats and harassment in a case that has yet to come to court. : The Tamil Nadu assembly on Thursday witnessed a heated debate over the National Population Register (NPR) exercise with the DMK alleging that it does not feature Islamic festivals while the ruling AIADMK retorted that the manual of 2010 too did not have it. Urging Chief Minister K Palaniswami to announce that NPR exercise will not be undertaken in the State, Leader of Opposition M K Stalin said the new enumeration form of the population drive posed several questions. "The new NPR form seeks information like place of birth of parents and date of birth. If there are no proper certificates, the festival time of the people concerned are asked. In the list, Islamic festivals do not find a place. This by itself has exposed a religious divide," he said while raising the issue. All the data needed to prepare the National Register for Citizens (NRC) were being asked in the NPR and the two exercises were no different and they are inter-related, he said. "No one needs to think that this will only affect Muslims. This will for sure create several consequences for many, including Tamils," he alleged and demanded the government to assure that the NPR exercise would not be taken up in the state. Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam said, "We celebrate all festivals - Ramzan, Bakrid, Pongal and Deepavali." He assured that the government "is committed to the welfare of the minorities."Revenue Minister R B Udhayakumar asserted that the NPR form "has nothing to do with festivals."Tracing the background to the exercise, he said the opposition was making claims for "votebank" which led to an apprehension that such a stand may lead to an unresolvable issue. Only some features like Aadhar information were new in the NPR form and the state government has sought clarification from the Centre over such aspects but it was yet to get a reply. On Islamic festivals, Udhayakumar said: "Islamic festivals do not find a place in the NPR manual released in 2010 too. All the festivals that found a place in the 2010 NPR Manual is featured in the 2020 manual also." Further, there is a table in the handbook to compute Islamic year by comparing it with the Gregorian (English) calendar, he said. In villages, some people may not know their date of birth and if they remembered the festival time during which they were born, the month of birth can be arrived at and the NPR handbook has guidelines for it, he said. "Other than this, as I have already said NPR form has nothing to do with festivals." The Minister also asked, "who was in power at the Centre and Tamil Nadu in 2010." The Congress-led UPA was in power at the Centre while DMK ruled Tamil Nadu that year. The DMK staged a walkout over the issue. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 22:43:05|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close A saleswoman works in the duty-free shop in Haikou, south China's Hainan province, Feb. 20, 2020. Two offshore duty-free shops resumed operation Thursday in south China's island province of Hainan amid the novel coronavirus outbreak. One duty-free shop in Haikou, capital of Hainan, runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. All the sales staff are required to wear masks and gloves. Customers' temperature will be taken and masks will be checked at each entrance of the store. (Photo by Pu Xiaoxu/Xinhua) The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are unlikely to protest a steep Pentagon budget cut for fear over angering US President Donald Trump, according to sources familiar with the matter. This months Trump administration request would cut military assistance by $100 million from last years Pentagon budget request, a move that experts say could degrade the Kurdish-led units ability to fight the Islamic State (IS) and hold thousands of detainees. I dont think they will say anything publicly because they do not want to anger Trump and have him decide just to withdraw out of spite, a former senior administration official, speaking not for attribution, told Al-Monitor. It will impact everything, including their ability to hold prisoners. Despite the cut, the Pentagon aims to use the money to grow the number of US-vetted Syrian opposition fighters to more than 10,000 troops by next year, according to Defense Department budget documents. The fresh units will conduct surgical raids and clearance operations against IS, hold checkpoints and protect oil fields. Part of the money will also help the so-called Jaysh Maghawir al-Thawra boost its force levels to 500, standing abreast an Iranian supply line in southwestern Syria at the US-held Al-Tanf garrison. Two Kurdish sources asked by Al-Monitor about the cut said they hadnt heard about it. When questioned about the SDF funding at a Pentagon press briefing last week, acting Defense Department Comptroller Elaine McCusker said the US budget to aid Syrian opposition forces was the same as last year, though the administration requested $300 million for the Kurdish group to fight IS. Congress cut $100 million from that figure in an appropriations reduction in December after Trump signed the Defense Departments annual authorization that requested a higher figure. It wasnt immediately clear why the Pentagon had decided to trim the military aid, though the agency slashed funding for the SDF by $200 million from the previous year in its budget for fiscal year 2020. Its not uncommon for amounts in appropriations bills to differ from authorizing legislation such as the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), said Evan Hollander, the communications director for the House Appropriations panels Democratic majority. But congressional aides did not make clear the reason for the change in funding. The Defense Intelligence Agency told the joint inspector general for the US-led fight against IS in Syria that the militant groups online claims indicated it had picked up its rate of attacks by 20% to 66 attacks per month, following Turkeys Oct. 9 incursion into Syria. Yet the Kurdish-led group has been wary of taking on Washington over the cut, with leaders such as Gen. Mazlum Kobane remaining quiet in days following the move. Given the Trump administrations track record of asking US allies such as Germany, Japan and South Korea to pay more for housing thousands of American forces based in those countries, the Syrian opposition forces may be worried about stronger retribution from the White House. Nobody wants to be bullied by Trump, an SDF-linked source told Al-Monitor. If I were them and I complained about it, I might be afraid that Trump would say its our money, you should be thankful for [it] and do not demand more.' The Trump administrations 2021 budget request would also zero out a $250 million fund under the defeat-IS heading previously given to countries on Syrias border, according to documents released last week. The move could impact the ability of nations such as Jordan to defend against external terror threats. Meanwhile, the United States has picked back up the pace of counterterrorism operations against IS in Syria, US Central Command chief Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told The Washington Post in January. But the four-star Marine commander publicly admitted he frankly did not know how long were going to be here. But even while the future of the mission in Syria faces uncertainty, the Pentagon is facing scrutiny for improper care of weapons going out into the field. In an audit released today, the Defense Departments inspector general said the special operations joint task force for the US-led defeat-IS mission failed to properly account for nearly $716 million in American taxpayer-funded weapons for the Syrian opposition. MANILA, Philippines Filipinos aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship being quarantined due to cases of coronavirus among its passengers in Yokohama, Japan will be repatriated by the Philippine government on Sunday, February 23, the Department of Health (DOH) announced Thursday. Health Secretary Francisco Duque III told reporters in a briefing that the Filipinos will arrive at the Haribon Hangar of Clark Airbase in two planes and will be brought to New Clark City in Capas, Tarlac to undergo the mandatory 14-day quarantine. Of the 3,711 people onboard the cruise ship, 538 are Filipinos 531 are crew members while seven are passengers. The health chief said they need to bring home as soon as possible Filipinos who did not test positive for novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) and are not showing symptoms of the illness. However, Filipinos aboard the cruise ship who were found infected with the disease will not be repatriated as they will have to be brought to a hospital to undergo treatment or monitoring. As of Thursday, the number of Filipinos on the vessel who were found positive for COVID-19 has risen to 44. Duque said the Philippine government is willing to assist Filipinos who contracted the disease once they have recovered. He also said that it is not yet known how many Filipinos will return home as some might still decide to stay after disembarking the ship on Wednesday when the two-week quarantine period ended. The entire cruise ship was placed on quarantine last February 3 after one of its passengers tested positive for the virus. Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) Secretary Teodoro Locsin, Jr. earlier ordered for the immediate repatriation of Filipinos aboard the cruise ship. The DFA said they have been coordinating with Japanese authorities and the operator of the vessel to ensure that everything will be smooth once the repatriation process begins. RRD (with details from Correspondent Aiko Miguel) The post Filipinos aboard quarantined ship in Japan to be repatriated on Feb. 23 DOH appeared first on UNTV News. Nicholas Sutton, 58, was sentenced to death for his involvement in the stabbing and killing of fellow inmate Carl Estep Sutton Tennessee Govenor Bill Lee said Wednesday he will not grant clemency to a death row inmate whose group of supporters includes family members of his victims and past and present prison workers. Nicholas Sutton, 58, was sentenced to death in 1986 for killing fellow inmate Carl Estep in a conflict over a drug deal while both were incarcerated in an East Tennessee prison. 'After careful consideration of Nicholas Suttons request for clemency and a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the State of Tennessee and will not be intervening,' Lee said in a brief statement released Wednesday. Esteps oldest daughter said Sutton did her family a favor when he killed her father. 'To say that was the best day of my life is an understatement,' Rosemary Hall said of her fathers death in a statement included in Suttons clemency petition. 'I felt as though a 100-pound weight had been lifted off my shoulders and I thought to myself, `There is a God!'' She called Estep an 'evil man' and accused him of setting their house on fire and deliberately causing a traffic accident that killed her baby sister. Estep was in prison for raping Halls stepsister when Sutton killed him, she said. Sutton, 58, is scheduled to be executed Thursday for killing a fellow inmate in 1986. Sutton would be the fifth inmate executed by electrocution since 2018 Tennessee Govenor Bill Lee, pictured, said Wednesday he will not grant clemency to Sutton despite him having vocal supporters including family members of his victims and past and present prison workers Although Sutton drew the death penalty for Esteps murder, he was already serving time for three murders he committed in 1979 when he was just 18, including that of his grandmother. In the clemency petition, longtime friends describe a childhood marked by abandonment, abuse and neglect, and later a spiral into drug abuse. But a recurring theme in the statements supporting the clemency petition is that Sutton today is not the same man who went prison at 18. 'I can confidently state that Nick Sutton is the most rehabilitated prisoner that I met working in maximum security prisons over the course of 30 years,' former Correction Lt. Tony Eden stated in an affidavit included with the clemency petition. Eden believes Sutton may have saved his life during a prison riot in 1985 by confronting a group of armed inmates who were trying to take Eden hostage. 'If Nick Sutton was released tomorrow, I would welcome him into my home and invite him to be my neighbor,' Eden wrote. Former prison Former Correction Lt. Tony Eden (center) is pictured with Nick Sutton and his wife Reba on their wedding day in 1994. Former counselor Cheryl Donaldson also believes Sutton may have saved her life when he sprang into action and called for help after she slipped and hit her head hard on a concrete prison floor. Donaldson also described how her own brother's killing prompted a very frank conversation with Sutton. 'Nick told me he deeply regretted his crimes, constantly reflected on his wrongs, his victims and their families, and is haunted by the lives he has taken,' Donaldson stated. The mother of Paul House, a former death row inmate who was later freed when a judge overturned his conviction based on new evidence, said last week that she was doing all she could to advocate for Sutton. She said Sutton cared for her son after he developed multiple sclerosis in prison, including helping him eat and shower. 'Im telling you right now, my son would be dead if it wasn't for Nick,' Joyce House said in a telephone interview. Former Correction Lt. Tony Eden (left, with Nick Sutton) says Sutton saved his life during a 1985 prison riot when Eden was surrounded by a group of five armed inmates who tried to take him hostage Relatives of another of Sutton's victims, Charles Almon, were also among those who requested clemency. Almon's nephew and namesake, Charles Maynard, said his close-knit family never got over his uncle's death, but the past few months have been especially painful as Sutton's execution date approaches. Maynard said he doesn't feel executing Sutton will solve anything. 'It just ends my uncle's story with another killing,' Maynard said in a phone interview. He said he and his daughter Anna Lee are considering attending a vigil to be held by Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty if the execution goes forward. Sutton still has two appeals pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. One questions the fairness of his sentencing. The other questions whether jurors were unduly prejudiced against Sutton by the security measures at his trial that included shackling and handcuffing Sutton and placing armed officers around the courtroom. Lee, who is a Methodist minister in Knoxville and no relation to Gov. Bill Lee, said her faith informs how she sees the execution. Nicholas Sutton is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee on February 20. His attorneys argue that his life should be spared because he has transformed himself behind bars and has saved the lives of three former prison staff members 'I have a deep belief in the sanctity and sacredness of human life, and I believe no life is beyond the redemption of God's grace,' she said. Gov. Lee is a devout Christian who often speaks of his faith, but it did not lead him to commute Sutton's sentence or the sentences of three men executed since he took office, including one who became a devout Christian and religious leader while in prison. In response to Lee's decision not to intervene in the execution, Sutton's clemency attorney Kevin Sharp, a former U.S. District Court judge, issued a statement Wednesday calling it a 'once-in-a-lifetime case for clemency.' An electric chair, nicknamed 'Old Sparky', is seen at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution under the jurisdiction of Tennessee's Department of Correction in Nashville 'We will continue to seek every available avenue of possible relief for Mr. Sutton because his execution is opposed by many family members of victims, many of the jurors who originally sentenced him to death but recognize his changes, and by the extraordinarily high number of correction professionals who came forward on his behalf,' Sutton's statement reads. Sutton is scheduled to be executed at a Nashville maximum security prison Thursday evening. He was moved to a cell next to the death chamber Tuesday and put under 24-hour surveillance. He has chosen a last meal of fried pork chops, mashed potatoes with gravy and peach pie with vanilla ice cream. Sutton has chosen to die in the electric chair, an option in Tennessee for prisoners whose crimes were committed before 1999. If executed, Sutton would be the fifth person to die in the state's electric chair in the past 16 months. The hotly-contested Delhi Assembly election resulted in a humiliating defeat for the BJP and delivered a decisive win to the AAP. The hotly-contested Delhi Assembly election resulted in a humiliating defeat for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and delivered a decisive win to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which won 62 out of 70 seats. The results indicated that the communally polarising hate campaign that the BJP ran in the lead-up to the 8 February elections did not pay off. The overall vote share of the BJP stood roughly at 40 percent, in contrast to that of AAP's roughly 54 percent. The decline of the Indian National Congress was apparent with its vote share falling to roughly 5 percent. While there has been a lot of analyses on the performance of AAP, BJP and the Congress, other aspects like the level of competition, and aspects of candidates, such as the proportion and performance of incumbents, turncoats, women and first-time candidates, have received little to no attention. Some of these aspects can be analysed (at least partially) through data. Level of competition The average vote share of the winners in the election has been similar in the last few elections. In recent years, Delhi has voted in an astonishingly decisive manner BJP for Lok Sabha elections and AAP for state Assembly giving more than fifty percent votes to winners on an average. It is difficult to ignore how the average winning vote share has remained consistent despite the decisive victories of different parties in general and Assembly elections. It indicates that voters in Delhi are making a clear distinction between national and state election, with many of them voting irrespective of (or, devoid of) party loyalties. Typically, such a high average winning vote share suggests a bipolar contest, which has been the case with Delhi for some time. With Congress' vote share declining to roughly 5 percent, the bipolar nature of the contest between BJP and AAP further strengthened in the 2020 Assembly election. New Elites? In the 2015 election, there were as many as 49 first-time winners. In the 2020 election, however, that number dropped by 57 percent and stands at 21 first-time winners. Of these, fifteen candidates had contested for the first time, while the rest had contested before. (The latter will be referred to from here on as repeat candidates). In 2015, 33 out of 49 first-time winners had contested for the first time. The percentage of incumbent winners out of repeat candidates also increased to 77 percent from 57 percent last time. The number of incumbent winners this time is 42, in comparison to 20 last time. To a large extent, the decline in the number of first-timers in the Assembly from the last election can be explained by the fact that the last election witnessed a transition of power to the AAP for the first time with a majority. However, this time, the AAP was seeking re-election. Hence, there was quite a large number of candidates who had contested or won before. Nonetheless, the elections results do suggest an emergence of a new elite many first-time winners who replaced the previous elites in 2015 have retained their hold on power. Comparison of performance of incumbents with non-incumbents It is often argued that giving tickets to non-incumbents mitigates 'anti-incumbency' and, therefore, makes more strategic sense for political parties. That, however, does not seem to be the case with this election. The average vote share of incumbent winners is almost identical to that of non-incumbent winners. Similarly, there have been some debates on giving tickets to candidates who have switched parties, or 'turncoats'. Commentators have made arguments for both sides that turncoats are strategically beneficial, and that inducting turncoats is bad strategy particularly in the context of defections from various Opposition parties to the BJP. However, again, the results of this election cannot be read as a validation for either of these arguments. The average vote share of turncoats and non-turncoats is very similar. The difference is not statistically significant (based on 95 percent confidence intervals), as statisticians would define it. How did first-time candidates perform vis-a-vis candidates who have contested before? Another common debate in the discourse on politics is the 'winnability' (the probability of winning) of candidates as a function of their electoral experience. Parties as well as commentators often argue that giving tickets to those who have contested before is usually electorally more beneficial; that such candidates have more experience of campaigning and have some existing support base. Again, this election does not show any support for that argument either. The first-timers were almost as successful as those who have contested before: the difference between the average vote shares of the two groups is similar for the AAP and BJP. These figures can be explained in two ways. One interpretation is that it did not matter whether the candidate was a first-timer or had contested before. The other interpretation is that voters mainly voted along party lines, irrespective of the candidate. The difference in average vote share between the two categories is statistically significant for the Congress, but a lot should not be read into it; the overall vote share of the Congress is so low that a few popular candidates could have possibly skewed the balance. Performance of female candidates One of the most popular 'explanations' that is put forward to justify discrimination against women in the distribution of party tickets is, again, the 'winnability' argument: that women tend to perform poorer than men in elections and, therefore, parties are forced to make the pragmatic choice of choosing more men. The number of female candidates remained at a shameful low in this election as well: AAP, BJP, and INC gave only nine, six, and ten tickets to women respectively. The problematic argument is even less convincing when one compares the performance of male and female candidates in this election. As the above graph shows, male and female candidates garnered an almost identical vote share. While the difference is 'statistically significant' for the Congress, it does not mean much as discussed above. It is, therefore, high time for the parties to stop shying away from distributing tickets to women and first-time candidates under the garb of 'winnability'. These factors did not really mean much for winnability in the recent Delhi Assembly Election. While it is true that every election has its own peculiarities and conclusions from this election cannot be generalised, the larger point is that parties should seriously examine and scrutinise their 'conventional wisdom' that stops them from making some bold decisions. The author studies political science at Ashoka University and is a former research associate at Trivedi Centre for Political Data, Ashoka University SAP is now hosting IBMs latest Power Systems servers in its own data centers, as part of its HANA Enterprise Cloud managed offering. The move introduces a new hosting option for enterprises running modern ERP systems with large databases on the Power platform. That could interest a lot of CIOs: SAP has offered its software on the Power platform since 2005, and ported HANA to the Power architecture in 2015. IBM estimated last year that between 20 percent and 25 percent of HANA workloads then ran on Power, with the rest on servers based on Intels architecture. HANA supports scaling for large databases in two ways: scale-up, on a single server with shared memory; or scale-out, on a cluster of smaller servers with shared storage. The latter requires the data to be partitioned, or broken into parts that fit onto the smaller servers. IBM touts its E980 servers the ones SAP is now hosting as offering the largest scale-up virtualized server for HANA in the industry, at a whopping 24TB. Some Intel-based instances in Microsofts Azure cloud can equal that, though. In addition, several companies (including IBM) offer systems with higher headline capacities, but those are scale-out systems. IBM Power Systems, including its latest processor generation, Power9, are the successors to the fabled AS/400 midrange computers it introduced in 1988. One of Power9s attractions is that it can still run legacy apps almost unchanged on the IBM i operating system in one logical partition (LPAR) or virtual machine, with another partition running IBMs AIX flavor of Unix or a Linux distribution such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In theory, then, an enterprise could have a single IBM Power Server running SAP HANA on Linux in one LPAR with legacy apps on IBM i in another. That wont be possible in the HANA Enterprise Cloud, though, as the IBM Power servers there will only run Linux. IBM servers built around IBMs Power9 processors are also available in the IBM Cloud, on Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure (through Skytap, a company that migrates legacy apps to the cloud), but SAP shops will only be able to host their development environments on those. For production environments, SAP has to certify the cloud, and the only one in which it has certified IBM Power Systems is its own SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, said IBM Vice President of Offering Management Vicente Moranta. Representative image The Maharashtra government has sanctioned Rs 152.24 crore for the development of roads in Aurangabad city, a senior official said on Thursday. During a meeting chaired by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray in Mumbai on Wednesday, the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation informed the government about road and other projects worth Rs 263 crore proposed in the city located in Marathwada region. State Urban Development Minister Eknath Shinde and Industries Minister Subhash Desai were also present at the meeting. The chief minister sanctioned Rs 152.24 crore for the development of roads in the city, Aurangabad Municipal Commissioner Astik Kumar Pandey told PTI. The Aurangabad Municipal Corporation, Maharashtra Industrial Development Corporation and Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation will carry out the development works here with the help of the funds, he said. "Around 22 km of roads in the city will be developed with the funds. Bitumen or concrete will be laid depending on the condition of the roads. Construction of side drains and footpaths, and other amenities are also proposed as part of the development project," Pandey said. The world economy faces an 850billion hit if the deadly coronavirus becomes a full-blown pandemic, experts have warned. At the moment most infected people are in China, meaning it is classed as an epidemic. But in a worst-case scenario where the virus affects large numbers of people worldwide becoming a pandemic Oxford Economics warned that G7 economies such as the US, UK and Germany could tip into recession. Scientists test blood samples at a laboratory in Guangdong province, China. Experts fear the global economy could be hit for 850bn if the epidemic becomes a pandemic It comes after International Monetary Fund boss Kristalina Georgieva said the coronavirus risked creating substantial supply chain disruptions and a dramatic fall in investor confidence. Apple says factory problems in China would cause a worldwide iPhone shortage, while car fim Jaguar Land Rover has been flying parts out of the country in suitcases. Oxford Economics modelled two down-side scenarios for the virus one where it was confined largely to Asia and another where it spreads across globe. Consumer spending would be affected by illness, travel restrictions and people staying in. Large numbers of sick workers would hurt manufacturing, while concerns would cut tourism and make investors nervous, hitting shares. If the virus only spreads in Asia, Oxford Economics said about 310billion would be wiped off world GDP, with annual growth slowing to 1.5 per cent in the first half of 2020. If the virus spreads further, it predicted a short but very sharp hit that would wipe 848billion off global GDP. This would see growth crash to zero in the first half before bouncing back rapidly. However, the world economy would still be 1.3 per cent smaller than if the virus had not struck. Georgieva this week said the virus risked causing a sharper and more protracted slowdown in China that could affect the world unless it was contained. SHELTON Beth Smith, the former Shelton High principal who was at the center of controversy over an alleged sex assault of a of a student last school year, has now been chosen to lead the district. The Republican-controlled Board of Education, in a 5-4 vote along party lines Wednesday, tabbed Smith, current supervisor of special education and pupil services, as the interim school superintendent. Smith will replace Chris Clouet, who announced his resignation earlier this week. Its a great honor to be charged with the position to lead the Shelton public schools, said Smith, as she received congratulations after the vote. Democrats opposed the move, instead recommending current assistant superintendent Ken Saranich. Kate Kutash and Amanda Kilmartin, both Democrats, said elevating Saranich, who they noted had the necessary experience after working alongside Clouet the past few months, would be the least disruptive move for the district during the search for a permanent superintendent. We are now on the third leader of the special education program in three years, Kilmartin said. Moving Beth into the interim superintendent position would imply a fourth person in three years in that role. I think that is a tremendous disservice to the public. READ MORE: Who is Beth Smith, Sheltons interim superintendent? READ MORE: Shelton High student starts petition to reject interim superintendent Beth Smith READ MORE: Shelton superintendent sad to leave, but job opportunity too good to pass Kilmartin said, while she has the utmost respect for Smith and her abilities as an educator, the former high school principal brings the baggage of several well-publicized controversies. Because of those things, I would say (Smith) does not make sense as interim superintendent, Kilmartin added. Kutash agreed, saying Smith is better used in her present role, where she can bring the districts pre-K typical peers program back into compliance with state mandates while remaining a steadying presence in the special education department. Smith will take over officially Feb. 29, and her first order of business is the school budget. The Board of Education has submitted a consensus budget with a 2.98 percent increase from this past fiscal year to the city. The board has not yet formally voted on the budget proposal. We need to get the budget finalized, Smith said. Smith said she must also learn how long the board sees her in the role. If it is a short period of time, my goal is to maintain where we are going and complete the year successfully, Smith said. If it is longer than that, I will look at strategic planning with the board to set goals and a vision of where the district is headed. brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com [February 20, 2020] AM Best to Host Webinar on the State of the Directors & Officers Insurance Sector AM Best will host a complimentary webinar, on March 2, 2020, at 10 a.m. (EST). Authors of a new AM Best special report on the Directors & Officers insurance sector, along with industry participants, will review financial results, cost trends and emerging underwriting and exposure issues. Register now. Panelists include: Sridhar Manyem, director, industry research, AM Best; David Blades, associate director, industry research, AM Best; Brian M. Finlay, head of North American Treaty for Error Omissions Liability and Directors' and Officers' Liability, TransRe; and Uri Dallal, managing director, east region leader, Financial Services Group, Aon. [email protected] . The event will be streamed in video and audio formats, and playback will be available to registered viewers shortly after the event. AM Best is a global credit rating agency, news publisher and data analytics provider specializing in the insurance industry. Headquartered in the United States, the company does business in over 100 countries with regional offices in New York, London, Amsterdam, Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Mexico City. For more information, visit www.ambest.com. Copyright 2020 by A.M. Best Company, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005539/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] The Catholic diocese of Harrisburg, Pa. filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday as it faces millions of dollars in sexual abuse claims, over a year after the state released a grand jury report detailing alleged abuse by hundreds of priests. The diocese was in need of right-sizing, said an attorney for the diocese, Matthew Haverstick. Bankruptcy is really the responsible way to do it, so it can continue to do all the things it does, spiritually and charitably. The diocese estimated its assets are between $1 million and $10 million while its financial liabilities are as much as $50 million to $100 million, according to the dioceses bankruptcy petition. Since 2004, at least 20 Catholic dioceses have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as they reel from abuse lawsuits. Pennsylvania inspired a rash of state investigations across the nation after state attorney general Josh Shapiro launched a grand jury inquiry into six Catholic dioceses in the state. The final grand jury report found that 301 priests were accused of sexual abuse in Pennsylvania over the last several decades while the Church worked to cover up the scandal. Before the grand jury report was made public, Bishop Ronald Gainer of Harrisburg released a list of seventy-one clergy and seminarians, 37 of whom are priests, who were accused of sexually abusing children stretching back to the 1940s. The bishop said he has adopted a zero-tolerance policy regarding child sexual abuse during his time at the diocese, and has immediately removed accused priests from ministry and reported them to law enforcement. Sexual abuse of minors in the Church made headlines again in 2018 when several high-ranking clergy members were toppled over accusations against them, including the resignation of prominent U.S. cardinal Theodore McCarrick over credible accusations that he molested a teenage boy. More from National Review The estate of a man who was killed in a drunken driving crash in 2017 and a crash victim who survived are suing the Prineville, Ore., bar that over-served driver Justin Bittick. The estate of Stephan Mitchell Leader-Bowles filed suit in Crook County Circuit Court against Cooler Bar LLC, which owns the Horseshoe Saloon, The Bulletin reported. Lawyers for Cooler Bar have filed motions challenging facts in the pleadings, and plaintiffs attorneys have filed responses. Bittick went to Horseshoe Saloon by himself on his birthday, Oct. 20, 2017, and drank to intoxication, according to court records. He persuaded four people at the bar to return with him to his home to continue partying and the vehicle he was driving rolled. Leader-Bowles was killed, as was Caleb Williams. Alex Shaver and Corrine Hatchell were severely injured, as was Bittick, who suffered a traumatic brain injury and couldnt remember the incident. Bittick was convicted of manslaughter and he was sentenced in July to 20 years in prison. The Oregon Liquor Control Commission revoked the Horseshoe Saloons liquor license and sanctioned the bar employee who served Bittick. Janette Leader Hill, mother of Leader-Bowles, is seeking $1.25 million in noneconomic damages and costs and disbursements. Shaver, who suffered a broken neck and was permanently injured in the wreck, is seeking $900,000. Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Topics Lawsuits Oregon Former GOP Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says he actually did offer WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a presidential pardon and that he told the Trump administration all about it. The Trump administration denied Wednesday that it had sent Rohrabacher to offer Assange a pardon, with White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham saying Trump "barely knows Dana Rohrabacher" and has "never spoken to him on this subject or almost any subject." But Rohrabacher provided a different story in a Thursday interview with Yahoo News, saying he floated a pardon if Assange could prove Russia didn't hack the Democratic National Committee in 2016. Rohrabacher met with Assange for three hours in August 2017 at the Ecuardorian embassy where he was claiming asylum. The ex-congressmember was looking to prove his conspiracy theory and claim Russia didn't actually hack DNC emails and provide those emails to WikiLeaks, Rohrabacher told Yahoo News. If Assange could do so, Rohrabacher assured Assange he would get a presidential pardon "He knew I could get to the president," Rohrabacher said. Rohrabacher called then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly after the meeting and mentioned the possible pardon, though he said Kelly didn't even commit to discussing the matter with Trump. Rohrabacher was a high-profile representative for 30 years before Rep. Harley Rouda (D-Calif.) beat him in the 2018 midterms. Assange was ousted from the embassy about a year ago and has since been charged in the U.S. with illegally publishing government secrets. More stories from theweek.com Bernie Sanders' subtle warning to the Democratic Party How much will Medicare-for-all save Americans? A lot. There's a way Democrats can beat the Trump economy but they won't like it Utah police have ended their investigation into the death of a man whose body was found in a freezer alongside a notarized letter saying his wife was not responsible. The Tooele City Police Department released a report on the mysterious case surrounding Paul Edward Mathers on Wednesday, nearly three months after his corpse was discovered in a freezer at his wife Jeanne Sourone-Mathers' apartment minutes after she herself was found deceased. The department announced that the investigation had been closed because, as Sgt Jeremy Hansen put it, 'We're never going to have final answers.' Included in a report was the typed letter in which Mathers wrote: 'I want it known that Jeanne is in NO way responsible for my death.' The letter, which was signed by a notary, is dated December 2, 2008. Police say Mathers appeared to have died sometime between February 4, 2009 - when the then-63-year-old was last seen at a Veterans Affairs hospital - and March 8, 2009. Investigators suspected early on that the couple may have kept Mathers' death a secret so that his wife could continue receiving his checks from the VA. Police said she pocketed $177,325 from the federal agency in the years between her husband's death and her own. But exactly how Mathers died and his body ended up in the freezer may never be answered. Utah police announced Wednesday that they have ended their investigation into the death of Paul Edward Mathers, whose body was found in a freezer alongside a notarized letter saying his wife, Jeanne Sourone-Mathers, was not responsible. The letter is shown in full above The bizarre case began on November 22 when police performed a welfare check on Sourone-Mathers at the Remington Park Apartments (pictured) in Tooele and found the 75-year-old dead of natural causes. Officers were searching the home for clues as to how long she'd been deceased when they discovered her late husband's body in the freezer The bizarre case began on November 22 when police performed a welfare check on Sourone-Mathers at the Remington Park Apartments and found the 75-year-old dead. She was determined to have died of natural causes. Officers were searching the home for clues as to how long Sourone-Mathers had been dead when they discovered her late husband's body in the freezer. Mathers had been diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer but authorities were unable to conclude if that's what killed him. An autopsy from the Utah State Medical Examiner's Office noted that Mathers only weeks to months to live in early 2009. It is also noted that he had 'highly lethal levels of several prescription narcotics' in his system. Mathers' head had been wrapped in a garbage bag that was 'tightly duct taped around his neck', but it was unclear whether the bag was secured before or after he died. Officials were also unable to determine whether Sourone-Mathers, who used a wheelchair, had a hand in putting the bag over her husband's head because 'no latent prints of comparable value' were recovered from the plastic. Even if she didn't assist in his death, it was still illegal that she didn't report it and kept the body in the freezer. But Mathers was intent on clearing his wife of any wrongdoing in his death, according to the notarized letter, which read: 'I, Paul E. Mathers, a.k.a. Paula, being of a relatively sound mind and cancer ridden body make the following statement: I am fully aware that with my heart condition the Lortabs/Hydrocodine will eventually stop my heart. It will not be deliberate as I am not ready to leave my wife, Jeanne Marie. 'Jeanne has foiled my actual suicide attempts. 'I want it known that Jeanne is in NO way responsible for my death. Although that will be what my drama queen mother will claim. My mother can get on with her life without having to acknowledge that I her first born am a T.G.' Police tape is seen outside the door of Sourone-Mathers' apartment after both she and her husband were discovered dead inside on November 22 The final sentence of the letter offers a possible explanation for another main question in the case: why other relatives didn't appear raise concerns about not having seen or heard from Mathers in years. Police said there were indications that Mathers had an estranged relationship with his family, including the mother he mentioned in the note. Investigators could not confirm what he meant by 'T.G.', but said the initials may stand for transgender, which would explain why he called himself 'Paula'. If that's the case, it would suggest that Mathers had a falling out with his mother because of his gender identity. The mother died in January 2018, Hansen said, and police were never able to verify if Mathers was transgender. Sourone-Mathers reportedly kept her husband's death under wraps by telling people that he had walked out on her. On March 5, 2009, Mathers' sister visited Sourone-Mathers, who claimed that her husband had moved to California. Evan Kline, who works in the retirement community where Sourone-Mathers lived, said that she had told others in the community the same story. Speaking to Fox13 back in December, Kline described Sourone-Mathers as a 'very nice person' who would not 'hurt a fly'. He said she stopped receiving dialysis treatments shortly before her death so it did not come as a shock to him. However, he was very surprised to hear about Mathers' body being found in the home. My jaw hit the floor when I found out,' he said. 'Based on what I know now, I'd have to say it was probably the plan, yeah, for her to keep the money because it was her only source of income,' Kline said. 'I guess you could call it kind of smart then again, crooks a lot of the time are smart.' Bhubaneswar, Feb 20 : The Odisha government has collected over Rs 38.67 crore as fine for violation of traffic norms under the amended Motor Vehicle (MV) Act 2019, said a Minister on Thursday. Replying to a written question of Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MLA Soumya Ranjan Patnaik, Transport Minister Padmanabha Behera informed the state Assembly that Rs 38.67 crore has been collected as fine under new MV Act between September 1, 2019 and January 31 this year. He also informed that a total of 4,13,994 driving license applications have been received after implementation of the MV Act till January 31. Driving licenses have been issued to 2,87,932 applicants so far, the Minister said. Replying to another question, Behera said a total of 28,63,648 pollution under control certificates have been issued to vehicles between September 2019 and February 15, 2020. Besides, a total of 13,90,48 fitness certificates have been issued during the period. Laura Ashley saw its losses deepen. (Laura Ashley) The CEO of Laura Ashley (ALY.L) has retired earlier than planned as the troubled retailer revealed its losses had more than doubled in the second half of last year. The clothes and home furnishings brand has been battling to stay afloat, after falling sales left the company unable to borrow as much as expected. It said it had secured a funding lifeline on Wednesday after crisis talks with its major bank lender Wells Fargo (WFC). It secured permission to use a loan to fund its day-to-day operations. It revealed on Thursday its pre-tax losses excluding exceptional items had widened to 4m ($5.2m) in the 26 weeks to the end of 2019, compared with 1.5m the previous year. Its sales also slid from 122.9m in the second half of 2018 to 109.6m. In a statement alongside the interim report it confirmed its CEO Kwan Cheong Ng would leave his post immediately. He had been due to retire at the end of April. Its share price leapt on the announcement, trading 16.5% higher in morning trading in London. Read more: Laura Ashley in crisis funding talks as sales dive Katharine Poulter, the companys current chief operating officer, will replace him with immediate effect, the company confirmed. She only recently joined the company, leading a strategic review. Poulter has previously worked at Marks and Spencer, Habitat, Kingfisher and Wilko. Andrew Khoo, Laura Ashleys chairman, said: "There have been market challenges for our business which have impacted these results during the current financial year. The decline in total revenue was due to the market headwinds and weaker consumer spending during the period, which led to a decline in sales of bigger ticket items. He added: We have further to go but are confident we now have the right leadership team and building blocks in place. WASHINGTON, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- NASA will kick off the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium an element of the agency's Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative at a workshop hosted by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, on Friday, Feb. 28. The consortium will team experts from academia, industry and government to shape the technologies and systems needed to explore the surface of the Moon in new ways. Universities and businesses will contribute to the Artemis program via the consortium and collaborate with NASA to make recommendations for a cohesive, executable strategy for developing and deploying technologies required for successful lunar surface exploration. Media representatives interested in attending the event should contact Michael Buckley of APL Public Affairs at 240-228-7536 or [email protected] by 5 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 27. NASA and APL experts will be made available for interview opportunities upon request. The event will also be livestreamed on APL's YouTube and Facebook pages. The workshop opens with an address by NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk at 9:15 a.m. The day continues with discussions among NASA leaders and the university, laboratory and commercial space communities on the path ahead for technologies for long-term exploration of the Moon. APL operates the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium in collaboration with NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate under the Lunar Surface Innovation Initiative. The initiative complements NASA science and technology payloads being developed to fly aboard commercial lunar landers. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, continues to advance the agency's lunar exploration efforts. Goddard manages the longest running lunar mission the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Working with American companies, Goddard is developing payloads and instruments for the lunar surface. Goddard's Chief Technologist plans to attend the kickoff consortium meeting. The Artemis program is the next step in human exploration. It is a part of NASA's broader Moon to Mars exploration approach, in which we will quickly and sustainable explore the Moon and use what we learn there to enable humanity's next giant leap, sending astronauts to Mars. For information on the Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium and kickoff meeting, visit: http://lsic.jhuapl.edu/ SOURCE NASA Related Links http://www.nasa.gov GENEVA, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Firmenich announces the retirement of Armand de Villoutreys as President of its Perfumery and Ingredients business on June 30th, 2020 after a remarkable tenure of over 21 years with the company. The Group is delighted to appoint Ilaria Resta as President Perfumery and member of the company's Executive Committee. Resta will join on March 2nd, 2020 and will officially take over the leadership of Perfumery on July 1st, 2020, following a smooth handover with de Villoutreys. Having most recently served as Vice President of North America Hair Care at Procter & Gamble, Resta joins Firmenich with deep experience in the Beauty, Fabric and Home Care markets globally. She brings an outstanding track record in delivering superior growth by building iconic brands, leading disruptive business models and developing a positive culture as well as winning teams. "I warmly welcome Ilaria to Firmenich's Executive Committee as President of our Perfumery business," says Gilbert Ghostine, CEO, Firmenich. "Ilaria is an inspiring leader with a great track record of empowering people, building iconic brands and outperforming markets. With her deep consumer understanding and passion for fragrance and innovation, I am confident she will be a partner of choice for our customers to make their brands stronger," adds Ghostine. "I would like to sincerely thank Armand de Villoutreys who has served Firmenich remarkably over more than 21 years," continues Ghostine. "Under his leadership, our Perfumery business deepened its strategic partnerships with our customers, while strengthening its innovation and creative signature. Loved by his teams, Armand relentlessly inspired them to win bigger for our customers. He leaves a strong and distinctive mark on the industry, as he played a leadership role in key fragrance associations, including IFRA and RIFM. I personally have the greatest respect for Armand, from whom I learned a lot over the years. I look forward to continuing our friendship in the future and wish him much fulfillment as he opens this new chapter in his life," concludes Ghostine. "I am very pleased to join Firmenich as President of Perfumery. Fragrance plays a critical role in connecting people with positive experiences and memories, which has been a personal passion for me throughout my career," said Resta. "It is an honor for me to lead Firmenich's Perfumery Business into the future, building on an incredibly strong base of renowned creativity, talent and pioneering innovation. In my new role, I will focus on continuously strengthening the Group's leadership with the most loved and sustainable fragrances. I have the deepest respect for Armand and the Perfumery excellence he has built at Firmenich. It is with great esteem and admiration that I take the baton from him today to shape the future of Perfumery as a member of Firmenich's Executive Committee," she adds. Resta joins Firmenich with more than 22 years of experience in building iconic brands at Procter & Gamble. She has held leadership roles across its Beauty, Fabric and Home Care markets in Europe, North America and globally. In her most recent role as P&G's Vice President North America Hair Care, Resta delivered record growth results, led innovative digital and e-commerce programs as well as purpose-driven sustainable experiences, and received the esteemed WWD Beauty Inc 2019 Brand Builder of the Year Award. An Italian and Swiss citizen, Resta has a Bachelor's degree in Marketing and Economics from the University of Naples and a Master's degree in Financial Mathematics. She will relocate from the US to Geneva with her family. About Firmenich Firmenich is the world's largest privately-owned perfume and taste company, founded in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1895. Driven by its purpose to create positive emotions to enhance wellbeing, naturally, Firmenich has designed many of the world's best-known perfumes and tastes, bringing delight to over four billion consumers every day. Renowned for its world-class research and creativity, as well as its leadership in sustainability, each year, Firmenich invests 10% of its turnover in R&D to understand and share the best that nature has to offer responsibly. Firmenich had an annual turnover of 3.9 billion Swiss Francs at end June 2019. More information about Firmenich is available at www.firmenich.com. Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/798187/Firmenich_Logo.jpg Turkey's guarantees in Libya are dependent on a truce between warring sides being upheld, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday, adding that Libyan commander Khalifa Haftar was violating the ceasefire. Turkey backs Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA) and has signed a military cooperation agreement to help it repel an offensive by Haftar's forces in the country's east. World powers agreed at a summit last month to halt hostilities in Libya while a political process is underway. Speaking to state broadcaster TRT Haber, Cavusoglu said the "international system" had failed to stop clashes in Libya and that there was no determination. He said a political process in Libya could not move forward while Haftar's attacks continue. Search Keywords: Short link: TORRINGTON The 41st annual Tim Driscoll St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital Telethon returns March 1, filling the halls and the Little Theatre at Torrington High School with music, dancing and plenty of food and refreshments. The event this year will again be live-streamed at www.stjude.org/torrington, giving residents the chance to view the 11-hour telethon from home. For the first time, WZBG is doing a live show from the telethon during the day, and the telethon will broadcast live on Cable 5. The call-in number is 860-489-0612. WZBG is coming for a live broadcast from 10 a.m.-noon, and its very exciting to have them, said Kristin Raymond, daughter of the events founder, the late Tim Driscoll. Theyll do live reporting and live intervews, to spread the word and get people to make a pledge or come down to the high school theater. Last years telethon raised $70,000 for St. Judes Childrens Research Hospital, founded by actor Danny Thomas. As always, organizers never set a goal for fundraising, and the number increases every year. My dad always used to say, if we set a goal and we dont reach it, (the telethon) isnt seen as a success, said Raymond. But no matter how much we raise, every year is a success. Its important to always remember that. A big part of the telethon is the live music and dancing, presented by numerous school groups and dance schools. Were following the same format otherwise, with a lot of returning performers and a few new ones, too, Raymond said. Performers ths year will include the Center for Dance Arts, Dana LaPortas piano students, Thomaston Center School student chorus, Torringford School dance team, the Forbes Flyers, Dream Believe Achieve Dance of New Hartford, Deborahs Dance Workshop, Reach for the Stars dance studio, the Southwest School chorus, Sparkle and Shine Dance Studio, St. Peter St. Francis School chorus, Torrington High Schools cheer and dance teams, Torrington High School jazz band, and the Thomaston High School drama club. New groups joining the telethon this year are kids from Black Rock School in Thomaston, Litchfield Center School, and the Thomaston High School choir, Raymond said. Schools typically sing for their part in the telethon, and the dance schools are great they always put on a good show. And its exciting for us to have the Thomaston choir join us. Another big draw to the telethon is the food sale, which is organized completely by volunteers. We have a group of ladies and they get food from all over. We serve breakfast, lunch and dinner. There are snacks, baked goods and lots of pies, Raymond said. People come for the food and to support their families who are participating in the performances. People really love the food sale. Raymond said this years door prize table is impressive. The volunteers have put together fantastic door prizes, better than Ive seen anywhere else, she said. Local businesses donate prizes, and local school teachers and office staff create baskets, too. The Torrington schools do an outstanding job. Telethon guests can purchase door prize tickets when they arrive. You dont have to be there to win, Raymond said. Well announce the winners on air, and you can pick them up at the telethon or arrange to get them later. The telethon is a family effort for the Driscolls. Along with her niece, Kolbe Driscoll, Raymonds siblings are part of the team. Raymonds older sister Kyla Driscoll works behind the scenes with their mother, Cathy. Her cousin Derek is the events emcee this year. Uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews and cousins are also volunteering for the telethon, along with a crew of children of all ages. Live-streaming the telethon has brought the telethon more visibility, Raymond said. We had people calling in from a lot of other states besides Connecticut last year, and people were watching all over the country, she said. This is a very local, amateur event, and people love it. Its an event that wouldnt be possible without the support of those people, and people all over Litchfield County. I start getting emails from people around September, asking what the date of the telethon will be, if its still on, and what its going to have, she said. Each year, my aunt Lisa handles the phone room, and I over see the talent and the sponsors. Its a family event but we need our community members to come out and support it, and they always do. The pledges are $5, $10 or $20, and maybe it was difficult for a family to make that pledge, but they always do. Its very humbling and gratifying. When she takes the stage to welcome participants, Driscoll and her niece Kolbe wear their best dresses. This year, Maria Christines Bridal Shop is providing those dresses, as well as tuxedos for the men. That spirit of community is what makes the telethon such a success, Raymond said. Weve got it down to a science now, from start to cleanup, she said. Its better than it used to be, and we are so fortunate to have so many people involved. The Tim Driscoll St. Jude Childrens Hospital Telethon runs from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. March 1 at Torrington High School, 50 Major Besse Drive. There is no charge to attend; bring money for door prize tickets and food. If you cant attend, call the pledge line at 860-489-0612 or tune in to Cable 5 or www.stjude.org/torrington. Every investor on earth makes bad calls sometimes. But you want to avoid the really big losses like the plague. So consider, for a moment, the misfortune of China Tonghai International Financial Limited (HKG:952) investors who have held the stock for three years as it declined a whopping 71%. That would certainly shake our confidence in the decision to own the stock. The more recent news is of little comfort, with the share price down 29% in a year. See our latest analysis for China Tonghai International Financial To quote Buffett, 'Ships will sail around the world but the Flat Earth Society will flourish. There will continue to be wide discrepancies between price and value in the marketplace...' One way to examine how market sentiment has changed over time is to look at the interaction between a company's share price and its earnings per share (EPS). Although the share price is down over three years, China Tonghai International Financial actually managed to grow EPS by 97% per year in that time. This is quite a puzzle, and suggests there might be something temporarily buoying the share price. Alternatively, growth expectations may have been unreasonable in the past. It's worth taking a look at other metrics, because the EPS growth doesn't seem to match with the falling share price. Revenue is actually up 23% over the three years, so the share price drop doesn't seem to hinge on revenue, either. This analysis is just perfunctory, but it might be worth researching China Tonghai International Financial more closely, as sometimes stocks fall unfairly. This could present an opportunity. The graphic below depicts how earnings and revenue have changed over time (unveil the exact values by clicking on the image). SEHK:952 Income Statement, February 20th 2020 This free interactive report on China Tonghai International Financial's balance sheet strength is a great place to start, if you want to investigate the stock further. What about the Total Shareholder Return (TSR)? Story continues We'd be remiss not to mention the difference between China Tonghai International Financial's total shareholder return (TSR) and its share price return. The TSR is a return calculation that accounts for the value of cash dividends (assuming that any dividend received was reinvested) and the calculated value of any discounted capital raisings and spin-offs. Dividends have been really beneficial for China Tonghai International Financial shareholders, and that cash payout explains why its total shareholder loss of 70%, over the last 3 years, isn't as bad as the share price return. A Different Perspective While the broader market lost about 1.6% in the twelve months, China Tonghai International Financial shareholders did even worse, losing 29%. Having said that, it's inevitable that some stocks will be oversold in a falling market. The key is to keep your eyes on the fundamental developments. Regrettably, last year's performance caps off a bad run, with the shareholders facing a total loss of 8.0% per year over five years. We realise that Buffett has said investors should 'buy when there is blood on the streets', but we caution that investors should first be sure they are buying a high quality business. While it is well worth considering the different impacts that market conditions can have on the share price, there are other factors that are even more important. Be aware that China Tonghai International Financial is showing 1 warning sign in our investment analysis , you should know about... Of course China Tonghai International Financial may not be the best stock to buy. So you may wish to see this free collection of growth stocks. Please note, the market returns quoted in this article reflect the market weighted average returns of stocks that currently trade on HK exchanges. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. A farming charity is releasing money from its crisis fund to provide emergency grants to farming families affected by storms Dennis and Ciara. Farmers across the country have experienced heavy storms over the last two weekends, and more rainfall is forecast. Storms Dennis and Ciara wreaked havoc across the United Kingdom, with gust speeds of up to 90mph and torrential downpour. Looking to help affected farmers, the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution (RABI) has released an initial 50,000 to provide emergency payments to those affected. The charity has already provided around 75,000 of grant support to those affected by extreme wet weather this autumn and winter. Alicia Chivers, RABI CEO said: We know how devastating the impacts are for farmers in both the immediate and longer-term. Simplifying our criteria and application process means we can fast-track immediate assistance to affected farmers. The funds help to alleviate pressing financial worries, allowing farmers to concentrate on dealing with the immediate impacts of the extreme weather. Ms Chivers added: RABI understands that the effects of severe weather are both financial and emotional. We will be here to provide support for as long as it is needed by our community. We will also continue to work closely with partner charities and other farming organisations to make sure help is available, both now and on an enduring basis. To apply for assistance, call R.A.B.Is confidential Freephone Helpline 0808 281 9490 Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex are soaking up their final weeks of relaxation before the head back to the U.K. at the beginning of March to finish out their final royal duties. After April 1, the Sussexes will have officially relinquished their senior working royal roles for good. Since announcing Megxit on Jan. 8, 2020 the duke and duchess have been living a low-key life on Vancouver Island in Canada. The Sussexes are renting out a massive $14.1 million mansion that sits on acres of land and grants them the privacy and the serenity that theyve been craving. In fact, aside from a couple of quick trips to the United States once for a paid speaking engagement in Miami with JP Morgan and then for a trip to Stanford University where they held a brainstorming workshop around their new charity, the Sussexes have been loving their new lives and homebodies. In fact, the duke was just spotted grocery shopping. Inside Meghan Markle and Prince Harrys daily routine in Canada Though they are carving out a plan for their lives that will eventually grant them complete financial independence from the royal family speaking events like the $1 million they reportedly earned from the JP Morgan event will help sustain the Sussexes for now. These plans take a lot of time, and staff are putting in the legwork to prepare it properly and make sure it delivers on the expectations and the couples ambitions, an insider told People. Its full throttle for them right now. They have a lot happening in 2020, and it will be really exciting to see. Instead of rushing into work, the pair have been enjoying a much lighter schedule their time together as a couple and being regular parents to their infant son, Archie Harrison. They both love to be outside and have been loving it there, a source revealed to People. When theyre not doing yoga or eating in, Harry will pick up sandwiches at a local spot, and Meghan walks her beloved rescue beagle Guy and the couples adopted Labrador. They go for long walks, they do yoga, and Meghan cooks. They are real homebodies who love to chill out with Archie and the dogs. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have always done their own cooking and shopping On her now-defunct lifestyle blog, The Tig the duchess often gushed about her love of cooking. In fact, she was roasting a chicken when the duke proposed to her. Despite her hectic royal schedule, Markle tried to cook for herself and the prince as often as possible when they were working royals. For his part, Prince Harry has always done his own grocery shopping even when he was single. I do my own shopping, the prince said to Newsweek. Sometimes, when I come away from the meat counter in my local supermarket, I worry someone will snap me with their phone. But I am determined to have a relatively normal life. Prince Harry was just spotted grocery shopping on Vancouver Island Markle and Prince Harry were last spotted together smiling and happy when they landed in Canada from their trip to Stanford on Valentines Day. Now, TMZ has just snapped a photo of the prince grocery shopping with his reusable bag. TMZ is reporting that the duke picked up to-go sandwiches and groceries while wearing a Patagonia zip-up puffer jacket, denim jeans, and a dad cap. Were happy the Sussexes seem at peace. 20.02.2020 LISTEN The Akpini Traditional council in Kpando and the families of Dr. Fred Mac Palm have joined calls to mount pressure on government to grant bail to persons standing trial for allegedly plotting to destabilise the country. The Bulla, Tendeku and MacPalm families in Kpando told the press that the continuous stay of Dr. Mac Palm in police custody is making life difficult for his dependents, including his aged mother. Dr. Fred Mac Palm, a native of Kpando in the Volta Region and owner of the Bawaleshie based Citadel clinic was arrested, together with Donya Kafui, alias Ezor, a blacksmith from Alavanyo, and Bright Allan Debrah Ofosu, a freight manager on September 20 last year and have remained in custody since then. The three were charged for conspiracy to commit crime, namely, manufacturing of arms and ammunition, and the possession of explosives, firearms and ammunition without lawful authority. But a cousin of Dr. Mac Palm, Delali Tendeku, who addressed the press, said as much as they will not want to interfere with the prosecutorial process, they plead with the government to not only expedite the prosecution but to also grant bail to their son. We are appealing to the government to expedite action in this work and to grant him bail so that the charges will move on smoothly. He, however, reiterated the familys position that Dr. Mac Palm was innocent. I dont believe that my brother has done this. The charges that have been levelled against him, I don't believe he can never plot against anybody. He is a God-fearing man, Mr. Tendeku stated. The other persons standing trial are Col. Samuel Kodzo Gameli, W.O.2 Esther Doku, Lance Corporal Ali Solomon, Lance Corporal Albert Baba Ibrahim, Lance Corporal Sylvester Akapewon, Bright Alan Debrah and Corporal Seidu Abubakar. The accused persons are said to be part of a group known as the Take Action Ghana (TAG). The group, according to the prosecution, planned to organise a series of demonstrations and also to overthrow the government. They reportedly put together a plan to target some key installations including the Jubilee House, the Ghana Broadcast Corporation, the National police trading school, 37 Military Hospital and Burma Camp. Their arrests, in October 2019, followed 15 months of surveillance and gathering of evidence on the activities of the suspects. The government also said meetings between the civilian suspects and serving military personnel with a view to executing a plot to obtain weapons, take over key installations, and secure funding for the purported coup were closely monitored. ---citinewsroom A day after Rep. Thomas Petrolati announced he wouldnt seek re-election, Ludlow School Committee member Jake Oliveira launched his campaign for the 7th Hampden District seat. Oliveira thanked Petrolati, a Democrat who was first elected in 1986, for his work at the Massachusetts State House and announced his plans to become his successor. It would be an honor to represent the residents of Ludlow, Belchertown, Springfield and Chicopee, and I plan to be a steadfast advocate for Western Massachusetts interests on Beacon Hill, said Oliveira, a Democrat. Oliveira, 33, is the assistant executive officer of the Massachusetts State Universities Council of Presidents, which represents nine Massachusetts colleges and universities. An 11-year committee member, Oliveira touted his background in education policy and advocacy. He has served as the policy subcommittee chair and as Ludlows representative to the Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative, which provides vocational programs and student transportation. Advocacy is one of the most important roles of a school committee member, particularly when the state and the Legislature control so much of education policy in terms of funding and regulations, Oliveira said. In 2015, Oliveira was elected president of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, the youngest one in recent memory. As MASC president, Oliveira was tasked with leading the organizations advocacy efforts on charter school expansion, school funding and revenue options and challenges surrounding students struggling with poverty and homelessness. Oliveira went on to represent 11 states on the National School Boards Associations board of directors. Petrolati announced this week that he will not seek re-election. He is currently the chairman of the House Committee on Steering, Policy, and Scheduling. He is the latest in a series of Western Massachusetts lawmakers who decided against running for re-election. Democratic state Reps. Aaron M. Vega, of the 5th Hampden District, and Jose F. Tosado, of the 9th Hampden District, have said they are not running for reelection in November. In the 2018 election cycle, five new lawmakers joined the Western Massachusetts delegation following retirements, resignations and death. Now more than ever do we need to build a cohesive delegation of legislators, Oliveira told MassLive. An urgent search is underway for a young woman who suddenly went missing. Kataraina Watts was last seen in Berwick, Melbourne about 9am on Tuesday, February 18. The 20-year-old has not been in contact with any family or friends since she was last seen. Kataraina Watts was last seen in Berwick, Victoria about 9am on Tuesday, February 18 Her devastated family and police are concerned for her welfare due to the length of time she has been missing. She is described as being approximately 188cm tall with a solid build. Ms Watts was last seen wearing black pants, a black shirt with a grey cardigan and black shoes. Victoria Police have released images of Ms Watts and are appealing to members of the public for answers on her whereabouts. Anyone with information on her whereabouts is urged to come forward. Burma Myanmars Union-Level Ceasefire Monitoring Committee to Meet Next Month Military representatives attend the three-day meeting in Yangon. / Aung Kyaw Htet / The Irrawaddy YANGONAfter a long delay, the Union-level Joint Ceasefire Monitoring Committee (JMC) will meet again in March, according to government peace negotiator U Hla Maung Shwe. The JMC was formed in late 2015 following the signing of the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) between the government and ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) in October of that year. Its role includes monitoring NCA signatories implementation of the ceasefire. The last meeting of the JMC took place more than a year ago. Following a three-day meeting between the governments peace delegation and representatives of the 10 NCA signatories at the National Reconciliation and Peace Center in Yangon this week, U Hla Maung Shwe told reporters on Tuesday that the two sides had agreed to meet next month. We discussed resuming the JMC meeting. As you all know, the government has proposed resuming the JMC meeting from March 10-12. And we expect the meeting will be held on those dates, said U Hla Maung Shwe. Nai Ong MaNge, a spokesperson for the 10 NCA signatories, said the two sides also agreed dates for holding the Union Peace Dialogue Joint Committee (UPDJC) secretarial meeting and the UPDJC meeting, which are instrumental in convening the 21st-Century Panglong Peace Conference, as well as national-level political dialogues in Shan and Rakhine states ahead of the peace conference. The two sides also agreed to hold a Joint Implementation Coordination Meeting (JICM), the highest-level meeting within the national peace process, in March. The government and the 10 NCA signatories are also in the process of discussing the political structure they envision for the Union beyond 2020. The two sides exchanged proposals on the Union structure and will submit them to their top leaders, Nai Ong MaNge said. A series of discussions will be held step by step, he said. The agreement to resume the JMC meeting indicates that trust has been restored between the two sides, U Hla Maung Shwe said. At a peace summit from Oct. 15-16 in 2018, the Myanmar military and government demanded that ethnic states vow never to seek secession from the Union, and to accept a single military. Disagreements over the demands brought the summit to a halt. On Oct. 27 of that year, Saw Mutu Say Poe, the chairman of the Karen National Union (KNU)an NCA signatorysent a letter to State Counselor Daw Aung San Suu Kyi informing her that the KNU would suspend its participation in formal peace meetings. Another signatory, the Restoration Council of Shan State, followed suit, saying it would not attend future JMC meetings if the committee continued to lack impartiality, equality and justice at its various levels. The JMC implements ceasefire monitoring through its Union-, state- and local-level committees. The Union-level JMC consists of 26 members10 representatives each from the government and 10 EAOs, and six civilians. The Union-level JMCs procedures call for it to meet every two months. In case of complaints about disputes, shootings, violations of the militarys code of conduct, and violations of the NCA such as recruitment or burdening of civilians, the local-level JMC is responsible for convening a meeting and reporting its decision to the state-level JMC. If the state-level JMC cannot resolve the issue, it will report it to the Union-level JMC for settlement. Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko You may also like these stories: Myanmar Reportedly Set to Be Placed on Global Money-Laundering Watchlist EU Honors Myanmar Rights Advocates at Fourth Schuman Awards Fighting Blocks off Food Supplies to Myanmars Chin State Township Justin Sutton is getting another chance at life as a free man after Judge Tom Greenholtz allowed him to stay on probation. Sutton, 23, absconded while on probation for theft of property. When he appeared in court, he described his living situation. I live in a tent behind my moms (residence), said Sutton, who told the judge there was no room in her house for another person. Because of mental challenges, Sutton is unable to work and he said Im trying to get disability in order to pay bills. He said he had gone to Moccasin Bend for a time, but now, he would have a renewed focus and determination to turn his life around. When Judge Greenholtz at first seemed skeptical of his proclamation, Sutton elaborated. Ive got more of a support system, said Sutton. He then told the judge he would also report to probation as quickly as humanly possible. Im going to show up to the door the first moment I get out. Samantha Bales, who works in the district attorneys office, explained the plan for Sutton, should he be allowed to continue probation. Sutton would go to Helen Ross-McNabb Center. While there, he would receive treatment for his mental health symptoms, using a therapist, case, and drug management. He was a very poor historian, and confused very easily, said Ms. Bales when she recounted how Sutton struggled to remember past events. Prosecutor Jason Demastus had no desire to place the defendant back in prison. Though he had absconded, prosecutor Demastus said he was fine with Ms. Bales plan. With the prosecutions stance clear, Judge Greenholtz put Sutton back on probation, with the understanding that he would report to probation and go to Helen Ross-McNabb. I want you to get there this week, said Judge Greenholtz. Just calling and leaving a message is not acceptable. You need to go down there and report. I dont want to see you here again. Over one, under one, Sharon Crary intoned as a group of women watched her guiding yarn across a loom during her weaving demonstration in the Napa Main Library last week. Crary, a prolific weaver whose tapestries are on exhibit at the library this month, responded to questions from the group. Most people who do tapestries use bobbins. Im primarily self-taught and I learned this with the tapestry needle, and thats just the way I do it. Im a rule breaker, Crary said, laughing as she worked and explained her technique. This area here, she said, pointing to a section of her nearly finished tapestry. It is called a wedge weave. Though Crarys work has been featured on the covers of several prominent tapestry magazines and juried into international exhibitions, this is the first time her tapestries have been shown at the Napa library. To honor Crarys exhibit, the library is hosting a wine and hors doeuvres reception with live music from 6-7:30 p.m. on Friday, Feb. 21. An artist talk is scheduled for 6:30 p.m. Both her large and smaller wall hangings depict mountains, fields, water, Napa landscapes, the swamps of Louisiana, as well as microscopic images of butterflies and flowers There is really nothing off limits to inspire me. I take photos or sketch ideas that dance around in my head, she said. I can get totally lost in those planning hours of designing before I even sit down to weave at the loom. Crary is also influenced by painters. She has done tapestries inspired by the unusual colors Vincent Van Gogh put together and she said that much of her work appears similar to pointillism in painting. For more than 4 decades, Crary has been weaving original, one-of-a-kind designs into tapestries, rugs, wall hangings, pillows, scarves and more. Though she was raised in an environment in the Midwest that encouraged sewing and the appreciation of fabric arts, weaving wasnt a part of her childhood. Weaving wasnt an interest until a spinning wheel came into her life. Crary and her husband were collecting antiques prior to moving from Ohio to Baton Rouge, Louisiana where he was a university professor at LSU. In their quest to find primitive pieces, the couple went to estate sales, and at one, found the object that was to change her life. I dont know why my husband bought me this spinning wheel he found, she said. They called it a big wheel or walking wheel. By the time we moved to Louisiana, I thought Id learn to spin. In Louisiana, she joined a spinning guild and before long bought her first loom for weaving. Throughout my life, Ive done all kinds of craftsmostly fiber but when I got to weaving, I knew Id found my place, Crary said. Crary said people tell her that she must be patient to weave. To this, she replies, No, Im really not patient. Ive thought about it and I think it has to be something youre passionate about, she said. You really, really like it or you wouldnt be doing it. I find weaving rewarding. It is slow. It is calming. I get in a zone and lose track of time. It is a meditative thing. When asked how long it takes her to complete a tapestry, Crary said that her woven creations take a long time even though she is a fast weaver. It is almost as slow as watching paint drywell not quite, she joked. I had one piece for an exhibit that was 30 by 30. I must have worked on it every day during the month of October and November and part of December last year. I did keep track of the hours and I havent had the nerve to add them up. Though Crary is self taught, she credits the excellent teachers in classes and workshops and the textile books that focused on color, design and technique for her weaving skills. Her focus is color, texture, movement, and the dimension. Crary conceptualizes before weaving. She often begins with crayon color blending exercises because she says the crayon on paper more closely resembles what happens when different colored yarns crisscross. When the colors appear that will express the idea, mood or emotion Im looking for, the question then is what weaving technique will I choose, she said. One of her favorite steps comes next when she makes piles of different colored yarns to be used. She weaves with many strands of various yarns in multiple and unusual color combinations. After warping the loom, the fun part of the actual weaving begins, she said. Frequently as I weave the piece, it takes over and leads me to places I hadnt planned to go. Sometimes, she dyes the yarn while it is still the in the skein, which gives a variation of color. The inside comes out much lighter than the outside yarn. Occasionally, she uses an embroidery floss because floss is shiny and reflects the light differently. I am a happy and willing student in the what if continuing education school, Crary said, good-naturedly. She can usually be found in her Napa studio, where she has several looms, continuing her weaving education. Her original design rugs are woven using a shaft switching technique with three or four end block designs. Her tapestries and other work are also woven from her original designs. These days, Crary has more time for weaving and is a member of many weaving organizations. For years, her weaving time was split between working in public schools with communicatively-challenged children and raising her two daughters. Crary has been married to her middle-school sweetheart for more than 50 years and the couple now have delightful granddaughters. In addition to her library exhibit this month, her work is also currently being exhibited in San Francisco in the Impact Climate Change Tapestry Weavers West show through March; Yountvilles Contemporary Tapestry at Yountville Community Center through April; and as part of a Handweavers Guild of America show currently touring. Former State Sen. Carlos Uresti's 8,000-square-foot mansion just got a little more affordable. Initially listed at $1.7 million, the asking price has been dropped $200,000 to $1.5 million, according to the listing from Coldwell Banker Global Luxury, part of Coldwell Banker D'Ann Harper, REALTORS. The home was put on the market earlier this summer after Uresti was convicted on 11 felony charges, including wire fraud, securities fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. He was sentenced to 12 years in prison and ordered to pay $6.3 million in restitution to his victims. RELATED: First look: New climbing experience with 'San Antonio flair' coming to downtown A judge on Tuesday ruled Uresti couldn't start collecting his Texas pension yet. Uresti said he needed the pension because he's broke and his lawyer said he's relying on relatives to get by. He also has a divorce pending, though the judge put finalizing it on hold to account for Uresti's assets, and prosecutors are trying to force Uresti to take a portion of his pension in a "partial lump sum payment," which the government would then take a portion of for his victims. The home is situated on a 3-acre lot and is described as a "Tuscan sanctuary" on the listing page. The mansion has six bedrooms, five bathrooms and three and a half bathrooms. The garage holds up to four cars and has an apartment above it. Prospective buyers would also be able to take in the scenic view while enjoy the mansion's in-ground pool and hot tub. The house is located at 15530 Spur Clip in Helotes. Click through the slideshow to see pictures of the mansion. TRENTON, MI An 86-year-old woman who was missing for two weeks before her body was found at a landfill died of hypothermia, authorities said. Irene Kin, of Trenton, was found dead on Sunday, Feb. 16, in a remote, wooded area of Riverview Land Preserve, a landfill in Brownstown Township, FOX 2 Detroit reports. Her vehicle was found at the landfill first due a fire that authorities suspect was due to arson. Kins body was found a distance from the vehicle after crews put out the fire. The fire and death are not believed to be related, police said. Police do not suspect foul play in Kins death; evidence suggests she drove her car to the landfill herself. She had been missing since Feb. 1. The investigation into the vehicle fire is ongoing. READ MORE: Michigan man accused of beating, beheading grandmother in Monroe County home Missing Trenton, Michigan woman, 86, found dead at Riverview Land Preserve Macomb County mother pours urine on daughter with disabilities, charged with felony Highland Park woman finds Ypsilanti man beaten to death, left in running vehicle 2 Baraga County teens found dead in car, another hospitalized Photo credit: NurPhoto - Getty Images From Popular Mechanics The U.S Navy plans to put one of its first hypersonic weapons to sea in eight years, aboard submarines. Hypersonic weapons travel at speeds in excess of 3,800 miles an hour. Hypersonics will be used to strike fleeting, time sensitive targets or kick down the enemy's door in a conventional conflict. The U.S. Navy plans to put its first hypersonic weapons to sea in eight years, stowing them aboard nuclear attack submarines. The Conventional Prompt Strike weapons will be embarked aboard new Virginia-class submarines, giving the Navy a Mach 5+ weapon invulnerable to modern air defenses. The weapon could be used against fleeting targets, such as terrorist meetings, or an enemy headquarters. The U.S. Navy tested the Global Strike weapon in October 2017. Since then, the Navy has decided to fit the weapon in the new Virginia Payload Modules being added to new Virginia-class attack submarines starting in 2019. Each 84 foot long VPM is designed to carry up to 28 Tomahawk cruise missiles, though they are also meant to carry other payloads as well. One of those new payloads is Global Strike. According to USNI News , Global Strike consists of a a Common Hypersonic Glide Body (C-HGB) and a 34.5 inch two-stage booster. This more or less confirms that Global Strike is a boost glide hypersonic weapon. Boost glide hypersonic weapons take off like ballistic missiles but remain in the atmosphere, leveling off and then gliding to their targets at speeds in excess of Mach 5. The unique flight profile of boost glide weapons makes them unstoppable by modern air defenses. Global Strikes extreme speed could take warfare to a whole new level, with a submarine on one side of the world capable of striking a target anywhere on Earth in an hour less. If the U.S. government had credible information that a wanted terrorist was going to be at a certain location at a certain time with little advance notice, Global Strike could hit a target before anything else. Global Strike would also be useful in a major conflict with an adversary, targeting enemy headquarters, radar sites, and missile batteries, weakening the enemys defenses and paving the way for strikes by manned aircraft. Story continues Photo credit: NurPhoto - Getty Images Its unclear exactly how fast Global Strike can actually go, but its fast enough for the Navy to claim it can hit any target on Earth in less than an hour. Thats likely in the Mach 10 to Mach 20 range, or 7,600 to 15,200 miles an hour. The Navy is building 10 Virginia-class submarines with the Virginia Payload Module, thus ensuring at least 10 platforms capable of carrying Global Strike. The service might also install the weapons on the Zumwalt-class destroyers. The destroyers, originally built to bombard targets on land, recently switched missions to the anti-surface role, which includes attacking ships at sea and targets on land. Source: USNI News You Might Also Like MCLEAN, Va., Feb. 20, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Freddie Mac (OTCQB: FMCC) announced that Mark B. Grier has been elected to its Board of Directors effective February 18, 2020. Grier served as Vice Chairman and a Member of the Board of Directors of Prudential Financial, Inc. until his retirement in 2019. Mark Grier brings more than 40 years of finance, risk, and markets experience to Freddie Mac, said Sara Mathew, non-executive chair of Freddie Macs Board of Directors. His deep expertise in capital management will benefit the Board as we guide Freddie Mac through the next chapter of its corporate life. Grier joined Prudential in 1995 as Chief Financial Officer and held several positions before being named to the Office of the Chairman in 2002 and as Vice Chairman in 2007. He oversaw a wide array of functions, including Finance, Risk Management, Chief Investment Office, Corporate Actuarial, Investor Relations, Global Business & Technology Solutions, and Global Marketing and Communications. He also led Global Strategic Initiatives, which oversaw Prudentials international retirement and China strategies. In late 2011, he led the $3 billion initial public offering of Prudential Financial, which was the one of the largest IPOs in history at the time. Grier previously held various positions at Chase Manhattan Corporation and its predecessor from 1978 to 1995, including Executive Vice President, Global Risk Management and Executive Vice President, Co-Head of Global Markets. Grier attended Eastern Illinois University where he received a bachelors degree and a masters degree in economics. He also earned an MBA in finance and corporate accounting from The University of Rochester. He is Chair of Achieve and the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and is a Trustee of Eisenhower Fellow and the Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS). Freddie Mac makes home possible for millions of families and individuals by providing mortgage capital to lenders. Since our creation by Congress in 1970, weve made housing more accessible and affordable for homebuyers and renters in communities nationwide. We are building a better housing finance system for homebuyers, renters, lenders and taxpayers. Learn more at FreddieMac.com , Twitter @FreddieMac and Freddie Macs blog FreddieMac.com/blog . MEDIA CONTACT: Frederick Solomon 703-903-3861 Frederick_Solomon@FreddieMac.com Venezuelas President Nicolas Maduro declared an energy emergency as he announced a commission to revamp state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, redoubling efforts to shore up the nations crumbling oil industry. Economy Vice President Tareck El Aissami will lead the commission, which will focus on boosting crude production, Maduro said. El Aissami, who is already an external director at PDVSA, will be joined by former Energy Minister Asdrubal Chavez as commission vice president, Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino, armed forces Strategic Operational Commander Remigio Ceballos and others. I wont accept more excuses, Maduro said at an event with PDVSA workers broadcast on state television. Either we produce or we produce. Venezuela has to be an oil power. RELATED: Seized oil cargo is latest twist in Venezuela's political fight The intervention, which installs a key Maduro loyalist at the top of the state oil producer, shows the growing urgency to increase output of the countrys primary source of cash. The Maduro regime has previously proposed giving majority shares and control of its oil industry to big international corporations, which would forsake decades of state monopoly. The planned intervention -- which Bloomberg News reported earlier on Wednesday -- comes a day after the U.S. imposed sanctions on the biggest exporter of Venezuelan crude. The decision to target the Geneva-based trading arm of Rosneft PJSC could have a significant effect on shipments of Venezuelan crude to China and India. Maduro said he had investment offers for more than $25 billion in oil production projects and refinery rehabilitations. He did not provide details. FUEL FIX: Now more than ever, you need our energy news in your inbox The oil commission will also include current Energy Minister Manuel Quevedo, Interior Minister Nestor Reverol, Transportation Minister Hipolito Abreu, Science and Technology Minister Gabriela Jimenez, Social Labor Minister Eduardo Pinate. The commission will also include seven oil industry workers, a militia member and a state university president. Maduro said the commission will issue measures to guarantee national energy security and protect the industry from imperialist aggression. While Maduro vowed to increase production to two million barrels a day two years ago, the goal remains far from reach as the countrys economy enters its seventh year of economic decline, plagued by the failure of public utilities and widespread shortages outside the capital. Production fell to 733,000 barrels a day in January, a 36% drop from a year earlier, according to OPEC secondary sources. Rosneft Trading accounted for about half of Venezuelas 874,649 barrels a day of exports in January, according to shipping reports and tracking data compiled by Bloomberg. Its unlikely that other trading companies will step in and take charge of volumes traded by Rosneft, FGE analysts said in a note earlier Wednesday. --With assistance from Lucia Kassai and Alex Vasquez. 2020 Bloomberg L.P. (Photo : Unsplash) When you start up your own business, after you have established a sound little enterprise with frequent customers and orders, you discover that business is not just about doing that one thing that your business is built around. Like every other business, there is this one type of product or service that you provide, it is the primary function of your business and it's what everything else is built around. But it wouldn't be correct to say that it's the single most important thing in your business; no, a business has countless other aspects that are indispensable for its successful operation. There are some critical aspects of a successful enterprise: excellent customer service, good management, a good business plan and constant re-investment back into your business to make it grow and get better. The focus of this article will be how you can improve your customer service and the experience your clients have with you, by using a better invoicing system, the digital invoice; other ways will also be discussed of course. You can get your very own digital invoice template at https://www.freshbooks.com/invoice-templates/word for your auto-repair business and give a huge instant boost to your trade. A digital invoice system is going to prove useful to you in the following ways: Receive the payment for the repairs faster: In the auto-repair market, the payments for services are made after the repairs have been done. This is the custom all over the world for auto-repair and there is a need for a good invoicing system. With a digital invoice system, you will no longer have to worry about getting the invoice to the customer; because you just need to push a button and it will pop up the customer's email or messaging app. This way the inconvenience of paying in parts will be avoided as the customer will know beforehand how much money they need to take with them when going to get their car. It is common that customers walk into the mechanic and realize that their bill is more than they have brought with themselves, and they have to come again with the full payment to get their car. Digital invoicing will also help to speed up the work. It is also very frequent in the repair industry that people often forget about their cars after handing them over to the mechanic; so even after the repairs have been completed the car is kept parked in the mechanic's garage until its owner comes to take it. With digital invoicing this is less likely to happen: when the repair work of a vehicle is completed the digital invoice with all the details of the repairs and the total amount can be sent to the customer and when they receive it on their phones, they are going to come by and take their car on time. On the other hand, if manual invoicing is used it will be upon the customer to come and check if the work has been completed so they can take their car if they don't show up the car would stay at the garage, taking up parking space which creates a problem for the business as there is no space to park the new cars or vehicles that have come in for repairs. Your invoice serves as your advertisement: With a professional digital invoice template, you can customize the invoice just the way you want. Consider this: you have a nice, good looking, professional invoice that has your business name and logo on it and you send it to one of your customers so they can pay you; your invoice sitting in their phone or laptop, or in case they print will be an automatic marketing medium for your repair business. When your customer's friend or family members see your invoice it conveys a very perfect and professional image of your business and will attract them to get their next repairs done from you. Under other conditions, if you use the same old manual invoicing method that is written by hand or typed on a spreadsheet, you are bound to miss that charismatic image that only a good digital invoice can provide. Gives you more time to be an actual mechanic: In small auto-repair businesses that are run by one or two mechanics, it is odd to see the mechanic on the desk with all the invoices and account books around them while they try to figure out the source of an imbalance in the accounts, but it does happen. Frankly, being on a desk and surrounded in account books and invoices is not the natural habitat of the mech, and they also don't like working around figures and sums and would want to go back to their original work. A digital invoicing system will help you avoid getting into this fuss of numbers because you are covered by cloud accounting. You will have more time to focus on the work that you are supposed to do. Apart from adopting the digital invoice system, there are some other steps that you can take to make your workshop grow and be a bigger and better enterprise. In this age of social media, you should engage on social media sites to make the presence of your business felt by the community that lives around. The first big reason why you should engage on social media is that is free to sign up, which means free advertising. It certainly takes effort and social media skills to get adept at it and make it work, but there is also the option of paid advertising options that you can use your boost your posts, target specific audiences that live around the area where the business is present, and have insight on campaign effectiveness. Another reason you should use social media is that it houses immense audience sizes - in the United States alone there are nearly 70 million Twitter users. While you aren't going to need to reach as many people, you can target the specific lot that lives in your city to utilize this golden opportunity. You can also connect with local businesses and have a mutualistic agreement with them. For example, you can make a deal where customers of your auto repair shop can get discounts at a local restaurant, and in return, that local can advertise for you. BUENOS AIRES / ARGENTINA / February 19, 2020 / Central Puerto S.A ("Central Puerto" or the "Company") (CEPU) one of the largest private sector power generation companies in Argentina, as measured by generated power, will issue a press release announcing its 2019 results on March 10, 2020. Mr. Jorge Rauber, Chief Executive Officer, and Mr. Fernando Bonnet, Chief Financial Officer, will host a conference call to discuss the Company's financial results on March 11, 2020 at 12:00 ET. To access the conference call, please dial: United States Participants (Toll Free): +1-888-317-6003 Argentina Participants (Toll Free): 0-800-555-0645 International Participants: +1-412-317-6061 Passcode: 0188551 The Company will also host a live audio webcast of the conference call on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at www.centralpuerto.com. Please allow extra time prior to the call to visit the website and download any streaming media software that might be required to listen to the webcast. The call will be available for replay until March 10, 2021 at +1-412-317-0088 with access code # 10139645 and on the Company website under the Investor Relations section. For further information please contact: Tomas A. Daghlian Investor Relations Officer inversores@centralpuerto.com +54 11 4317-5000 ext. 2192 Av. Tomas Alva Edison 2701 Darsena E - Puerto de Buenos Aires (C1104BAB) Ciudad de Buenos Aires Republica Argentina SOURCE: Central Puerto S.A. View source version on accesswire.com: https://www.accesswire.com/577054/Central-Puerto-Announces-Reporting-Date-for-the-2019-Financial-Results-Conference-Call-and-Webcast live bse live nse live Volume Todays L/H More Here are some stocks that are in the news today: Dairy stocks in focus: Government approved a Rs 4,558-crore scheme to promote the dairy sector which will benefit about 95 lakh farmers Thomas Cook board to consider share buyback on February 26 Kotak Mahindra Bank: The lender said the Reserve Bank has granted its final approval for reducing promoters' stake in the bank to 26 percent. Vodafone Idea: Brickwork Ratings has downgraded the rating on the company's non-convertible debentures, aggregating to Rs 2,500 crore, from 'BWR BBB-' to 'BWR BB-'. Religare Enterprises: Axis Bank sold 29 lakh shares of the company through a bulk deal on NSE on February 19. Jayant Agro-Organics: CRISIL has revised the company's long-term ratings as 'CRISIL BBB+/Negative' and short-term ratings as 'CRISIL A2'. Lumax Auto Technologies: Board of Directors at its meeting held on February 19, 2020, declared Interim Dividend of Rs 2 per equity share. NIIT: The company has declared an interim dividend of 8 per equity share and fixed the record date as March 3, 2020, for the purpose. GMR Infra - Delhi International Airport bond issue oversubscribed by 8 times Asian Paints: Board to consider and approve payment of second interim dividend in February 25 meeting. Fixed record date as March 4, 2020, for the purpose of the second interim dividend. Amtek Auto: The company will release its quarterly earnings on February 20. NIIT approved the proposal of voluntary liquidation as shareholder of NYJL and NIPE Mahanagar Gas - Board meeting on February 26 to consider and approve the declaration of interim dividend Patel Engineering - Preferential issue of Optionally Convertible Preference Shares worth Rs 54 crore Sunteck Realty - Response for Sunteck MaxXWorld at Naigaon continues to remain encouraging with number of units sold reaching a mark of 1800 apartments Tata Communications - HPIL approved allotment and issue of shares to the shareholders of the company in the ratio of 1:1 McLeod Russel - Defaults on loans worth Rs 1,187.09 crore as on December 31, 2019 Gayatri Projects - Defaults on loans from Syndicate Bank worth Rs 0.64 crore Infibeam Avenues expands its digital payments business to USA Gateway Distriparks - Board meeting scheduled on February 20 to consider payment of interim dividend for FY 2019-20 to the shareholders, stands postponed Sterlite Technologies gets new orders worth Rs 1,500 crore Adani in talks with Simplex promoters for equity stake - ET With no trains running on CN Rails in eastern Canada for a week, many farmers are becoming anxious about the potential impact on their livelihoods. It's been nearly two weeks since Tyendinaga Mohawk protesters set up camp along the tracks near Belleville, Ont., in solidarity with Wet'suwet'en opponents of a natural gas pipeline in B.C. Their actions prompted CN Rail to suspend service, and Via Rail to cancel dozens of passenger trains. Keith Currie is president of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) and vice-president of the Canadian Federation of Agriculture. He's also a hay and sweet corn farmer near Collingwood, Ont., whose operation relies on propane. "When it runs out, I don't know what I'm going to do," Currie told CBC's Ottawa Morning. Lars Hagberg/Canadian Press Currie said farmers are now planning for spring and are worried about the supply of fertilizer, which is normally shipped by rail. He said the shutdown will also affect farmers' ability to ship livestock. "There's a lot of moving parts here, and certainly at the core of this is rail transportation," he said. Currie says the OFA acknowledges that "Indigenous Canadians have fundamental issues that we need to deal with, especially in order to reach full reconciliation ... [but] these protests that are paralyzing the country are not helpful in that process. "Canadians are getting upset," he said. "We are humans. We do get emotional. And it certainly is crippling the economy." Ontario Federation of Agriculture Tactics from the farmers' playbook But not all farmers are blaming the protesters. The National Farmers Union (NFU) has come out publicly in support of them. Ayla Fenton runs a small organic vegetable farm near Perth, Ont., and is the Ontario vice-president of the NFU. She recognizes the rail shutdown is hurting some farmers, but told CBC's Ontario Morning "land defenders are also suffering from 500 years of colonization and removal from their land." Story continues Lars Hagberg/Canadian Press In fact, Fenton said, the blockade and similar tactics are from the farmers' own playbook. "Farmers in Canada have a very long history of using non-violent direct action to assert our rights and defend our economic interests." To farmers who are speaking out against protestors, Fenton had this to say: "Other people who are suffering are not your enemy. The anger that exists among farmers about the rail blockades needs to be directed at those with the power to resolve the situation." On that point, Currie and Fenton agree. "The federal government needs to step up here and resolve this as soon as possible," Currie said. "They can debate it in the House all they want. The reality is they need to get on with having discussions with [the protestors] to finally resolve this situation." The sentence that Judge Amy Berman Jackson imposed on Mr. Stone, while lower than the guideline range that the career prosecutors recommended, is not unusual; in 2018, federal judges imposed sentences outside the guidelines in about a quarter of all cases nationwide. As Judge Jackson said in Thursdays hearing, she made this decision based on her own assessment of the relevant facts, and she likely would have imposed a sentence below the guideline range irrespective of Mr. Barrs intervention. This is exactly what the law requires. But an examination of federal sentencing processes and principles makes clear that Mr. Barrs intervention in the Stone case is actually considerably worse than it initially appeared. Some background on federal sentencing: The United States Sentencing Guidelines offer guidance on what kind of penalty a convicted criminal defendant should receive based on the crime and the characteristics of the defendant. The guidelines are nonbinding, and judges are permitted to sentence above or below them. But the guidelines seek to add consistency and fairness to the federal criminal justice system so that similar defendants are treated similarly, and the Justice Department in particular has sought to hew closely to them. In fact, the Trump administration has made clear, in a document colloquially known as the Sessions memo, that it expects prosecutors to consistently push for guidelines sentences. In most cases, the Sessions memo says, recommending a sentence within the advisory guideline range will be appropriate. Recommendations for sentencing departures or variances require supervisory approval, and the reasoning must be documented in the file. Recommending a sentence within the guideline range was precisely what the career prosecutors in the Stone case did. They engaged in an exhaustive analysis of the applicable guidelines, supported by ample evidence and careful argument, and asked for a sentence precisely within the range called for by the guidelines. Thousands of terrorists might have been airlifted out of Kabul: Trump slams Biden Never in history has withdrawal from war been handled so badly: Trump Hectic schedule including India Road Show awaits Donald Trump India oi-Vicky Nanjappa New Delhi, Feb 20: US President Donald Trump will have a packed schedule during his India visit next week. Trump would leave US on Sunday morning and arrive in Germany. Following a one and half hour stop, he would leave for India. At India, both Trump and Prime Minister, Narendra Modi would jointly address the Namaste Trump event at the Motera stadium in Gujarat. During the 22 kilometre drive between the airport and Motera stadium, the two leaders would pass through 28 stages representing the states of the country. This even is called as the India Road Show. Trump in India; Trade deal off, but chopper pact on the table Trump and First Lady, Melania Trump will arrive in Delhi at around 8 pm and they would stay at the Maurya hotel in Chanakyapuri. They would visit the Taj Mahal at Agra. The business end of the visit will be held at the Hyderabad House where delegation level talks will be held between the two leaders. NEWS AT NOON, FEBRUARY 20th, 2020 Trump will also take part in private events at the US embassy. There would also be a roundtable with industry representatives. Trump and Melania would also call on President Ram Nath Kovind and take part in a state banquet. ANTIOCH (BCN) The Contra Costa County coroner's office confirmed the identity Wednesday of a woman who died Sunday in a solo-vehicle crash on James Donlon Boulevard in Antioch. Antioch resident Mia Coloma, 18, was pronounced dead at the scene after being ejected from the vehicle when it crashed on James Donlon near Hummingbird Drive. The vehicle's two other passengers, a 19-year-old man and a 20-year-old man, were taken to a hospital after being removed from the car by Contra Costa County firefighters. Antioch police described the pair's injuries Sunday as "major but not life-threatening." Antioch police said excessive speed is believed to have played a role in the crash. Copyright 2020 by Bay City News, Inc. Republication, Rebroadcast or any other Reuse without the express written consent of Bay City News, Inc. is prohibited. The coronavirus outbreak will have a limited impact on India but the global GDP and trade will definitely get affected due to the large size of the Chinese economy, RBI Governor Shaktikanta Das has said. Only a couple of sectors in India are likely to see some disruptions but alternatives are being explored to overcome those issues, he said. The deadly virus has brought a large part of the world's second-largest economy China to a standstill and its impact has been felt across industries. India's pharmaceutical and electronic manufacturing sectors are dependent on China for inputs and they may be impacted, Das told PTI in an interview here. "It is definitely an issue which needs to be closely monitored by every policymaker whether in India or any other country. Every policymaker, every monetary authority needs to keep a very close watch. So coronavirus issue needs to be closely watched," he said. A similar problem, perhaps on a lower scale, occurred last time during the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in 2003, he said adding that the Chinese economy had slowed down by about 1 per cent during that time. At the time of SARS outbreak, China was the sixth-largest economy and accounted for only 4.2 per cent of the world's GDP. While, the Asian giant is now the world's second-largest economy, accounting for 16.3 per cent of the global GDP, therefore, any slowdown in the Chinese economy would impact the global economy. The RBI governor said that the coronavirus outbreak appears to be larger than SARS and this time China's share in world GDP and world trade is much higher. "So, the coronavirus will definitely have an impact on the global GDP and global trade," he said adding that every major economy today will have to be very careful and must monitor the situation closely. For India, China is an important trading partner and policymakers both in the government and the monetary authority "are very watchful of the developments that are taking place," he said. If the Chinese authorities are able to contain the problem, the impact on the global economy and on India will be minimised, Das said. On the impact on India, he said the pharmaceutical sector is sourcing raw materials from China. "Most of the large pharma companies, according to information that we have, always keep stock for three-four months. So, therefore, they should be able to manage and also those provinces from where these pharma intermediates are sourced have not been impacted by the virus outbreak. Therefore, there is an expectation that the supply of pharma raw materials will be maintained," he said. The other areas where India is dependent on China is mobile handsets, TV sets and certain other electronic products. "There again it is important that our manufacturers are able to develop alternative places of sourcing these raw materials." "So, I think there is evidence that already our manufacturers are discussing with other countries in the Asian region. So, if they are able to quickly access raw materials from these other countries, then to that extent the problem on our manufacturing will be contained," he said. He noted that the critical thing to be watched and monitored now is how quickly Chinese authorities are able to contain the problem. For India, he said, the important aspect is manufacturer should be able to quickly develop alternative sources. India exports iron ore to China and it could be impacted, he said. "But in economics, something negative in one place always works positive elsewhere. So if your iron ore exports are impacted, then perhaps the raw material supply to our local domestic steel manufacturers will be at reduced costs. So their cost of production may go down." Das said Coronavirus is a big human tragedy and the focus has to be on containing this menace. China's GDP has risen dramatically since SARS outbreak in 2003. In 2002, China contributed 23 per cent to the world GDP growth, in 2019 China contributed an estimated 38 per cent of world growth. The 11 Chinese provinces have announced an extended holiday period. Meanwhile, the death toll from the coronavirus epidemic in China crossed the 2,000-mark on Wednesday with the death of 136 more people, while the overall confirmed cases climbed to 74,185, authorities said. Written by ACM *Strasbourg/Angelo Marcopolo/- As EU renews its Monitoring of Libya Arms Embargo in the Mediterranean Sea, (Mission "Sophia"=Wisdom), after LNA hit a Turkish Arms Smuggling area at Tripoli SeaPort, GNA suspended Peace Talks, droped UN Geneva meetings, claimed cease-fire violation, asked "Sanctions" against the Opposition, (etc)... But its Cronies were unable to do more than merely Deny that a Turkish Ship was still there "When" that Strike took place ; Claim that a ship would be "not technically Turkish" if this was covered under a "Flag of Seychelles registered Company"; and/or if another ship used an "Albanian Flag", but "Sailed from Mersin, Turkey on Feb.9 & arrived Tripoli in Feb.15" ; while, at any case, they didN't even dare Deny the notorious Fact that, Earlier, it was Not 1 but ...5 Turkish Military Frigates which had escorted at Tripoli SeaPort Cargos with Heavy Weapons, including Armoured Vehicles and "Hawk" Anti-AirCraft systems, (as Denounced even by UNO's Libya Envoy Salame), added to UnPopular and Dangerous armed Gangs of Islamist Terrorists deployed by Turkey from Syria's Idlib "by Thousands", (See: ..., etc). => Such "UnScrupulous Actors" (according to UNO's Ghassan Salame, recently), as those UnElected guys from the so-called "Government of National Accord" ("GNA"), that some inside UNO curiously persist to "recognize", Despite the Fact that they doN't even gather Any "Accord" at all in Libya, where they doN't control, no more, not even 1/3 of the Country, while, on the Contrary, the "National Libyan Army" is Supported by Libya's only Internationaly Recognized and Elected Parliament : that of Tobruk, where it was obliged to find Refuge, since the 2015 Violent Clashes with Islamist Militia in Tripoli, Backs General Haftar, who already controls the Biggest Part of the Country, and Nowadays just met with USA, EU and Russia Top Officials. Curiously, Turkey criticized EU's decision on Air/Sea Monitoring of Arms Embargo on Libya, but, on the Contrary, ...praised Tripoli's GNA's decision to Suspend UN Geneva Peace Talks ! ----------------------------------- + Meanwhile, the GNA's decision to Suspend UN-sponsored Peace Talks at Geneva, surprizingly Coincided wth the official Presentation of the "Conditions" raised by Libyan Tribal Leaders, (Allies of NLA's General Haftar), in order to UnBlock the Oil Pipelines heading Westwards, towards Tripoli's GNA, that they had, recently, Stoped flowing, in order to Oblige it to Hear their Demands : A move which had provoked a row, with the GNA claiming that it Threatened seriously Libya's Economy, while Refusing, however, to Negotiate with the East... Now, those Conditions were Received at Geneva by UNO's Libya Envoy Salame, who reportedly said that the were of "quite General" nature, and would be treated in the Context of the Economic aspects of the Libyan Issue. According to "Reuters", they are related with "overcoming Economic Divisions". Previously, a National Parliament's Spokesperson, had pointed towards "a Fair Distribution of Wealth". But Nothing concrete was revealed Today, while Tripoli's GNA did Not Comment on the substance of that Socio-Economic Differend. However, Libya's Tribes' Leaders, gathered at a 2 Day's long meeting in Tarhouna (near Tripoli), reportedly Warned that this Problem would "Escalate", if there is still "No Reply" to their reiterated requests. +Meanwhile, Tripoli's Matiga Airport had earlier suspended Flights again, after clashes, and Oil Tankers were nowadays reportedly withdrawn from Tripoli's SeaPort, after the latest incident (Comp. supra). (../..) ("Draft-News") Thailand's government is scrambling to cope with new travel restrictions after Israel banned the citizens of Thailand and three other Asian countries and territories from entering over concerns about a new virus. Israel on Monday announced it was refusing entry to all foreign nationals who travelled to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macau during the past 14 days. Israeli citizens and residents will be isolated at home for 14 days after their return from areas at risk. Israel has so far confirmed no cases of COVID-19 infections inside the country. Thai Foreign Ministry Deputy Spokesman Natapanu Nopakun said the country's ambassador n Tel Aviv had asked Israel to review its decision to ban Thais. "We believe that Israel will reconsider the decision as Thailand isn't the only country affected from the announcement," he told The Associated Press. Israel had already in late January imposed a similar ban on foreign nationals entering from China. The latest ban could inconvenience business travellers from Singapore, which like Israel is a major hub for high-tech projects. The consequences for Thailand could be more substantial. About 25,000 Thai workers are employed in Israel, mostly in the agricultural sector. In many cases they are the main breadwinners for their families in Thailand's economically disadvantaged northeast. Separately, the Consular Affairs Department of Thailand's Foreign Ministry urged Thais "who don't have a need to live in China to consider travelling out of China while airlines still operate, and to refrain from travelling to China if it isn't necessary at the moment." The statement didn't apply to Hong Kong. The ministry said it was a normal travel advisory and did not amount to any order or instruction. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police finally get their man after 13 years THAILAND: A former municipal councillor sentenced to death in absentia for the murder of a wealthy Dutchman, in collusion with the victims wife and brother, has been arrested in Phrae province after 13 years on the run. crimedeathhomicidemurderviolence By Bangkok Post Thursday 20 February 2020, 09:13AM Anupong Suthani, 54, centre, fields reporters questions outside Pattaya Provincial Court in 2003. In 2007, the court sentenced him to death in absentia for the 2003 murder of Jules Odekerken. Photo: CSD Crime Suppression Division police arrested Anupong Suthani, 54, in tambon Wang Thong of Muang district of the northern province on Tuesday (Feb 18), CSD commander Pol Maj Gen Jirabhob Bhuridej said yesterday (Feb 19). Anupong was wanted on an arrest warrant issued by the Pattaya provincial court on Dec 21, 2007 for colluding in murder in 2003. Anupong, a former Lang Suan municipal councillor in Chumphon, had been hired to build a house for Jules Odekerken, 49, from Holland, the owner of Quick News Pattaya and another foreign newspaper sold in Pattaya and Phuket. The Dutchman had married Marisa Prommana, 37, a Thai woman living in Pattaya city, Chon Buri. The couple had one daughter. Anupong had become romantically involved with Marisa and learned that her husband had life insurance and other assets worth more than B100 million. The suspect then conspired with the victims wife and her elder brother Seksan Prommana to kill the man and hopefully inherit his estate, Pol Maj Gen Jirabhop said. On Nov 16, 2003, Anupong and Seksan had caught Oderken alone in Pattaya and beaten him senseless with wooden batons. They thought he was dead and tied a rope around his neck and dragged his body to a vehicle. On the way, the victim regained consciousness, struggled and shouted for help. So the two men beat him repeatedly on the head with rocks until he was dead, Pol Maj Gen Jirabhob said. They later left his body at a garbage dump at Soi Green Way, Muang district of Chon Buri, where it was later discovered and police informed All three people involved in the murder were arrested. Marisa and Seksan confessed and were given life imprisonment. Anupong denied any involvement in the murder and was released on bail. On Dec 21, 2007, Anupong was due in court for a ruling in the case. He failed to show up. He was sentenced to death in absentia and a bench warrant issued for his arrest. Pol Col Nethi Wongkularb, who led the CSD arrest team, said Anupong had hidden out in several provinces and changed his first and last names. He had asked someone to be his representative in buying some property in Phrae province, where he had been living for more than 10 years before his arrest. During police interrogation, Anupong confessed to the murder charge and expressed remorse for what he had done. He was handed over to Pattaya court, Pol Col Nethi said. Thermal coal has become a byword for the resource industry's climate crimes. From BlackRock down, fund managers are reluctant to touch a mineral that releases more carbon dioxide than any other energy source. Large miners, from BHP Group to Anglo American, are trying to dump it. Coal is also - for now at least - profitable. It's the unpalatable truth that explains why Glencore, the world's largest exporter of the black stuff, sticks with a dying fuel. Morals aside, the details suggest Chief Executive Officer Ivan Glasenberg and his team may well be right. Coal is dirty but profitable for Glencore's billionaire CEO Ivan Glasenberg. Credit:Chris Ratcliffe Tuesday's full-year earnings from the trader and miner bore more than a few smudges. Lower prices for commodities like copper and cobalt took a heavy toll. Coal didn't help, with the price of benchmark Newcastle coal down by over a third in 2019. Colombia, where Glencore's reserves will run out in the next decade or so, accounted for nearly $US1 billion ($1.5 billion) of a $US2.8 billion impairment that dragged the company to its first net loss since 2015. [February 20, 2020] CENIC Honors David Reese for a Lifetime of Creating and Developing Research and Education Networks in California, the US, and Abroad In recognition of his work as a pioneer, enabler, and leader in the research and education community, David Reese is being recognized posthumously with CENIC's 2020 Christine Haska Distinguished Service Award, which honors individuals who have provided extraordinary leadership and service to the CENIC community. Prior to his passing last fall, Reese held the position of Vice President for Regional and International Initiatives at CENIC. He had worked with CENIC since it began in 1996. In his remarkable career spanning more than three decades, he helped propel innumerable important networking projects at the regional, national, and international scale. His knowledge and understanding of how to define and run research and education networks served as a guiding light for many networks around the United States and the world. Before CENIC, Reese led the creation of the California State University system's network in the early days of the Internet. He was one of the original creators of the shared backbone network (CSUnet) used by all CSU campuses. In addition, Reese was key in bringing broadband network connections to K-12 schools in California, and he played a major role in bringing the California Community Colleges system onto the network. Reese was also integral to enabling commercial peering on a global scale and defining international exchange capabilities. An inimitable contributor to the research and education community, Reese created a legacy that will last a long time. He had an unparalleled ability to envision te possibilities and understand the actual opportunities for community-owned fiber-optic infrastructure, and millions of people in California and beyond are better off for his work. But Reese was not only a brilliant and imaginative engineer with an astounding depth and breadth of knowledge on networks. Perhaps most importantly, he was also known for his generosity, his respect for others, and his warm and dynamic personality. "Dave Reese contributed significantly in the development and advancement of regional, national, and international networks in support of education and research," said CENIC President and CEO Louis Fox. "As we go forward with our commitment and passion for the work that we do, he will be remembered for his contributions and will remain an inspiration in the years ahead." The CENIC Innovations in Networking Awards are presented each year at CENIC's annual conference to highlight exemplary people, projects, and organizations that leverage high-bandwidth networking. The CENIC conference will be held March 16 - 18, 2020, in Monterey, California. Learn more and register to attend. CENIC Christine Haska Distinguished Service Award Established in 2018, the CENIC Christine Haska Distinguished Service Award honors individuals who have provided extraordinary leadership and service to the CENIC community and its partners. The award is named in honor of Dr. Christine Haska (1951-2017), a treasured member of the CENIC community with an exuberant personality, boundless energy, and wide-ranging interests. She brought foresight, grace, and an innovative spirit to all her work, and remains an inspiration to colleagues working in research and education institutions across the nation. Haska had a long career in higher education and in 2002 joined the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterey, Calif., where she served as vice president of information resources and chief information officer. She played a vital role in establishing both NPS and the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center as CENIC members. Retiring from NPS in 2013, Haska went on to successfully lead an initiative to connect the major health care institutions in Monterey to the CENIC network. About CENIC | www.cenic.org CENIC connects California to the world - advancing education and research statewide by providing the world-class network essential for innovation, collaboration, and economic growth. This nonprofit organization operates the California Research and Education Network (CalREN), a high-capacity network designed to meet the unique requirements of over 20 million users, including the vast majority of K-20 students together with educators, researchers, and individuals at other vital public-serving institutions. CENIC's Charter Associates are part of the world's largest education system; they include the California K-12 system, California Community Colleges, the California State University system, California's public libraries, the University of California system, Stanford, Caltech, USC, and the Naval Postgraduate School. CENIC also provides connectivity to leading-edge institutions and industry research organizations around the world, serving the public as a catalyst for a vibrant California. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005767/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] Windrose airline during the period of summer navigation schedule will launch flights to Ljubljana (Slovenia), Zagreb (Croatia), Berlin (Germany) and Burgas (Bulgaria), the airline's press service has said. The period of servicing flights to Ljubljana is from April 30 to October 22. Flights will be operated from Kyiv (Boryspil Airport) by Embraer-145 aircraft on Thursdays and Sundays. The cost of a one-way ticket with baggage starts from UAH 2,700. The period of servicing flights to Zagreb is from June 2 to October 24. Flights will be operated from Kyiv (Boryspil Airport) by Embraer-145 aircraft on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The cost of a one-way ticket with baggage starts from UAH 2,700. The period of servicing flights to Berlin is from June 1 to October 24. Flights will be operated from Dnipro by Embraer-145 aircraft on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The cost of a one-way ticket with baggage starts from UAH 2,700. The period of servicing flights to Burgas is from June 7 to September 13. Flights will be operated from Dnipro by Embraer-145 aircraft on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. The cost of a one-way ticket with baggage starts from UAH 3,000. Mission San Jose, San Antonios renowned Queen of Missions, is celebrating the tricentennial of its founding with recreational and cultural events throughout 2020, seeking to share its rich heritage with even more people. The congregation at the heavily visited Spanish colonial mission gathered for a spirited special Mass on Wednesday night led by Archbishop Gustavo Garcia-Siller in observance of the 300th anniversary of the missions founding in 1720. There was singing and dancing, with numerous local groups participating. The parish, still active with about 400 members, wants to carry that energy forward with events each month through the rest of the year. Its very important for us to celebrate 300 years of living faith in San Antonio, said Father Rogelio Martinez, pastor at Mission San Jose and Mission San Juan. This is a joyful moment for the San Antonio community, Martinez said. It is a great community. We are one family. Everyone is welcome. On ExpressNews.com: San Antonios 300th birthday unfolding Upcoming events include the Viva Poesia festival in Mission Marquee Plaza just north of the mission April 4; MissionFest, the parishs big Fiesta fundraiser, on the mission grounds April 26; and Movie Night in the Marquee Plaza on May 16. Other events, including a living history day, festivals, bike rides, a fun run and a performance by the San Antonio Symphony are planned later in the year. Visit www.msj300.org to learn more. San Jose is perhaps the most well-known of the four historic missions of the federally run San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, which draws up to 1.5 million visitors annually. The tricentennial provides an opportunity to spotlight the parish, which provides cleaning, utilities and other services that keep the church open to the public without any financial support from the National Park Service. A lot of parishes are continually strapped for cash. So if people can just donate $1 when they come in, that would be awesome, said Brother Kevin Lenihan, parish administrator at San Jose. The founding on San Pedro Creek of the original site of Mission San Antonio de Valero on May 1, 1718, followed by the founding of a nearby presidio, has been recognized as the origin of the Spanish village that became San Antonio. But the founding of Mission San Jose y San Miguel de Aguayo on the San Antonio River on Feb. 23, 1720, was critical in establishing a chain of missionary-led Native American communities along the river. On ExpressNews.com: City seeks to protect views of Mission San Jose The 2015 inscription of the missions as the only UNESCO World Heritage Site in Texas acknowledged the history and architectural beauty of missions, as well as a human connection between the indigenous people who lived there and their descendants still worshiping in mission parishes today. San Jose was originally composed of jacales and adobe structures near the river, in an area where Mission Concepcion would later be established in the 1730s, relocating from East Texas. San Jose moved to a second site between 1724 and 1727, then finally located about 2 miles downstream from its original site after an epidemic about 1740. In San Antonio: The Story of an Enchanted City, the late historian Frank W. Jennings noted that San Jose is the only San Antonio mission not established by Franciscans from Queretaro, a state in central Mexico. Its founding priest, Father Antonio Margil de Jesus, was a Franciscan from the College of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Zacatecas, located in another Mexican state south of Queretaro. Margil had earlier spent 30 years organizing missions in Yucatan, Costa Rica and Guatemala. His extraordinary achievements among the Indians, and stories of an unusual spirituality, of humbleness, of long journeys always on foot, and of purported miracles resulted in 1771 in his being placed under consideration by the Vatican for sainthood, Jennings wrote. According to the park services website, the missions imposing complex of stone walls, bastions, granary and magnificent church was completed by 1782. At its peak, the mission held about 350 Native American people who cultivated farmlands and raised livestock. On ExpressNews.com: Legends surround missions Rose Window The mission was partly secularized in 1792 and was closed as a mission by the 1820s. It later fell into disrepair, and portions of the church collapsed. The local Conservation Society launched an effort in the 1920s and 30s to restore the mission, using labor from the federal Works Progress Administration. The 1930s reconstruction of Mission San Jose began a movement to preserve the San Antonio missions as historic sites. The missions began operating as a federal park in 1983. One of the most widely recognized images at San Jose is the Rose Window outside the church sacristy. A persistent, oft-told romantic tale is that Pedro Huizar, a surveyor and craftsman of the late mission era, sculpted the window from locally quarried limestone while pining over a fiancee named Rosa who was lost at sea. A 2016 scholarly report suggests that Huizar likely carved it, possibly with the help of a builder named Antonio Salazar. But various legends that Huizar created it in memory of lost love have not been proved and have been dismissed as romanticized fabrications of travel writers of the late 1800s and early 1900s. 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 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. By Express News Service PALAKKAD: Nineteen people lost their lives after a collision between Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) Volvo bus heading to Ernakulam from Bengaluru and a container truck in Avinashi town of Tamil Nadu's Tirupur district on Thursday morning. Earlier it was reported that 15 men, including the driver and conductor of the inter-state bus, and 5 men died, while another 23 were injured in the incident that happened around 3:00 AM. The condition of some of the injured was reported to be serious. However, the death toll has increased to 21 at 11.30 AM. on Thursday. CLICK HERE TO READ PHOTO STORY The deceased who were identified so far are Thrissur natives Vinod (45), Christo Cherikkekaran (25), Nibin Baby and Rahim, (all from Thrissur), and Palakkad natives Sona Sunny, Krish (29), Jordan (35), Kiran Kumar (33), Igni Raphael (39) and Roselli (61). The bus driver and conductor have been identified as TD Gireesh and Baiju. Preliminary information was that the tyres of the container lorry burst and it lost control. The lorry then hit the divider and onward to the KSRTC bus. The Ernakulam-registered container was loaded with tiles. Police are searching for the absconding driver of the truck. The passengers, who were all from Kerala, were in deep slumber when the mishap occurred. Around 12 seats of the KSRTC bus were completely mangled in the incident. Kerala Transport Minister AK Saseendran said there were 48 passengers on the bus and most of them had booked their tickets to Palakkad and Ernakulam. Police and local residents rushed to the spot and shifted the injured to Avinashi, Tiruppur and Coimbatore government hospitals. They have been admitted to the Coimbatore government hospital and other hospitals in Avinashi. The RS 784 KSRTC Volvo was expected to reach Kochi at 7:00 AM in the morning. The bus had gone to Bengaluru from Ernakulam on Monday. Since there were no enough passengers for the return trip, the bus which was to leave on Tuesday evening left a day later on Wednesday evening. The KSRTC officials from the Palakkad depot have reached the spot. If you own shares in Rite Aid Corporation (NYSE:RAD) then it's worth thinking about how it contributes to the volatility of your portfolio, overall. In finance, Beta is a measure of volatility. Volatility is considered to be a measure of risk in modern finance theory. Investors may think of volatility as falling into two main categories. The first type is company specific volatility. Investors use diversification across uncorrelated stocks to reduce this kind of price volatility across the portfolio. The second sort is caused by the natural volatility of markets, overall. For example, certain macroeconomic events will impact (virtually) all stocks on the market. Some stocks mimic the volatility of the market quite closely, while others demonstrate muted, exagerrated or uncorrelated price movements. Beta can be a useful tool to understand how much a stock is influenced by market risk (volatility). However, Warren Buffett said 'volatility is far from synonymous with risk' in his 2014 letter to investors. So, while useful, beta is not the only metric to consider. To use beta as an investor, you must first understand that the overall market has a beta of one. A stock with a beta below one is either less volatile than the market, or more volatile but not corellated with the overall market. In comparison a stock with a beta of over one tends to be move in a similar direction to the market in the long term, but with greater changes in price. View our latest analysis for Rite Aid What we can learn from RAD's beta value Zooming in on Rite Aid, we see it has a five year beta of 1.92. This is above 1, so historically its share price has been influenced by the broader volatility of the stock market. If this beta value holds true in the future, Rite Aid shares are likely to rise more than the market when the market is going up, but fall faster when the market is going down. Beta is worth considering, but it's also important to consider whether Rite Aid is growing earnings and revenue. You can take a look for yourself, below. Story continues NYSE:RAD Income Statement, February 20th 2020 How does RAD's size impact its beta? With a market capitalisation of US$784m, Rite Aid is a small cap stock. However, it is big enough to catch the attention of professional investors. It's not particularly surprising that it has a higher beta than the overall market. That's because it takes less money to influence the share price of a smaller company, than a bigger company. What this means for you: Beta only tells us that the Rite Aid share price is sensitive to broader market movements. This could indicate that it is a high growth company, or is heavily influenced by sentiment because it is speculative. Alternatively, it could have operating leverage in its business model. Ultimately, beta is an interesting metric, but there's plenty more to learn. In order to fully understand whether RAD is a good investment for you, we also need to consider important company-specific fundamentals such as Rite Aids financial health and performance track record. I urge you to continue your research by taking a look at the following: Future Outlook: What are well-informed industry analysts predicting for RADs future growth? Take a look at our free research report of analyst consensus for RADs outlook. Past Track Record: Has RAD been consistently performing well irrespective of the ups and downs in the market? Go into more detail in the past performance analysis and take a look at the free visual representations of RAD's historicals for more clarity. Other Interesting Stocks: It's worth checking to see how RAD measures up against other companies on valuation. You could start with this free list of prospective options. 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. 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. Thank you for reading. Effect of a Statewide Media Campaign on Smoking Cessation Among Florida Adults Jennifer C. Duke, PhD1; Robyn Woodlea, MA1; Kristin Y. Arnold, MSPH1; Anna J. MacMonegle, MA1; James M. Nonnemaker, PhD1; Lauren Porter, PhD2 (View author affiliations) Suggested citation for this article: Duke JC, Woodlea R, Arnold KY, MacMonegle AJ, Nonnemaker JM, Porter L. Effect of a Statewide Media Campaign on Smoking Cessation Among Florida Adults. Prev Chronic Dis 2020;17:190271. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5888/pcd17.190271external icon. PEER REVIEWED Summary What is already known about this topic? Statewide media campaigns are an evidence-based component of comprehensive tobacco control programs. However, because of budget limitations, few state tobacco control programs can devote resources to both create and consistently air media campaigns. What is added by this report? From 2011 through 2018, the Bureau of Tobacco Free Florida aired hard-hitting advertisements from successful national and state campaigns as part of their Tobacco Free Florida campaign. The study found that exposure to the Tobacco Free Florida campaign influenced the rate of quit attempts among adult smokers in Florida. What are the implications for public health practice? Statewide media campaigns can use existing effective advertising materials to affect population-level quit attempts. Abstract Introduction Since December 2010, Floridas Bureau of Tobacco Free Florida has aired a statewide tobacco education campaign to encourage smoking cessation. The Tobacco Free Florida campaign consists of evidence-based advertisements primarily characterized by strong emotional content and graphic imagery designed to increase awareness of the health risks of tobacco use. We evaluated the effect of the media campaign on population-level quit attempts by using a statewide representative sample of Florida adults aged 18 or older. Methods We examined data from 5,418 Florida adult cigarette smokers and recent quitters aged 18 or older from the Florida Adult Tobacco Survey, an annual, cross-sectional survey conducted from 2011 through 2018. The primary outcome was incidence of quit attempts in the previous 12 months. We used multivariable logistic regression models to estimate the odds of making a quit attempt as a function of advertising levels across state media markets. Rates of quit attempts in Florida were also estimated. Results Approximately 66% of smokers in the study made at least 1 quit attempt. Exposure to the campaign was associated with increased odds of a quit attempt in the previous 12 months (odds ratio = 1.25; P = .02) among smokers and recent quitters. The Tobacco Free Florida campaign was associated with an estimated 332,604 additional smokers making quit attempts per year during the study period. Conclusion The Tobacco Free Florida campaign affected cessation-related behaviors in Florida over an 8-year period. Evidence-based state tobacco education campaigns can accelerate progress toward the goal of reducing adult smoking. Top Introduction Research shows that mass media campaigns can effectively encourage smoking cessation and contribute to reductions in smoking prevalence among adults aged 18 or older (14). An international review of evidence from 121 anti-tobacco mass media campaigns showed strong evidence of positive behavioral effects (5). However, increases in population-level quit attempts have been shown to fade shortly after a campaign ends (1). A national tobacco education campaign for adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions (CDCs) Tips From Former Smokers (Tips), has aired intermittently since 2012. However, few states have maintained robust paid media campaigns in recent years because of funding constraints (6). As a result of a ballot initiative, the Florida Constitution was amended in 2007 to allocate funds to a comprehensive statewide tobacco education program. The Florida Department of Health Bureau of Tobacco Free Florida is one of the largest statewide tobacco control programs in the United States. The programs goal is to protect people from the health hazards of using tobacco by discouraging its use. From 2011 through 2018, the bureau invested approximately $160 million in paid advertising to educate residents about the health risks of tobacco use and the dangers of secondhand smoke exposure. The Tobacco Free Florida media campaign (TFF) primarily used advertisements with highly emotional or graphic content; such content is more likely to be attended to and perceived as effective than less hard-hitting content (79). Empirical studies indicate that highly emotional advertisements or those that include graphic imagery are effective in promoting cessation, whereas other types are not as effective (1012). The extent to which Floridas statewide campaign affects behavior change at the population level is a crucial question for both state and federal agencies given their limited resources and the high cost of airing televised mass media campaigns. Our study examined the association between exposure to the states anti-tobacco television advertisements and quit attempts among smokers and recent quitters over an 8-year period. Top Methods Data source The Florida Adult Tobacco Survey (13) is an annual cross-sectional survey that assesses tobacco use and behavior among adults aged 18 or older in Florida. The survey uses a random digit dialing method for selecting a new group of participants each year from a landline telephone sample. In 2013, the sampling criteria expanded to include cellular telephone users. The TFF campaign launched in late 2010, and we examined data collected from March 2011 through September 2018 for our study. Of the 48,538 participants from these years, 7,330 current smokers and recent quitters provided information on quit attempts made in the past year and a valid zip code or county of residence. The analysis sample of 5,418 people consisted of participants with complete demographic and smoking-related data used in the analytic models. Response rates were available from 2013 through 2018 and were as follows: 10.7% for 2013, 9.1% for 2014, 8.8% for 2015, 7.8% for 2016, 8.7% for 2017, and 6.5% for 2018 (14). To produce reliable estimates of the population parameters, we used analysis weights that accounted for unequal probabilities of selection and adjusted for nonresponse. Five sampling distributions were also used to calculate weights that resulted in annual samples representative of the Florida adult population: age, sex, race/ethnicity, educational attainment, and telephone category (cellular telephone, landline, or both). TFF ran paid advertising on television, radio, the internet, and other outlets from December 2010 through September 2018 to educate Floridians. TFF advertisements contained strong emotional content and graphic imagery designed to increase awareness of the health risks of tobacco use and dangers of secondhand smoke, with the expressed goal of increasing smokers interest in quitting. A small number of motivational advertisements complemented these messages by aiming to increase smokers self-efficacy to quit and their knowledge of effective cessation practices and services (Table 1). Measures The independent variable of interest in the statistical model was exposure to TFF television advertisements. We measured exposure by using target rating points (TRPs), which are the standard unit of measurement for media delivery (4). TRPs are the product of 2 measures: the percentage of a target population potentially exposed to advertisements (reach) and the average number of times advertisements are aired (frequency) over a time period. For example, if 50% of the target population was exposed to 2 advertisements during a week, then the weekly TRPs value is 100. Because TRPs measure potential exposure rather than actual exposure, they offer the advantage of being exogenous to the respondent and therefore not susceptible to the bias inherent in self-reported measures of exposure. We used weekly TRPs for each of Floridas 10 designated marketing areas (DMAs) for the target audience of adults aged 18 to 54 to create a past-year cumulative TRPs measure. For each respondent, the TRPs value was the sum of weekly TRPs specific to their DMA of residence for the 52 weeks before their survey date. Past-year TRPs for respondents in the analysis sample ranged from 1,233 to 8,477 TRPs, with an unweighted average of 3,887 TRPs and a weighted average of 4,190 TRPs. Quit attempts, which mark progress in achieving successful tobacco cessation, are the standard outcome measure of effectiveness for anti-tobacco mass media campaigns. The outcome variable was whether a respondent made a quit attempt during the past year: During the past 12 months, have you stopped smoking for one day or longer because you were trying to quit smoking? Interviewers asked this question only if a person reported 1) smoking at least 100 cigarettes in their life and 2) smoking cigarettes some days or every day at the time of the survey. We included recent quitters, defined as former cigarette smokers who successfully stopped smoking in the past year, in the group of respondents who made a quit attempt in the past year. Demographic and smoking-related variables included indicators for 4 age categories (age 1824 was used as the reference); an indicator for male (female was the reference category); indicators for non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, and other non-Hispanic race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic white was the reference category); employment (employed for wages/self-employed versus neither); indicators for 4 educational attainment categories (less than completion of high school was the reference category); the presence of a youth under the age of 18 in the household; and the heaviness of smoking index (HSI). HSI incorporates responses to 2 questions: On average, on days when you smoked during the past 30 days, about how many cigarettes did you smoke a day? and On the days that you smoke, how soon after you wake up do you have your first cigarette? Each item response had a value between 0 and 3, producing an HSI ranging from 0 to 6. A higher HSI reflects greater nicotine dependence (ie, more cigarettes smoked and smoking soon after waking). We also used 2 media-related variables to control for time spent watching television and exposure to the CDCs national Tips advertisements, which intermittently ran concurrent to TFF campaign advertisements. The wording of the item assessing time spent watching television changed twice over the years analyzed. From 2011 through 2015 it read Please think back to the last 7 days. On average, how many hours per day did you watch television? In 2016, the item changed to: Think about how much you watched television yesterday. About how much time did you spend watching television shows or movies on any platform including a television set, a computer, a laptop, a tablet, a smartphone, or an iPod or MP3 player? In 2017, the item changed to: About how much time did you spend watching television shows or movies yesterday? Include time spent watching on a television, computer, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. We created a dichotomous measure based on the median split of responses. We measured potential exposure to Tips advertisements for each respondent by summing Tips TRPs in the DMA of residence for 1 year before the respondents survey date. Statistical analysis We used a multivariable logistic regression model to examine the likelihood of making a quit attempt in the past year as a function of past-year TFF campaign TRPs. We divided past-year TRPs by 2,000 to yield estimated odds ratios for the changes in the likelihood of a smoker making a quit attempt in the past year, given a unit increase of 2,000 total TRPs in a media market. Scaling TRPs in this way is a common practice to aid in the interpretation of results when advertisement exposure is the independent variable of interest (10,15). As in other media studies (2), the model included demographic, smoking-related, and media-related control variables known to influence quit attempts. In addition, we included an indicator for the DMA in which respondents resided and a linear yearly time trend. At least 2 potential confounders used in other media studies were unavailable in the survey: diagnosis of chronic health conditions and diagnosis of mental health conditions (16). As in other assessments of the effect of smoking cessation media campaigns on quit attempts, we included numerous additional variables in the multivariable logistic regression model (2,10,17). Three variables presence of another smoker in the home, having rules about smoking in the home, and income were not significantly associated with quit attempts in either bivariate or multivariable models; they were excluded from the final model specification. We tested other functional forms for the TRPs variable (eg, square root, parabolic) in alternate models, but these changes did not increase the models goodness of fit. The analysis sample size (N = 5,418) was sufficient for reliably identifying effects at a 5% significance level. We calculated the percentage of smokers who made quit attempts attributable to the TFF campaign by taking the difference between the actual quit attempt percentage from the analysis sample and the predicted quit attempt percentage in a hypothetical scenario where exposure to the campaign was 0 for each year of the analysis sample. We then applied these differences in quit attempt rates to corresponding annual state populations of smokers in Florida (18). We performed all statistical analyses using Stata MP version 15.1 (StataCorp LLC). Top Results The sample of 5,418 current smokers and recent quitters in Florida from 2011 through 2018 was evenly split between women and men, with similar unweighted and weighted distributions by race/ethnicity (Table 2). Almost 40% of the sample was aged 55 or older. Unweighted income distributions were similar to weighted estimates. Overall, 66% (95% CI, 64.0%67.7%) of adult smokers in the sample made a quit attempt in the past 12 months. Potential exposure to the campaign was high, with a mean annual TRPs value of 4,190 for the sample, exceeding CDC guidelines for effective campaign reach for a mass media campaign (6). Results from the multivariable logistic regression model (Table 3) indicated that for each increase of 2,000 past year TRPs, a smoker in Florida was 25% more likely to make a quit attempt during that same year (OR = 1.25, P = .02). Hispanic smokers were more likely to make a quit attempt than non-Hispanic white adults. Smokers with children in the household aged younger than 18 years were more likely to try to quit than smokers with no children in the household aged younger than 18 years. Smokers with higher HSI scores were less likely to try to quit than those with lower scores. By using estimates from the multivariable logistic regression model, we predicted the probability of making a past-year quit attempt at various levels of total annual TFF TRPs. In the hypothetical absence of the campaign, where TRPs were 0, we predicted the overall quit attempt probability for adult Florida smokers to be 55.3% (95% CI, 46.3%64.4%) (Figure 1). Predicted quit attempt probability increased to 60.5% (95% CI, 54.7%64.9%) with the first 2,000 TFF TRPs and then continued to increase, but at a diminishing rate, with larger TRP amounts. The predicted quit attempt probability at the average TRP value for the analysis sample (4,190) was 65.9% (95% CI, 63.7%67.2%). Figure 1. Quit attempt probability as a function of past year Tobacco Free Florida target rating points, Florida 20112018. Quit attempt probabilities were predicted by using estimates from a logistic regression model that controlled for age, sex, race/ethnicity, nicotine dependence, children younger than 18 years of age residing in the home, educational attainment, employment status, potential exposure to the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Tips From Former Smokers campaign, time spent watching television, media market, and year. Error bars show 95% confidence intervals. The average number of target rating points (TRPs) was 4,190. [A tabular version of this figure is available.] To illustrate the influence of the campaign on quit attempts, we estimated the annual number of Florida smokers who made quit attempts attributable to the TFF campaign during the study period. The overall difference between the actual quit attempt percentage for the sample and the predicted quit attempt percentage in a hypothetical scenario where no exposure to the campaign occurred (ie, TRPs = 0) was 10.5 percentage points (95% CI, 1.519.6) for the study period, and differences varied from 6.6 to 14.7 percentage points annually across survey years. Applied to the state population of adult smokers in Florida, we estimated that from 2011 through 2018, the TFF campaign was associated with a population weighted average of 332,604 additional smokers making quit attempts per year (or 17% of all smokers who made quit attempts), with annual estimates ranging from 183,369 additional smokers making quit attempts in 2016 to 443,044 additional smokers making quit attempts in 2011 (Figure 2). Figure 2. Estimated number of smokers with past year quit attempts attributable to the Tobacco Free Florida (TFF) campaign. These estimates were calculated by taking the annual overall difference between the actual quit attempt percentage for the sample and the predicted quit attempt percentage in a hypothetical scenario where no exposure to the campaign occurred (ie, target rating points = 0), and then applying that difference to the state population of adult smokers in Florida. [A tabular version of this figure is available.] Top Discussion Ours is the first study to assess the multiyear impact of Floridas tobacco education campaign on statewide quit attempts in the context of other nationwide mass media campaigns airing over the past 8 years. We examined the association between temporal and geographic variation in campaign exposure and quit attempts over an 8-year period. Our study used an exogenous measure of media dose, market-level TRPs, which is the most rigorous approach to measurement in natural experiments like media campaigns when control groups are unfeasible (19). Our study suggests that statewide mass media campaigns make an important public health impact by increasing population-level quit attempts, which then increases the number of sustained quitters and reduces smoking prevalence. Data on adult smoking prevalence in Florida during the study period support this conclusion. Adult smoking rates in Florida declined substantially, from 19.3% in 2011 to 14.5% in 2018 (20). These findings also add to the knowledge base for the study of state public health campaigns in real-world settings. Statewide campaigns can complement national tobacco education campaigns that do not air continuously throughout the year nationwide or in Florida. This study has several limitations. First, the data are cross-sectional and thus show an association between TRPs and quit attempts that is not as strong as in longitudinal designs (2). Second, TRPs are measured at the market level rather than the individual level and thus represent potential as opposed to actual campaign exposure. TRPs are preferred to other available exposure measures (eg, self-reported exposure) because they are exogenous to the individual and not subject to selective attention bias. The use of TRPs may limit the overall variability in the exposure variable and lower statistical power to detect campaign effects. Third, although the model examined exposure to other tobacco-related media campaigns, the multicollinearity we observed with the time trend resulted in a model that may not fully account for the independent or synergistic effects with national cessation campaigns. Fourth, media data for other important media channels such as online advertising could not be included in the exposure variable because of measurement limitations. A final limitation was the relatively low response rates for this study, which may increase the risk of error for estimates. In the past decade, response rates have been declining for national and state surveillance systems (21). Despite their positive benefits to public health, state tobacco control programs were outspent almost 10 to 1 by the tobacco industry in Florida during the study period (22). State media campaigns like the Tobacco Free Florida campaign are critical to counter tobacco industry marketing and continue to reduce smoking prevalence. In combination with other comprehensive tobacco control efforts, media campaigns can reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with smoking-related diseases in Florida. Estimates indicate that for every pack of cigarettes purchased in Florida, the state spends $12.28 in smoking-related health costs and lost productivity (23). Given the financial burden of health care costs on states, this study suggests that continued funding of state mass media campaigns contributes to reductions in future tobacco use and the resulting public health burden to Florida. Top Acknowledgments Funding for this study was provided by a contract with the Florida Department of Health (contract no. COTGC). No copyrighted material, surveys, instruments, or tools were used in this article. Top Author Information Corresponding Author: Jennifer Duke, PhD, Center for Health Policy Science and Tobacco Research, 3040 E. Cornwallis Rd, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709. Telephone: 919-485-2669. Email: jduke@rti.org. Author Affiliations: 1RTI International, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. 2Florida Department of Health, Tallahassee, Florida. Top References Top Tables Table 1. Tobacco Free Florida Media Campaign Implementation, Television Advertisements, 20102018 Campaign Year Television Advertisements Campaign Year Summary 20102011 Reverse the Damage: Reverse Heart Attack The campaign predominantly featured cessation messaging from several campaigns with graphic depictions of the health consequences of smoking and emotional appeals about the impact of smoking on family members. The campaign also included advertisements with secondhand smoke messaging. Reverse the Damage: Reverse Lung Cancer Rick Stoddard: 46 Years Rick Stoddard: Emergency Department (Unspecified Campaign): Apartment Just Eliminate Lies: Baby Seat (Unspecified Campaign): Separation Every Cigarette Does Damage: Artery Every Cigarette Does Damage: Lung 20112012 Every Cigarette Does Damage: Artery The campaign featured a mixture of cessation messaging from several campaigns with graphic depictions of and testimonials about the health consequences of smoking and motivational messaging to offer support and encouragement to quit. The campaign also included advertisements with secondhand smoke messaging. Every Cigarette Does Damage: Lung Quitting Takes Practice: I Know, I Know Quitting Takes Practice: Smokers Helpline Reverse the Damage: Reverse Heart Attack Reverse the Damage: Reverse Lung Cancer Tobacco. Reality. Unfiltered: This is Justin Tobacco. Reality. Unfiltered: This is Destini (Unspecified Campaign): Dont Stop Fighting (Unspecified Campaign): Apartment Just Eliminate Lies: Baby Seat (Unspecified Campaign): Separation 20122013 Tips From Former Smokers: Cessation Tips The campaign predominantly featured a mixture of cessation messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Tips From Former Smokers campaign (https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/campaign/tips/index.html). At the end of the campaign year, the campaign also included advertisements with secondhand smoke messaging. Tips From Former Smokers: Anthem Tips From Former Smokers: Suzys Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Jessicas Asthma Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Roosevelts Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Buergers Tips Tips From Former Smokers: Terries Tip Reverse the Damage: Reverse Heart Attack Reverse the Damage: Reverse Lung Cancer Just Eliminate Lies: Baby Seat (Unspecified Campaign): Separation 20132014 Tips From Former Smokers: Terries Voice Tip The campaign predominantly featured a mixture of cessation messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Tips From Former Smokers campaign. Tips From Former Smokers: Buergers Tips Tips From Former Smokers: Nathans Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Cessation Tips Tips From Former Smokers: Bills Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Tiffanys Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Anthem Tips From Former Smokers: Roosevelts Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Teenager Become an Ex: Start Your Day 20142015 Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Teenager The campaign exclusively featured a mixture of cessation messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Tips From Former Smokers campaign. Tips From Former Smokers: Buergers Tips Tips From Former Smokers: Nathans Tip- Memorial Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Surgeon General Tips From Former Smokers: Bills Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Tiffanys Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Dont Smoke Tips From Former Smokers: Bretts Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Shawns Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Amandas Tip 20152016 Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Surgeon General The campaign exclusively featured a mixture of cessation messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Preventions Tips From Former Smokers campaign. Tips From Former Smokers: Bills Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Roosevelts Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Cessation Tips Tips From Former Smokers: Amandas Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Teenager Tips From Former Smokers: Buergers Tips Tips From Former Smokers: Roses Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Tiffanys Decision Tips From Former Smokers: Marlenes Needle Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Mark and Julias Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Jessicas Asthma Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Nathans Tip Memorial 20162017 Lost Moments: Hopscotch The first half of the campaign year predominantly featured motivational cessation messaging from ClearWay Minnesotas No Judgements campaign (http://clearwaymn.org/tobaccos-harm/campaign-ads/) to promote Tobacco Free Floridas Quit Your Way program (https://tobaccofreeflorida.com/how-to-quit-tobaco/smoking-cessation-programs/) along with some graphic and emotional cessation messaging and secondhand smoke messaging. At the end of the campaign year, the campaign began featuring hard-hitting testimonial cessation messaging from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygienes Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder campaign (https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/press/pr2016/pr021-16.page) along with motivational cessation messaging from ClearWay Minnesotas No Judgements campaign. Lost Moments: Military Homecoming Lost Moments: Were Having a Baby Secondhand Smoke Kids: Secondhand Smoke, Kids Under 5 Secondhand Smoke Kids: Secondhand Smoke, Kids Under 10 No Judgments: Angie No Judgments: Wendall Suffering Every Minute: Lung Cancer Suffering Every Minute: Mom Cancer Suffering Every Minute: Emphysema Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: How Can I Have Lung Cancer? Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: Out of My Hands Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: Field of Radiation Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: Is it Going to Come Back? 20172018 Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: How Can I Have Lung Cancer? The first quarter of the campaign year continued to feature hard-hitting testimonial cessation messaging from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygienes Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder campaign and messaging from ClearWay Minnesotas No Judgments campaign. In the second quarter of the campaign year, the campaign switched from the Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder campaign to hard-hitting testimonial messaging from the Center for Disease Control and Preventions Tips From Former Smokers campaign. In the spring of 2018, Tobacco Free Florida launched original motivational advertising from The Reasons campaign (https://tobaccofreeflorida.com/reasons-quit-smoking-stories/). Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: Out of My Hands Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: Field of Radiation Quitting is Hard, Cancer is Harder: Is it Going to Come Back? No Judgments: Angie No Judgments: Wendall Tips From Former Smokers: Terrie Teenager Tips From Former Smokers: Amandas Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Brians Heart Attack Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Roosevelts Tip Tips From Former Smokers: Rebeccas Tip The Reasons: Christy The Reasons: Robert Table 2. Characteristics of Analysis Sample of Adult Florida Smokers Aged 18 or Older (N = 5,418), Florida Adult Tobacco Survey, 20112018a Characteristic n Unweighted % (SD) Weighted % (SD) Sex Male 2,815 52.0 (50.0) 58.2 (49.3) Female 2,603 48.0 (50.0) 41.8 (49.3) Age, y 1824 571 10.5 (30.7) 10.9 (31.2) 2534 822 15.2 (35.9) 19.6 (39.7) 3554 2,025 37.4 (48.4) 43.0 (49.5) 55 2,000 36.9 (48.3) 26.5 (44.1) Race/ethnicity Non-Hispanic white 3,691 68.1 (46.6) 67.5 (46.8) Non-Hispanic black 460 8.5 (27.9) 10.9 (31.2) Hispanic 847 15.6 (36.3) 17.6 (38.1) Non-Hispanic other 420 7.8 (26.7) 4.0 (19.5) Education Some high school 577 10.6 (30.9) 22.3 (41.6) High school graduate 1,690 31.2 (46.3) 34.6 (47.6) Some college 1,891 34.9 (47.7) 30.7 (46.1) College degree or more 1,260 23.3 (42.3) 12.3 (32.9) Employment Employed 2,782 51.3 (50.0) 51.8 (50.0) Not employed 2,636 48.7 (50.0) 48.2 (50.0) Annual household incomeb, $ <10,000 477 9.6 (29.5) 11.8 (32.3) 10,00019,999 855 17.3 (37.8) 19.7 (39.8) 20,00049,999 2,018 40.7 (49.1) 41.7 (49.3) 50,000 1,606 32.4 (46.8) 26.7 (44.3) Children in the household aged <18 y Yes 1,689 31.2 (46.3) 35.2 (47.8) No 3,729 68.8 (46.3) 64.8 (47.8) Table 3. Quit Attempts in the Past Year Among Adult Florida Smokers Aged 18 or Older (N = 5,418) in Response to Potential Exposure to the Tobacco Free Florida Campaigna Independent variables OR (95% CI) P Value Past year TRPsb 1.25 (1.041.51) .02 Sex Female 1 [Reference] Male 0.89 (0.751.05) .16 Age, y 1824 1 [Reference] 2534 0.80 (0.571.12) .20 3554 0.94 (0.681.29) .70 55 0.79 (0.571.10) .16 Race/ethnicity Non-Hispanic white 1 [Reference] Non-Hispanic black 1.07 (0.781.45) .68 Hispanic 1.37 (1.061.76) .02 Non-Hispanic other 1.03 (0.731.45) .88 Employed No 1 [Reference] Yes 0.96 (0.801.15) .63 Children in the household aged <18 y No 1 [Reference] Yes 1.29 (1.071.57) .009 Heaviness of smoking indexc 0.79 (0.740.83) < .001 Time trendd 1.04 (0.981.09) .18 Designated marketing area MiamiFt. Lauderdale 1 [Reference] TallahasseeThomasville 0.99 (0.601.65) .98 OrlandoDaytona Beach-Melbourne 0.87 (0.611.23) .43 TampaSt. Petersburg (Sarasota) 1.07 (0.751.52) .72 West Palm BeachFt. Pierce 0.90 (0.611.34) .60 Jacksonville 1.08 (0.741.59) .69 Ft. MyersNaples 0.63 (0.400.98) .04 Gainesville 0.97 (0.521.84) .93 Panama City 0.56 (0.340.92) .02 MobilePensacola (Ft. Walton Beach) 0.70 (0.431.15) .16 Top Three deaf survivors of clerical sexual abuse from Argentina say they want Pope Francis finally to live up to his promises of reform -- and they are taking their call directly to the Vatican this week. The three told AFP they were "tortured" by their abusers but now felt emboldened after a high-profile trial in their case last year that put two priests behind bars for decades in the pope's homeland. "In the world there are a lot of countries where these things continue to happen and there's silence," said Daniel Sgardelis, 45, speaking through a sign language interpreter during a visit to the UN in Geneva. Sgardelis was abused by Nicola Corradi, an Italian priest sentenced to 42 years in prison in Argentina in November for assaulting some 20 children at the Provolo Institute for children with hearing and speech disorders. An Argentine priest, Horacio Corbacho, was sentenced to 45 years in prison at the same trial -- one of several involving the school, some of which are still going on. The abuse scandal is one of thousands that have shaken the Catholic Church, mainly in Europe and the United States. The Church has been accused of covering up this abuse for decades by moving abusing priests between different parishes and countries -- a practice that Pope Francis has vowed to end. - 'Code of silence' - Claudia Labeguerie, 26, another survivor from the Provolo Institute, said she believed there were still abusive priests being protected by the Church. "The pope knows that they should be incarcerated but even so he doesn't do anything about it. I would like to know why there's nothing being done about it," she said. "There is still a lot of abuse, a lot of victims, victims just like us and it's necessary for the laws to change." The survivors have requested an audience with Pope Francis and are hoping to consult files relating to the Provolo Institute in the Vatican after the pope last year said he was lifting papal secrecy in abuse cases. "I want to tell the pope that we have power and strength and we have all the strength to continue fighting for justice," said 19-year-old Ezequiel Villalonga. The survivors said they would be travelling to Rome later this week after meeting the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child in Geneva. The independent committee of experts issued a scathing report in 2014 on the Vatican's handling of abuse cases, accusing the Church of imposing a "code of silence". - 'It's still there' - Peter Isely, a founding member of Ending Clergy Abuse (ECA), a non-governmental organisation that is assisting the survivors' visit to Europe, said he believed many abuse scandals had simply not been uncovered yet. "It's going to explode again.... In Latin America, in Africa, in Asia this is still just beginning," Isely said. "We are a long ways from solving this problem. This case... demonstrates everything that's wrong still with this issue and what needs to change," he said. Gerald Staberock, head of the Geneva-based World Organisation Against Torture, said there had been promises from the Church to co-operate in abuse investigations but in many countries "this remains an uphill battle". "We're not talking about something that is past, it's still present. It's still there," he said. Isely said he had received no reply to the request for an audience with Pope Francis for the survivors. Still, for Villalonga, victory in last year's trial in Argentina has brought some respite after dark years. "I waited a long time and I thought that justice wasn't going to come and I cried a lot," he said. "But in the trial, I cried happiness and I stopped being a victim." Parents across the country can now hire a Tom Hardy lookalike to teach their children how to read - after the actor's hit appearances on CBeebies Bedtime Stories. The lookalike - whose real name is Dave - will read to children at primary schools across the UK and deliver one-on-one reading tuition at home in a bid to 'make reading cool again'. Dave, who will be available throughout March, has also offered to dress up like various Tom Hardy characters including Batman supervillain Bane and his Peaky Blinders character Alfie Solomons. The book buddy venture, launched by Exam Papers Plus, is inspired by the Dark Knight Rises actor's recent appearance on CBeebies Bedtime Stories, which sent fans into a frenzy. The lookalike - whose real name is Dave (pictured) - will read to children at primary schools across the UK and deliver one-on-one reading tuition Parents across the country can now hire a Tom Hardy lookalike to teach their children how to read - after the actor's hit appearances on CBeebies Bedtime Stories (pictured) Hardy, 42, first appeared on the show on New Year's Eve in 2016 to tell the story of a boy going to a party as he read You Must Bring a Hat by Simon Philip and Kate Hindley. He was joined by his dog Woodstock when he returned to the programme - which has also seen Captain America star Chris Evans and Isla Fisher take to the hot seat - later in the year. On their website, Exam Papers Plus said: 'We've launched a brand new book buddy service where you can hire a Tom Hardy lookalike to come to your school or your home to teach your child to read. This is now available throughout March and available across the UK. 'The new service aims to encourage more reading within schools and encourages parents to pick up a book and take part in story-time. Hardy, 42, first appeared on the CBeebies show on New Year's Eve in 2016 to tell the story of a boy going to a party as he read You Must Bring a Hat by Simon Philip and Kate Hindley 'With digital technologies such as iPads and online gaming fewer children spend their spare time reading, and this limited-time service aims to encourage this. 'The new service aims to support reading in schools as well as encouraging parents to pick up a book and take part in story time at home.' The service, which is available in March, will cost 100 for a one-hour reading session at a primary school or 80-per-hour for one-to-one tutoring. Faisal Nasim, Director at Exampapersplus.co.uk, says: 'We believe that creativity and inspiration can sometimes be lacking in the private tuition experience. 'We have received an influx of requests for lookalike tutors from Harry Potter to Tom Hardy to make learning fun again so last year we launched School of Magic which was hugely popular amongst the wizarding fans and now launch the Tom Hardy reading service and already seen huge demand.' Protesters' efforts to block freight rail traffic in Canada in support of a First Nations group's objections over a proposed natural gas pipeline have caused ripples throughout the Commonwealth's supply chain, including temporary layoffs at Canadian National (NYSE: CNI) and increased congestion at some ports. Canadian National (CN) confirmed Tuesday that it has sent temporary layoff notices to about 450 employees affiliated with its eastern operations. CN shut down its eastern operations last week amid a rail blockade in Belleville, Ontario. The blockades have also disrupted service on CN's western operations. CN said affected employees work at the autoport in Eastern Passage and at Moncton, Charny and Montreal in accordance with the provisions of the collective agreement between CN and union employees. "This situation is regrettable for its impact on the economy and on our railroaders as these protests are unrelated to CN's activities, and beyond our control. Our shutdown is progressive and methodical to ensure that we are well set up for recovery, which will come when the illegal blockades end completely," CN said. CN told FreightWaves that it is talking with its partners and other railways to try to find ways to accommodate CN's customers, but that it couldn't comment on any specifics since that would entail disclosing commercial information. Meanwhile, the blockades are causing congestion at ports, including vessels waiting to unload at Vancouver. The Port of Halifax remains open, with no backlog for anchorage, and the Halifax Port Authority continues to work closely with CN and terminal operators PSA Halifax and Ceres-Halifax to minimize the impact of rail disruptions on port operations, port authority spokesperson Lane Farguson said. "There have been no lost vessel calls as a result of the rail disruptions to date, but the longer the disruption lasts, the more difficult it will become to manage yard space," Farguson said. Story continues Farguson warned that a prolonged disruption could use up yard storage space since the import cargo destined for inland markets can't move from the terminals. If that happens, the port may be unable to accept more import cargo, and that could influence ocean carriers to stop calling at the port, Farguson said. "Simply put, if the ships aren't calling, cargo isn't moving," Farguson said. Meanwhile, passenger rail service provider VIA Rail said it has received notification from CN allowing service to resume in Southwestern Ontario, although trains may encounter delays. Industries Urge Government Intervention The protests are in support of hereditary chiefs of the Wet'suwet'en nation who say the proposed location of Coastal GasLink's fracked gas pipeline will bring environmental and cultural harm to their territory in British Columbia. Coastal GasLink has defended its decision. Rail-dependent industries and other trade associations are pressing Canadian government officials to intervene and take action immediately. The Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters (CM&E) warned that for every day that rail service is blocked, it could take three to four days for companies to make up for the lost time. The association also said if the disruptions don't end soon, it could force manufacturers to halt production, which could result in job losses along the supply chain. "The federal government must work with the provinces to put an end to the blockages. For every additional day that the blockage continues, approximately $425 million of manufactured goods that are usually carried by rail are sitting idle," CM&E Dennis Darby said. The association estimates that manufacturers loaded an average of nearly 4,500 railcars/day, or 1.62 million railcars annually, in 2016, with manufactured goods accounting for nearly half of all railcar loadings in Canada. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) said the rail disruptions are affecting the deliveries of food and agricultural products but also propane supplies in Eastern Canada, which farmers need to heat their barns during wintertime. This most recent disruption is the second one that farmers have faced in recent months. The first was an eight-day strike in November involving CN during peak harvest season. "These new blockades are once again hampering the ability of farmers to get their products to port, especially those in Western Canada," CFA said. "As farmers do not get paid until their products reach the market, this can have huge financial consequences for Canadian farmers, and creates cash-flow issues as they prepare for the coming year. As this is the second significant interruption in rail service in the past few months, these issues are compounding on each other to create an extremely challenging coming year for farmers across the country." Even the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA) called for the government to find a peaceful solution, saying that the rail disruptions can also affect the trucking industry. "Many trucking movements begin or end at the rail head. The supply chain is not only integrated from a supplier perspective, it's integrated modally as well," CTA said. "When the railways suffer disruption in service, it impacts everyone in the economy including the trucking industry. When bridges and roads are blocked, trade stops and other modes and business sectors that depend on trucking services are negatively impacted. The Canadian economy overall depends on a reliable and fully functioning supply chain." Government Leaders Convene Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been meeting with other government leaders and on Feb. 18, he spoke before Parliament on the issue. Trudeau has also discussed the disruptions with British Columbia Premier John Horgan. Meanwhile, some Conservative leaders have pressed the government to take more initiative. "It's time to stand up for the rule of law and end these illegal blockades," Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer said in a tweet. According to Trudeau's office, Canada's Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Carolyn Bennett and British Columbia Minister of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation Scott Fraser "are willing to meet with the Gitxsan Simgyget, the Wet'suwet'en Dini Ze' and the Ts'ake ze at the earliest opportunity to engage in direct dialogue." On Feb. 18 Prime Minister Trudeau said in the House Chamber, "On all sides, people are upset and frustrated. I get it. It's understandable because this is about things that matter: rights and livelihoods, the rule of law and our democracy. To those who are feeling the consequences of the blockades and the protests, I know that you are going through difficult times. Rest assured that our government is working hard to find a solution." First Nations leaders, including Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Perry Bellegarde, also held a news conference on Feb. 18 about the rail blockades. "The principles of co-existence and respect for each other is needed, and it's not a time for divisive comments from any leader. It's a time for calm. It's a time for dialogue. It's a time for coming together of our peoples," Bellegarde said. "And even regarding the injunctions...the proper exercise of police discretion should not be confused with lack of enforcement," Bellegarde added, alluding to the non-enforcement of a court injunction that calls for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to dismantle protests on CN's eastern network. AFN said on Feb. 10 that the federal government needs to respect First Nations rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, as well as recognize First Nations laws. The Feb. 18 meeting at Parliament and the First Nations news conference is available on the Cable Public Affairs Channel of Canada. Image Sourced from Pixabay See more from Benzinga 2020 Benzinga.com. Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved. Were pleased that Banner Banka bank with a very long history of focusing on helping the underservedhas made its first investment in our company Clearinghouse Community Development Financial Institution (Clearinghouse CDFI) announced today an initial $1 million Class A equity investment from Banner Bank, a community bank headquartered in Washington. With this first investment, Banner Bank becomes one of Clearinghouse CDFIs 15 largest shareholders. We consider it a privilege to invest in Clearinghouse CDFI, said Camino Smith, Banner Bank Senior Vice President and Director of CRA. As a 130-year-old community bank with a rich history of forging meaningful local partnerships, this investment demonstrates our continuing commitment to helping underserved communities receive financing to create quality affordable housing, grow small businesses, and facilitate other critical economic development activities necessary to improve lives. Clearinghouse CDFI will use this investment to benefit low-income and distressed communities in the Western United States. The $1 million will help Clearinghouse CDFI continue financing community facilities, affordable housing, commercial real estate, and other projects that create jobs and services in underserved areas. Were pleased that Banner Banka bank with a very long history of focusing on helping the underservedhas made its first investment in our company, said Douglas J. Bystry, President and CEO of Clearinghouse CDFI. We look forward to working together to deploy more capital into distressed communities. Community development projects previously financed by Clearinghouse CDFI include: Federal Way Performing Arts & Event Center, Federal Way, WA$9.5 million NMTC allocation to create a multi-use community center in Washington. The Los Angeles Mission, Los Angeles, CA$5.9 million loan to refinance existing debt and preserve the ongoing operation of one of the nations largest homeless service providers. Palindrome Communities, LLCOliver Station, Portland OR$6.15 million loan for development of a mixed-use, affordable housing space serving low-income residents and local businesses. Clearinghouse CDFI has funded $1.9 billion in total loans for over 1,900 community projects over the past 24 years. These projects have created or retained more than 21,500 jobs and benefit over 1.9 million individuals. This includes the rehabilitation of more than 18 million square feet of blighted properties. These projects have benefited over 700 separate underserved communities throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Indian Country. To learn more about Banner Bank, visit http://www.bannerbank.com. About Clearinghouse Community Development Financial Institution: Clearinghouse Community Development Financial Institution (Clearinghouse CDFI) addresses unmet credit needs in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Indian Country in the Western United States. For over 24 years, Clearinghouse CDFI has helped bridge the gap between conventional lending standards and the needs of low-income and distressed communities. Clearinghouse CDFI is also a B Corpa certification received from the nonprofit B Lab. B Corps are companies who meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability, and use business as a force for good. More information is available at: http://www.ccdfi.com. By Li Yun, Jia Qilong and Yue Wenwan WUHAN, Feb. 18 -- Eight transport aircraft attached to the air force of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) successfully transported the fourth batch of medical staff and supplies to Hubei Province on February 172020. During this emergency airlift, three types of large and medium-sized transport aircraft were mobilized, including four homemade cargo plane Y-20s, one Il-76 and three Yun-9s.These aircraft first arrived at seven airports across the country to get the medical support personnel and supplies loaded in fast speed. Then, they took off again without any delay and landed at Wuhan Tianhe It is known that, as of press time, the air force has dispatched a total of 30 transport aircraft for four consecutive massive airlift operations since the outbreak of COVID-19. The PLAs airlift to Wuhan of this time shows an example of precise and efficient emergency air transport, said Military expert Du Wenlong. He also summarized three highlights of this operation: The first is the high intensity of the assignments. This delivery mission involving eight large and medium-sized transport aircraft of three types is carried out only three days after the last mission, which involved 11 aircraft of three types. This indicates that the air force has greatly improved its readiness in various fields such as operation commanding, materials management, flight maintenance, etc. The second is the high precision of the missions execution. The accurate landing of military aircraft from seven different airports within 21 minutes is the result of precise air dynamic command, efficient control, and accurate calculations. This is a clear evidence of the air forces strong air coordination and command support capabilities. The third is powerful ground support capability. The ground conditions of the seven airports are totally different, and it is a challenge to complete loading and military aircraft maneuver orderly and timely. However, they fulfilled the task with powerful ground support capabilities. Moscow on Thursday urged Turkey to stop "supporting terrorists" in Syria, saying Russian planes had carried out air strikes against armed groups backed by Ankara. "We urge the Turkish side, in order to avoid incidents, to cease support of the actions of terrorists and handing them arms," the Russian defence ministry said in a statement. Russia, which backs Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accused Turkey of aiding rebels fighting government forces in the northwestern Idlib province by firing artillery as the rebels carried out an attack. Moscow said that on Syria's request its bombers carried out strikes on "terrorist armed formations," allowing the Syrian forces to repel the attack. Separately, Turkey said two of its soldiers had been killed in an air strike in Idlib, blaming the Syrian regime. The Russian defence ministry said it told Ankara that it had spotted Turkish artillery firing on Syrian units, wounding four soldiers. "We note this is not the first case of support for rebel fighters by Turkey," the defence ministry said. Russia on Wednesday warned Turkey against attacking Syrian forces after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to launch an operation in Syria's Idlib region. Search Keywords: Short link: Reuters The first draft decisions by Ireland's data privacy regulator on probes into some of the world's biggest technology firms will go for consultation with other EU regulators this year, the lead watchdog for the bloc said on Thursday. Ireland hosts the European headquarters of a number of US technology firms, making Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) the EU's lead regulator under the General Data Protection Regulation's (GDPR) "One Stop Shop" regime introduced in 2018. The new rules give regulators the power to impose fines for violations of up to 4 percent of a company's global revenue or 20 million euros (17 million pounds), whichever is higher. (Also read: Should Facebook, Google get legal shield when it comes to user posts, asks US Attorney General) In its annual report, the DPC said two of the 21 inquiries it had open into big tech firms by the end of 2019 had moved from the investigative stage to the decision-making phase. They related to a 2019 investigation into a bug in Twitter's Android app, where some users' protected tweets were made public and a 2018 probe into the transparency of WhatsApp's data sharing with Facebook and its fellow subsidiaries. Facebook has come under most scrutiny since the new rules came into force in mid-2018 with eight individual probes, plus two into WhatsApp and one into Facebook-owned Instagram. Twitter and Apple are subject to three inquiries each. Google, Verizon Media, Microsoft owned LinkedIn and US digital advertiser Quantcast made up the rest of the cross-border investigations at the end of last year. The DPC has since launched a second inquiry into Google, relating to its processing of location data, and a first probe into the Match Group Inc's Tinder dating app. Under GDPR, the DPC must share its draft decision with all concerned EU supervisory authorities and consider their views in its final verdict. Each of the bloc's regulators may be called on for a majority decision if agreement cannot be reached among the relevant member states. A report last month showed European regulators had imposed just 114 million euros in fines for data breaches since GDPR came into force. The DPC defended the process, saying there would be little benefit in mass-producing decisions only to have them overturned by the courts. "A new legal framework and one that contemplates very significant penalties is always going to take time to implement correctly," Helen Dixon, the head of the DPC, said in the annual report. "But have no doubt that intensive work is underway." Berlin, Feb 20 : The body of the suspected perpetrator of the two shootings in the German city of Hanau that left at least nine people dead, has been found in his house along with another one, police said on Thursday. In a tweet, police said the "alleged perpetrator" was found "lifeless" at his home in Hanau, and special police officers also found another body there, reports Efe news. In a statement, the state police said they had received witness information about a fleeing vehicle. "The home address was blocked off extensively and searched by special police forces... One of the dead people is most likely the culprit," said the statement, which also confirmed the new shooting death toll as nine, bringing the total to 11 deaths. "Investigations into the identity of the victims and the suspected perpetrator are ongoing," it said, adding that "there are currently no indications of other perpetrators". The suspect is a German national with a hunting weapons license, in whose car ammunition was found, according to a report in the German Bild newspaper. In the consecutive shootings on Wednesday night in two shisha bars, nine people were killed and at least five others were believed to have been seriously injured. The first attack took place at around 10 p.m. in a bar called Midnight, followed by the second shooting at the Arena Bar & Cafe, a similar establishment in the city's Kesselstadt neighbourhood. The shots were allegedly fired from a car, according to regional public broadcaster Hessischer Rundfunk. Local police deployed a large search operation for the attacker over several hours. Hanau MP Katja Leikert said it was a "horrific scenario for us all" and sent her "heartfelt condolences" to those close to the victims. Several local media outlets also reported another alleged attack at a third location in the city, but police did not confirm this. The city of Hanau - home to some 100,000 people - is located 25 km east of Frankfurt. Seoul: A former North Korean diplomat who fled his embassy posting has become the first defector to run for South Korea's parliament, saying he was motivated by Seoul's forced repatriation of two North Korean fishermen who wanted to defect to the South. "This was so wrong, even if they were criminals," said the former diplomat, Thae Yong-ho, referring to the two North Koreans who were repatriated to the North in November after they were captured in waters off South Korea. Thae Yong-ho, a former minister at the North Korean Embassy in London, defected to South Korea in 2016. Credit:Yonhap/AP Thae was the No. 2 diplomat in the North Korean embassy in London when he fled to South Korea with his wife and two sons in 2016. South Korea's main conservative political opposition, the United Future Party, selected him to run in National Assembly's April elections. The U.S. Census is really bad at counting LGBTQ people. In fact, the government has never had an accurate counting of states lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans or other queer residents. That means the $675 billion allocated from the federal budget to states each year for anti-poverty programs likely isnt reaching as many LGBTQ people as it could because the government doesnt collect accurate data on them. As one of the larger states in the country and as a state with a significant LGBTQ population that could mean New Jersey is missing out on funding for its residents. Theres just so much we dont know about the discrimination happening against this community, said Kyle Velte, an associate law professor at the University of Kansas. Velte has studied why the Census Bureau doesnt collect data on sexual orientation and gender identity and said she couldnt find a clear answer. My gut tells me its a political question, she said. Its about the optics of including that question and the optics when the president is running for re-election. Instead of asking questions on the once-a-decade census or the monthly American Community Survey about a persons sexuality and their gender identity, those surveys only ask questions about same-sex marriages and unmarried same-sex partnerships. During the Obama administration, the bureau considered asking several questions about sexuality and gender identity on the 2020 Census. But those questions have been scrapped under the Trump administration. Leslie Malone, a public affairs specialist with the Census Bureau, explained in an email that the Census Bureau has specific criteria a question must meet before its added to the Census or the American Community Survey. Federal agencies must request the data and have a statutory or regulatory need for the data. We dont have a current request for sexual orientation or gender identity that meets those criteria, Malone said. Asking questions on a survey is always a balance. Its a balance between the governments need for information and limiting the burden on the people who respond. While the census may count LGBTQ people as individuals, their status as LGBTQ is not. That means the federal money based on census data cant flow directly to LGBTQ people and the communities where they live. A 2012 study in California, for example, revealed that 40% of homeless youth who seek out services are LGBTQ. Many shelters and social service agencies are funded by federal block grants. Accurate federal data on the problem could mean more resources to people and organizations that need it, Velte said. The data we do have, however, is a first step to understanding New Jerseys LGBTQ residents and the cities and towns where they live. The bureau estimates that 22,418 same-sex couples live in New Jersey, but that data couldnt be broken down by county or town. Same-sex marriage has been legal in New Jersey since 2013 and in the U.S. since 2015. So NJ Advance Media examined census data on how many unmarried same-sex couples live in each New Jersey town and city. Topping the list of places with the most same-sex couples is Jersey City, with the census listing 711 same-sex households. Newark comes in second with 185 same-sex households, and North Bergen is third with 139. Riverdale Borough in Morris County and Independence Township in Warren County top the list for the towns with the highest concentrations of same-sex households each has around 2,000 residents and about 3% of the households are same-sex. Thats around 60 to 70 same-sex households in each town. Additional data, published by the Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles, estimates about 4.1% of New Jersey residents are LGBTQ. The Williams Institute uses data from the Gallup Daily Tracking survey, as well as some Census data, to arrive at its estimates. But the number or concentration of same-sex households doesnt necessarily equate to a place being more or less LGBTQ-friendly. The Census data only lists four same-sex households in Maplewood Township, for example, but the town boasts a sizable LGBTQ population and made headlines a few years ago when it painted some of its crosswalks with rainbow colors. Maplewood also hosts a Pride festival each year and its deputy mayor, Dean Dafis, is also its first openly gay elected official. Dafis is in a position to create programs and allocate funding to problems that affect LGBTQ people, but thats difficult to do, he said, when he doesnt know how many people need resources. Right now (data collection) is very ad hoc, and its frustrating for them and frustrating for me because I know I cant do enough, he said. Even in communities like ours that are welcoming and inclusive we are so behind the curve. Similarly, according to Census data, only 1.6% of all households in Asbury Park are same-sex but that city boasts a massive Pride parade each June that thousands attended last year. Asbury Park ranks 11th for both number (108) and concentration of same-sex households. The incomplete data is a problem primarily because government agencies and nongovernmental organizations need accurate information to provide funding and services to LGBTQ people. Elizabeth Schedl, the executive director of the Hudson Pride Center in Jersey City, said the undercounting makes it more difficult for advocates like her to provide services. We are primarily grant funded, and if the data isnt there, they arent going to make the grants, she said. Its like this circle thats problematic. Schedl said shes aware of a few efforts in Jersey City and elsewhere to encourage LGBTQ people to respond to the 2020 Census, and her organization is planning to apply for a grant to encourage people to respond via social media advertisements. Velte has noted in her research that census researchers also have edited the responses of LGBTQ people. If a person marked their sex as female but their name appeared to be sufficiently male, census researchers would change the persons sex to match their name. And in population counts prior to 2010, according to a series published by HuffPost, the Census Bureau would change the responses of same-sex couples who reported that they were married. The Bureau assumed the form had been mis-marked and changed one partners sex. Data failings aside, advocates in New Jersey are attempting to provide programs and services to the states LGBTQ residents. Dafis, in Maplewood, has sought to add sexual orientation and gender identity self-identification options to municipal forms to start collecting data on his town. Rachel Paulus, the LGBTQ services librarian at the Newark Public Library, said the librarys LGBTQ Resource Center serves as both a community space for queer people and a way to learn about other services that are available to them. We look to be not only an information space, but a place where people can gather, Paulus wrote in an email. Despite the patchwork nature of programs and services for LGBTQ New Jerseyans, its essential that those spaces and services exist, said Stephanie Mills, the client service manager at the Hudson Pride Center. We know that LGBTQ people are everywhere, she said. Its vital, its super vital to have these safe spaces. J. Dale Shoemaker is a reporter on the data & investigations team. He can be reached at jshoemaker@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JDale_Shoemaker. An employee of the Internal Revenue Service in Mobile became sick today after being exposed to a package containing an unknown, potentially hazardous liquid. Mobile Fire-Rescue crews responded to the IRS building on S. University Blvd. in reference to a 55-year-old man becoming sick from a liquid that was in an international letter he received. MFRDs Hazardous Materials teams arrived at the scene at approximately 2:03 p.m. HazMat experts convened with IRS management and FBI officials to assess the situation and successfully evacuate the building prior to MFRD arrival on scene. HazMat teams received the suspected letter for testing. All preliminary tests at the scene came back negative for any chemical or biological substances of any kind. The IRS employee who received the letter was assessed at the scene and presented vitally stable with no signs or symptoms of illness. HOLYOKE The citys Department of Veterans Services will once again have an investigator following a unanimous City Council vote Tuesday. The council transferred $11,549.48 to helpreestablish the position using money that previously funded a head clerk job in the office. Veterans services director Jesus Pereira requested shifting money, saying the clerk position was vacant. Creating an investigator role in the department was discussed at length late in the fiscal 2020 budget process. Councilor Joseph McGiverin, who chairs the Finance Committee, said an investigator scrutinizes eligibility requirements for veterans benefits and tracks funds. The transfer allows the restoration of a $36,000 salary for the position. Last year, Mayor Alex Morse proposed budget line items that promoted Wilfredo Melendez from deputy director of the department to national service officer at $49,547 annually and reclassified the head clerk as an investigator at $35,000 annually. The City Council rejected Morses proposal and did not fund the current positions, which led to a one-day layoff in the department. The council in July quickly restored the funding but still rejected the promotions. Ward 3 Councilor Bartley called the July special meeting a dog and pony show and said the council was unfairly treated. He recommended Pereira follow the regular budget and job reclassification procedures in the future. Ward 5 Councilor Linda Vacon said Pereiras request was a modified version of what happened in July. She was concerned about the departments budget rising by over $10,000. Were already obligating a future budget in passing this, she said. Vacon wanted to know how many veterans the department serves. I have to be convinced were serving more veterans before Ill vote to increase that departments budget by thousands of hard-earned taxpayers dollars, she said. Councilor Peter Tallman said he stood by Pereira and noted an increase in veterans helped by the department in the past year. The number has increased substantially, he said. Tallman said an applicant received around $2,000 in benefits but failed to reveal they held $50,000 in unreported assets, which made the person ineligible. It does increase the budget, but I believe its well worthwhile to have an extra investigator, he said. Tallman added that Pereira and Melendez hold state and federal qualifications, which gives them direct access to benefit processing portals, cutting down on application turnaround times. Its well worth the investment in having to spend that extra money, Tallman said. Well see what happens for the next four or five months with this transfer from within the department. Budget time is coming up, and if people feel its not important to have that position in there, we can always cut it. As a veteran, Tallman said he agreed with the transfer, which drew support from Councilors Terence Murphy, James Leahy and Howard Greaney. McGiverin said more veterans are returning to civilian life who will need benefits and services. In the end, Vacon and Bartley voted for the transfer, as did the other 10 councilors present. Ward 4 Councilor Libby Hernandez was not in attendance. In other business, the City Council accepted two safety grants that fund fire prevention programs for seniors and students. The $5,200 Student Awareness of Fire Education (SAFE) and $2,5000 Senior SAFE grants allow the Holyoke Fire Department to continue its educational efforts in the citys schools and at elderly housing complexes and centers. McGiverin praised the work of Lt. Maria Pelchar, who leads the departments fire safety and prevention program. Pelchar and Chief Jeff Przekopowski recently appeared before the Finance Committee. Bartley said the fire department provides educational materials in English and Spanish and conducts seminars at shelters, group homes and senior housing. Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the amount an applicant received in benefits. The correct figure is $2,000. The article has been updated. An 11-year-old boy from Whitman remains in critical condition after a crash in Florida killed his sister, mother and grandmother Tuesday evening, police said. Jaxon Smith was unresponsive when he was taken to a hospital in Florida on Tuesday and remains on life support, Florida Highway Patrol spokeswoman Lt. Kim Montes said. They did not expect him to survive, Montes said. The last check that we got, he was still on life support. Smith was in a 2020 Toyota Sienna when a Dodge pickup truck slammed into the back of the rental van killing 5-year-old Scarlett Smith and 41-year-old Julie Smith, both of Whitman, and 76-year-old Josephine Fay of South Weymouth, police in Florida said. At around 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, the van was traveling south on Route 429, where the listed speed limit is 70 miles per hour, when congestion caused the cars ahead of the van to slow down, Montes said. A Dodge truck behind the van didnt slow down and collided with the familys rental car, then struck another car and sideswiped another. The drivers of those cars were not injured, police said. The van was carrying eight people at the time of the crash, police said, including two parents, four children and the maternal grandparents. Shane Smith, 43, of Whitman, was driving the van when the crash occurred. William Fay, 76, of South Weymouth was in the passenger seat. Each suffered minor injuries, police said. A 10-year-old, Shalie Smith, and 5-year-old Skylar Smith were sitting in captain seats in the middle of the van, police said. They also suffered minor injuries. Jaxon Smith was sitting between his sister in an additional seat that can be added to the Toyota van, police said. The three people killed in the crash were sitting in the back of the van, police said. The impact from the truck caused the van to flip on its side, Montes said. Its a sad day here in Whitman-Hanson, Superintendent Jeffrey Szymaniak said in a news conference Tuesday. Its awful it really is. . . I think the family should be in our thoughts and prayers. The family was in Florida to visit Disney World the school said during the news conference. The crash occurred about 10 miles from the Orlando, Florida resort. All schools in the Whitman-Hanson Regional School District have activated their crisis teams. Counselors will be available to help students and employees in the days and weeks ahead. The children had all attended the Merry Deb Learning Center in Whitman, according to WBZ. The driver of the truck, 26-year-old Lucas Dos Reis Laurindo provided police with a voluntary blood draw, Montes said. He showed no signs of impairment, Montes said. Florida police ask drivers involved in fatal crashes to provide a voluntary blood draw. Montes said the results from the blood would be back in 8 to 10 weeks. Traffic homicide investigators were at the scene Tuesday night, Montes said. The investigation will continue and last for a minimum 180 days, she said. If charges are warranted, they wont be filed until after the investigation is complete, police said. The face-off between the Oluwo of Iwo, Abdulrosheed Akanbi and the Agbowu of Ogbaagba, Dhikirulahi Akinropo, over land dispute in Iwo land continue to generate controversy in Osun communities. On Wednesday, Mr Akinropo, who was allegedly assaulted last Friday, wrote a petition to Assistant General of Police, Zone XI Headquarters, Osogbo, Bashir Makama, to immediately arraign Mr Akanbi. He made this demand through his counsel, Soji Oyetayo. The letter, made available to journalists in Osogbo on Wednesday, was titled Letter of demand for the immediate prosecution of Oba Abdulrasheed Adewale Akanbi, the Oluwo of Iwo. Mr Akinropos counsel argued that the alleged act in the presence of two Osun State commissioners and some officers is a criminal conduct and punishable by law. He reminded the AIG the ugly incident happened in your presence, two Honourable Osun State Commissioners, some of your officers who were at the said meeting and other traditional rulers invited for the said peace meeting. In fact, it was your humble self who disengaged the said Oluwo of Iwo, from killing our client on that day, part of the petition read. It needs to be clearly stated that under our law, nobody, no matter highly placed, is above the law. The act of the said Oluwo of Iwo, at the said meeting by beating a fellow traditional ruler clearly amounted to criminal conduct which is punishable by law. Mr Akinropo told the AIG that failure to charge Mr Akanbi to court for his criminal conduct will amount to disrepute of his office. PREMIUM TIMES reported that on Monday some residents of Ogbaagba, Ile-Ogbo and Iwo demanded adequate punishment against Mr Akanbi. A counter protest held on Tuesday by some residents of Iwo in solidarity with their king. Meanwhile, speaking during a press conference at the Nigerian Union of Journalists, correspondents chapel, in Osogbo on Tuesday, Mr Akanbi denied assaulting Mr. Akinropo. He said he was being targeted for fighting for the rights of the residents, whose lands were being sold illegally by some monarchs. The state government, through the Commissioner for Information, Funke Egbomode, said the face-off between the two monarchs is unfortunate and was being reviewed by the council of kings. But the approximately 13,000 full-time students at Brooklyn College 75 percent of whom depend on some form of financial aid and 45 percent of whom are from families in which neither parent completed college typically do not have that kind of access. These kids cant ask their parents to help them with job connections, she said. Thats not their world. Certainly Ms. Magner couldnt. She grew up in Crown Heights. Her father was a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department; her mother taught kindergarten. At the time she attended Brooklyn College, most of the women on campus were going to become teachers. Ms. Magner decided to major in business, but she admitted that at the time she really had no idea what that involved. To me, a business was the bakery, the butcher and the candy store around the corner, she said. She managed to succeed, but she realizes that the who-you-know factor is as critical to the career success of Generation Z students as it was for previous cohorts. And thats why she tries to recruit her fellow alumni to become involved with current students through the center. I tell them, Were the aunts and uncles, the friends of the family that these kids dont have, she said. Such ersatz family members can sometimes help students in ways that real ones cannot. My parents came from a tiny town in Mexico, said Karina Gomez, a senior who grew up in Sunset Park. Neither of them went past middle school. Ross Houllis, 28, was allegedly assaulted by two men and dragged through the car park of the Wakeley Shopping Centre A young man has been bashed to death after he was allegedly ambushed while trying to sell Apple AirPod earphones he had listed on Facebook. Ross Houllis, 28, was allegedly assaulted by two men and dragged through the car park of the Wakeley Shopping Centre near Fairfield in western Sydney's at 9pm on Friday. After the alleged assailants drove away in a Toyota Hilux, Mr Houllis was rushed to hospital in a critical condition, where he died on Monday. Sami Hamdach, 27, was arrested on Saturday and charged with murder at Bankstown Local Court on Thursday. Mr Houllis listed the Apple wireless earphones for sale on the Sydney Marketplace Facebook group on January 23. 'Brand New Airpods generation 2 haven't been used got them as a gift a while back,' he captioned the post. Apple AirPods sell for $250 at retail but Mr Houllis had listed them for $170. The popular group has more than 20,000 members who buy and sell items and often arrange face to face meetups to save on delivery costs. Hamdach and another man, who is yet to be arrested, allegedly arranged to meet Houllis to buy his Apple AirPods. Mr Houllis listed the Apple wireless earphones for sale on the Sydney Marketplace Facebook group on January 23. Sami Hamdach, 27, and another man, who is yet to be arrested, allegedly arranged to meet Houllis to buy his Apple AirPods before assaulting him Police allege the pair approached Mr Houllis and demanded cash before they knocked him to the ground and 'seriously assaulted' him before driving away. Witnesses called an ambulance for Mr Houllis, who was rushed to hospital with 'critical head injuries'. NSW Police's Tactical Operation Unit seized a Toyota Hilux as they executed at a unit on Marion Street in Bankstown on Saturday. Later in the afternoon, police arrested Hamdach and charged him with cause grievous bodily harm to person with intent. But since Mr Houllis died of his injuries in hospital on Monday, Hamdach's charge was upgraded to murder on Thursday. FEBRUARY 20, 2020 UTSA, Whataburger and the San Antonio Food Bank today announced a partnership to ensure that healthy food, free of charge, is made available to students in need across all of the universitys campuses. The announcement comes as UTSA opens its Downtown Campus food pantry and names the new space the Whataburger Resource Room. The pantry at the Main Campus, which has served 10,344 students since opening in 2017, will be renamed the Whataburger Resource Room as well. Whataburger will provide UTSA with in-kind donations, financial assistance and volunteer support, aligned with the San Antonio Food Bank, to ensure that shelves at the two campus pantries remain adequately stocked year-round with food items in high demand. Partnerships like this are helping us to eliminate obstacles that can impede student success. TAYLOR EIGHMY, UTSA President Whataburger knows that the dream of a college education can be so quickly derailed when students struggle with basic needs. We hope this pantry will help shore up those dreams so these young adults can reach their full potential, said Pam Cox, Whataburger vice president of human resources and brand communication. Our support of this resource room is an investment not just in them but in the communities where they will work and in future generations of students. We are appreciative to Whataburger and the San Antonio Food Bank for their support and longstanding relationship with UTSA, said UTSA President Taylor Eighmy. These efforts will help us address the food insecurity needs of many students, allowing them to focus on their educational goals. Partnerships like this are helping us to eliminate obstacles that can impede student success, and Whataburgers commitment toward that goal is to be commended. Learn more about UTSAs campus pantries and ways to donate. In the first month of operation the pantry on the Main Campus provided 1,600 pounds of food to 400 UTSA students. By the end of its first year the pantry had served nearly 3,700 students in need. With the opening of the Whataburger Resource Room at the Downtown Campus, UTSA expects to double the number of students accessing this important resource. To celebrate the opening of the Downtown Campus Whataburger Resource Room, the university held a ribbon-cutting ceremony today with university leadership, Whataburger executives and the chief executive officer of the San Antonio Food Bank. A Demat account is a repository where the digital copies of your stocks can be stored and managed. In other words, a Demat (abbreviated form of dematerialisation) Account allows investors to hold shares and securities in electronic format, with an aim of facilitating safe, easy and convenient trade for users. It is just like a bank account, the only difference being that when a bank account holds cash, the Demat account holds shares and other securities. Those indulging in online trading in the stock market will find the entire procedure of investing, trading, holding, and monitoring faster, convenient and cost-efficient with use of Demat account. It also allows the investor to buy and sell or hold a whole lot of products, other than shares and stocks, be it bonds, mutual funds, government securities, or exchange-traded funds. All this can be done from the comforts of your home with the click of a mouse, and without any paperwork. How does a Demat account work? Working of a Demat account is complemented by two other accounts -- your bank account and your trading account. Else, the role of your Demat account will be limited to that of holding shares, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, equities etc. Trading account is where the actual cash/fund flow happens. Whenever you buy or sell stocks, the account gets debited or credited. Most commonly, a trading account refers to a day trader's primary account. Similarly, your bank account which is linked to Demat and Trading accounts helps you to transfer money to a trading account. When you buy or sell a particular share, first of all, you need to login to your trading account, which is also linked to your bank account. When a buy or sell request is put in the trading account for a particular stock, your Depository Participant (DP) forwards this to the stock exchange immediately along with other details. If your request is to buy, then the stock exchange looks for a seller who wants to sell the same quantity of shares and sends an order to clearance houses to debit the particular number of shares from the sellers Demat Account and credit it to the buyers Demat Account. What is the use of a Demat account? There are always chances of shares and stocks getting misplaced, damaged etc in its physical form. A Demat account addresses this safety concern as here the securities are stored in electronic format. Also, to trade in the share market one has to own a Demat account, without which trade cannot be carried out. Other uses of a Demat account are: Easy Access: Since Demat accounts are completely online, it can be easily accessed online from any part of the world and at any time. Variety holdings: One can hold various investments like mutual funds, equity shares, bonds and exchange-traded funds under one Demat account, which can be opened even if you dont possess any shares. Quick Monitoring: Demat accounts facilitate easy monitoring of the holdings from the comforts of ones home. Saves time: With everything in digital format, this online platform makes trading very convenient and less time-consuming. One can buy, sell or transfer funds and securities in a matter of seconds. Minimal Costs: Unlike physical trading, there are no additional costs of stamp duty, handling charges, etc. involved when you are trading with a Demat account. Corporate Gains: Dividends, interest, or refunds reach the Demat account holder without any delay. Be it bonus issues, stock split or rights shares, everything is automatically updated in the Demat accounts. How to use a Demat account? To start with, you need an active internet connection. Then you have to select a Depository Participant (DP), who will act as an agent to the depository. Apart from filling the account opening form, you will have to keep handy identity proof, address proof, PAN card, and a passport size photograph. Once you agree to the terms of the agreement and the charges, an in-person verification is initiated. Upon successful processing /verification of the application, a client ID or an account number is provided along with a transaction password. Now you can access online your Demat account, which is your storehouse for your shares, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, equities and other derivatives. Apart from some debt instruments like bank and company fixed deposits, most of the instruments can be held in a single demat account. For making better use of a Demat account, i.e. to make a business out of share market, an investor will require a trading account, along with a Demat account, and a Depository Participant (DP) who connects you to a depository. Currently, India has two depositories; National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) and Central Securities Depository Ltd (CDSL). One of the biggest uses of a Demat account is that you have access to beneficial information, i.e. you will be able to check live share market updates and analyse your different investments. It also ensures that you stay updated and provide share market news related to your investments. The DP will send regular messages related to dividend declaration, results, merger, buyback, and other info. You can access analyst reports based on company performance, financial projections, and historical information to help make informed investment decisions. You can track the performance of your portfolio across different investment products. This enables you to make necessary modifications to suit your risk profile and return expectations. Also, you can set alerts and automatic buy and sell instructions that need to be carried out when the securities reach pre-specified prices. Important terms & conditions in opening Demat account One should ensure that the papers are valid as on submission date and that they havent crossed the expiry date. Also, the personal details need to be provided in the prescribed format. Most of the brokers/ banks pre-fill them once you provide them with PAN number and Date of Birth. You need to verify and attest them. Your Bank Account number and IFSC code need to be shared for opening a Demat account. You will have to share with the DP two copy passport size photo, Savings bank account- cancelled cheque leaf/ bank statement /passbook with IFSC and MICR printed on it, Pan card details, Aadhar or voter id details and Income proof - bank statement of 6-month transaction (only for F&O). FAQs What are the types of Demat account? There are three types of Demat accounts, cater to different investors depending on their needs: Regular Demat account: Traders who are Indian citizens and reside in India use this type of account. Repatriable Demat account: This account is useful to the Non-Resident Indians as it allows fund transfers abroad. It requires an associated NRE bank account. Non- Repatriable Demat account: This account, too, is for the Non-Resident Indians. However, in this case, funds cannot be transferred abroad, and this account requires an associated NRO bank account. How can I change my signature in Demat account? If a Demat account wants to change his signature, s/he should visit the branch for submitting the application. New signature(s) of the holder(s) should be attested by the banker. The Demat account holder should also submit the following documents: Request for change of signature in the prescribed format signed by all account holders; self-attested proof of identity of account holder(s) whose signature is/are to be changed; and reason for change of signature. Can I link a trading account with Demat account? Yes, you can link your trading account with a Demat account. This will also help avoid providing your Demat account details for every transaction. Once the order is processed, the shares will be either deposited or debited from the linked Demat account. What are the key benefits of participating in a depository? The benefits of participating in a depository are: Immediate transfer of securities; no stamp duty on transfer of securities; elimination of risks associated with physical certificates such as bad delivery, fake securities; reduction in paperwork involved in transfer of securities; reduction in transaction cost; and nomination facility. Can someone else operate my demat account on my behalf? Yes. If you authorise any person to operate your account by executing a power of attorney and submit it to your DP, that person can operate the account on your behalf. Can I change details of my bank a/c? Yes. Monetary benefits on your security balances are paid directly to the bank account as per the details provided by you while opening the demat account. So you have to ensure that you inform your DP of any subsequent changes in your bank account details. China asserts sovereignty over border state whenever a major Indian personality visits it Artists perform during the 34th Statehood Day of Arunachal Pradesh, in Tawang district, February 20, 2020. (PTI) Beijing: China has objected to Union home minister Amit Shahs ongoing current visit to Arunachal Pradesh to attend its statehood day. Asserting sovereignty over the territory, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said in Beijing that China is "firmly opposed" to the trip as it violated Beijing's "territorial sovereignty and sabotaged political mutual trust". China claims Arunachal Pradesh is part its territory of southern Tibet. Amit Shah is in Arunachal Pradesh to attend the 34th Statehood Day function and launch a number of projects, officials said. China routinely objects to Indian leaders' visits to the northeastern state to highlight its claims over it. "China's position on the eastern sector of the China-India boundary, or the southern part of China's Tibet region, is consistent and clear," China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told an online media briefing in Beijing on Thursday while replying to a question. "The Chinese government has never recognised the so-called 'Arunachal Pradesh' and is firmly opposed to the Indian politician's visit to the southern part of China's Tibet region as it violates China's territorial sovereignty, undermined stability of the border area, sabotaged political mutual trust, and violated relevant bilateral agreement," he said. "The Chinese side urges the Indian side to stop taking any action that may further complicate the border issue and take concrete actions to uphold peace and tranquillity of the border area," he said. The India-China border dispute covers the 3,488-km-long Line of Actual Control (LAC). China claims Arunachal Pradesh as part of southern Tibet and the two countries have so far held 22 rounds of talks between special representatives to resolve the border dispute. I'm tired today. These morning shows are no joke. How does the Squawk crew do it day after day?! Or the local news folks who, I found out this morning, are live at 4 a.m. Ouch. (I love you Channel 4 New York!) At least I got a bunch of Twitter followers out of it, but that's another story ;-) We have lots coming up this afternoon. We'll actually be speaking with Bloomberg's national political chair, Mike Nutter, around 1:40 as the candidate prepares to take the debate stage tonight. (By the way, I am so upset it doesn't start until 9 p.m. ET!) Bloomberg has already spent more than any other presidential candidate ever. I'll be asking, how much is he prepared to spend, total? A billion dollars? More? Plus we'll hit the action in Virgin Galactic's stock, which is rivaling Tesla (which surged back over $900 this morning) as the biggest stock take-off story of the year. My unconfirmed hypothesis is that this is a Gen Z-fueled stock craze. It's not us millennials. We're getting old and tired (or maybe that's just me). I think it's the next generation. Like the college girl on Instagram (@pricelesstay) who dances as her Tesla shares hit new highs. I shall demand answers from Kate Rooney about this around 2:10 on Power Lunch. By the way, did you see the housing numbers this morning?? December's data was all super strong but dismissed as a warm-weather anomaly. But then we got the January new home construction report and whaddaya know, "housing starts [only] slipped last month by less than 4% to a 1.567 million unit pace, the second-best reading since 2006," as per economist Stephen Stanley. Yes, January was also warm, and we'll need a few more months to know if the housing market is really taking off. Still, the homebuilders' confidence survey out earlier this week remains near an all-time high. How much more home construction does this country need? That'll be the topic of tomorrow's discussion with Conor Dougherty, author of "Golden Gates." Bottom line: young people are pro-space, pro-Tesla, and pro-development these days. See you at 1 p.m! Kelly P.S. The Exchange is now a podcast! Click to subscribe and never miss a Rapid Fire. Twitter: @KellyCNBC Instagram: @realkellyevans Lydian International Limited (Company) announced that the Ministry of Environment (MOE) of the Republic of Armenia has granted Lydian Armenia (the Companys principal operating subsidiary) a permit to draw water from the Arpa River at a volume of 11l/s, but the blockades of the Amulsar gold mine continue, the Company noted in a statement. As per the statement, the Company had previously sought permission to draw water from the Arpa River on two prior occasions with higher level flow rates (in excess of 40l/s) to support long term operations, both of which were denied by the MOE. On December 23, 2019, the Company applied to the MOE to draw water at the lower flow rate, which is estimated to be enough to support completing construction of the Amulsar Project. The Company had also previously applied to draw water from the Darb River at a volume sufficient to support longer term operations. That application was also rejected by the MOE in October 2019. The Company is disputing the MOEs rejection in the Administrative Court of Armenia. Edward Sellers, Interim President & CEO of Lydian International, said: We recognize that the Government of Armenia has granted Lydian Armenia a water use permit that would allow the Company to recommence construction. However, the Company is still deprived of access to its property by illegal blockades and has been unable to raise financing to complete construction of the Amulsar Project as a result. We call on the Government of Armenia to take immediate action to address the continuing illegality around the Amulsar Project. The restoration of the rule of law will serve the interests of thousands of Armenian citizens, including community members, employees, contractors and suppliers, as well as thousands of investors who invested in Armenia in good faith and with the hope that their legal rights would be protected. A new trial has been ordered for a former Manitoba RCMP officer convicted of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl. Hey there, time traveller! This article was published 20/2/2020 (691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current. A new trial has been ordered for a former Manitoba RCMP officer convicted of sexually assaulting a nine-year-old girl. In a written decision released Thursday, the Manitoba Court of Appeal quashed Robert Dowds August 2017 conviction, ruling the original trial judge erred in assessing Dowds credibility, compromising the fairness of his trial. Dowd was sentenced to one year in jail for the crime, but remained free on bail pending appeal, first before Manitoba Court of Queens Bench, which dismissed his appeal last year, and then the Appeal Court. "Mr. Dowd is very pleased with the Court of Appeal decision ordering a new trial," his lawyer Sarah Inness said. "He has always maintained that he was innocent, so this is the outcome we were hoping for." Dowd was accused of assaulting the alleged victim when he was off-duty during a bonfire party in the Interlake. Prosecutors alleged Dowd was alone with the girl "stargazing" when he put his hands under her clothes and fondled her for approximately three minutes. 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. Dowd denied the allegation, testifying at trial the only time he was alone with the girl was when he took her to his motorhome to use the bathroom. The trial judge said she did not believe Dowds denials, calling his evidence "contrived." At the heart of Dowds appeal was the trial judges assessment of his credibility, with a focus on his then-lawyers failure to cross-examine two adult witnesses regarding Dowds testimony they had asked him to show the alleged victim to the bathroom. "Giving less weight to an accuseds evidence, simply because of a failure to cross-examine other witnesses on aspects of that evidence must be done cautiously by a trial judge," Justice Chris Mainella wrote on behalf of the Appeal Court. A new trial date has not been set and Dowd remains free on bail. dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca DUBLIN, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- AerCap Holdings N.V. ("AerCap") (NYSE: AER) today announced it has signed an agreement with Belavia - Belarusian Airlines for the lease of three new Embraer E195-E2 aircraft. The aircraft are from AerCap's order book with Embraer. The first aircraft is scheduled to deliver in December 2020, with the remaining two aircraft delivering in March and April 2021. AerCap was the launch lessor customer of Embraer's E-Jets E2 and has a total of 50 Embraer E190-E2s and E195-E2s owned and on order. "We are very pleased to announce the placement of three E2s with Belavia. We have a long history of working with our friends at Belavia, and we are excited to be a part of their fleet renewal plan," said Philip Scruggs, President and Chief Commercial Officer of AerCap. "With the introduction of Embraer's most advanced aircraft, Belavia will enjoy improved operating costs and versatility. We look forward to working with the Belavia and Embraer teams as these aircraft deliver." About AerCap AerCap is the global leader in aircraft leasing with 1,334 aircraft owned, managed or on order and $43.7 billion of total assets as of December 31, 2019. AerCap has one of the most attractive order books in the industry. AerCap serves approximately 200 customers in approximately 80 countries with comprehensive fleet solutions. AerCap is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (AER) and has its headquarters in Dublin with offices in Shannon, Los Angeles, Singapore, Amsterdam, Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Seattle and Toulouse. Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain statements, estimates and forecasts with respect to future performance and events. These statements, estimates and forecasts are "forward-looking statements". In some cases, forward-looking statements can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as "may," "might," "should," "expect," "plan," "intend," "estimate," "anticipate," "believe," "predict," "potential" or "continue" or the negatives thereof or variations thereon or similar terminology. All statements other than statements of historical fact included in this press release are forward-looking statements and are based on various underlying assumptions and expectations and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and may include projections of our future financial performance based on our growth strategies and anticipated trends in our business. These statements are only predictions based on our current expectations and projections about future events. There are important factors that could cause our actual results, level of activity performance or achievements to differ materially from the results, level of activity, performance or achievements expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. As a result, we cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements included in this press release will prove to be accurate or correct. In light of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, the future performance or events described in the forward-looking statements in this press release might not occur. Accordingly, you should not rely upon forward-looking statements as a prediction of actual results and we do not assume any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any of these forward-looking statements. Except as required by applicable law, we do not undertake any obligation to, and will not, update any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise. SOURCE AerCap Holdings N.V. Related Links www.aercap.com New polling done in the three swing states that won President Trump the 2016 election show him losing to all six top Democrats in Pennsylvania, while beating every one of them in Wisconsin. In Michigan, the Democrats are ahead of Trump, but barely - suggesting America's mitten is in play. A new Quinnipiac University Poll dropped Thursday, as both the Democratic hopefuls and Trump are in full campaign mode. President Trump still holds an edge in Wisconsin, but all six Democrats are beating him in Pennsylvania and Michigan, though the results in Michigan are tighter, new polling from Quinnipiac University shows A new Quinnipiac University Poll showed how each of the six Democrats who performed on the debate stage Wednesday night in Las Vegas performed against President Trump in the three key states that won him the 2016 election Trump is hosting a series of rallies out west this week while the Democrats are vying for support in this Saturday's Nevada caucuses, before they move on to South Carolina for the first-in-the-south primary. In Pennsylvania, the Quinnipiac poll shows former Vice President Joe Biden performing best against Trump. In a hypothetical general election match-up, Biden wins 50 per cent of the vote to Trump's 42 per cent. The next-best choice for Democrats to beat Trump in the Keystone State is Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who bests the president by 7 points. While former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg wins by 6 points against Trump. Both Sen. Bernie Sanders and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg - who topped the contests in Iowa and New Hampshire - win against Trump by 4 points. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, coming off a hot Las Vegas debate performance, still beats the president, but only by 3 points. The margin of error for all three states polls was plus or minus 3.4 per cent. Biden could be getting a boost in Pennsylvania thanks to being born there - he's a native of Scranton - and because his adopted home state of Delaware shares the Philadelphia media market. In Wisconsin, Trump is beating every Democrat soundly. He crushes Klobuchar by 11 points and Warren by 10. Bloomberg and Buttigieg both lose to the sitting president by 8 points - 49 per cent to 41 per cent in both cases. The best performances in the Badger State go to Biden and Sanders, who both lose by 7 points. Trump receives 50 per cent to Sanders' 43 per cent, while he earns 49 per cent to Biden's 42 per cent support in the state. In Michigan, Sanders and Bloomberg perform the best against Trump - each winning the state by a 5-point margin. Biden also gets above the margin-of-error, winning against Trump by 4 points. Warren then squeaks by with a 2-point lead, while Klobuchar and Buttigieg only best Trump by a single percentage point in the Wolverine State. Electromagnetic Geoservices ASA ("EMGS" or the "Company") has been notified by Mr Johan Kr Mikkelsen of his resignation from the position as chairman of the board of directors of the Company. The resignation is effective immediately. Mr Mikkelsen resigns for personal reasons. Mr Mikkelsen joined the board of directors of EMGS in 2014, and assumed the position of chairman of the board in 2019. The Company extends its gratitude towards Mr Mikkelsen for his outstanding contribution to EMGS over many years. At a meeting of the board of directors of the Company held earlier today, Mr Petteri Soininen was elected as the new chairman of the board of directors of EMGS for the period up until the 2020 annual ordinary general meeting of the Company, scheduled for 19 June 2020. Mr Soininen joined the board of directors of the Company in 2014. Contact Anders Eimstad, EMGS Interim Chief Financial Officer, +47 948 25 836 About EMGS EMGS, the marine EM market leader, uses its proprietary electromagnetic (EM) technology to support oil and gas companies in their search for offshore hydrocarbons. EMGS supports each stage in the workflow, from survey design and data acquisition to processing and interpretation. The Company's services enable the integration of EM data with seismic and other geophysical and geological information to give explorationists a clearer and more complete understanding of the subsurface. This improves exploration efficiency and reduces risks and the finding costs per barrel. EMGS operates on a worldwide basis with offices in Trondheim, Oslo, Houston, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Kuala Lumpur. This information is subject of the disclosure requirements pursuant to section 5-12 of the Norwegian Securities Trading Act. The first few months of the new year have been busy around The Woodlands Township and South Montgomery County; here are some newsy tidbits from throughout the community. The unofficial results of the 2020 village association board elections as well as races for the Residential Design Review Committees (RDRC) were recently announced by township officials.\ The Village of Cochrans Crossing RDRC saw eight candidates compete for five seats. The winners were: Zack Lowe; Gerard Raap; Ron Hughes; Walter Ehrhardt; and James Goldmeyer. The Village of Creekside Park RDRC had seven candidates competing for five seats. The winners were: Manfred Berretz; Jennifer Mares; Michael Ramsey; Ronald Harris; and Brenda Schafer. The Village of Grogans Mill RDCR was competitive with nine people vying for five seats. The winners were: Vince Fredrick; Sharon deMarsais; Melissa Baker; Alana Ashley amd Franklin R. Palmer. The race for seats on the Village Association Board in Grogans Mill had 11 candidates for eight seats. The winners were: Mitzi Fredrick; Kelly Lewis; Patricia Goodpastor; Gerard C. (Neil) Gaynor; John Yoars; Emily Hoppel; Marie Brannen; and Randy William Randolph Brannen. The Village of Panther Creek RDRC had seven candidates for five seats. The winners were: Jimmy Ward; Chris Kanipe; Kenneth Berntsen; Rennie Van Wyk; and Thomas Albertson. The Sterling Ridge RDRC also had seven candidates for five seats. The winners were: Gordon W. Craig; Jayden Arnold Tullos; Debbie Lance; Patricia van Otterdyk; and George Newman. There were no contested races in the following villages and RDRCs, with incumbents retaining their seats: The Village of Alden Bridge village association board and RDRC: The Village of Cochrans Crossing village association board; the Village of College Parks village association board and RDRC; both of the Village of Indian Springs RDRCs (broken into the TWA and WCA) and also the village association board; the Village of Panther Creek village association board; and the Village of Sterling Ridge village association board. Jazz festival set for March 21 at Market Street Music lovers already know The Woodlands as one of the best communities in the Houston region for free, live music, now there is a jazz festival on tap. The Gulf Coast Intercollegiate Consortium Jazz Festival will entertain customers and music lovers at Market STreet from noon to 8 p.m., Saturday, March 21. The event is free and produced by officials from the Lone Star Community College. According to a press release, there will be seven local bands and musicians gracing the stage during the eight-hour extravaganza. Among the bands performing at the event are: representative musical groups from Lone Star Community College-Montgomery; Lone Star Community College-North Harris; Lone Star Community College-Cy Fair; and the Houston Community College. Several guest musicians will also be on tap for the March 21 festival, including: Kelly Dean from 4-7 p.m. and Phillip K. Jones II, from 2-3 p.m. Grogan's Mill scholarship application period opens The Grogans Mill Village Association is seeking applicants for the associations annual student scholarship program. The scholarships are scheduled to be awarded in May, according to a press release, and will honor a total of five recipients who will receive $2,000 each. The scholarships are open to all graduating high school seniors as well as current college students who are official residents of the Village of Grogans Mill at time of their application submission. To be considered for one of the scholarships, students must be in good standing at their academic institution or school; attend either a two-year, four-year or vocational school; and will be awarded based on several factors. Among the considerations are: financial need, strong sense of community involvement as well as good grades, citizenship and extracurricular activities. To apply, download a scholarship application form at the associations website, www.gmva.org, or obtain one from local Conroe Independent School District counselors. Applications must submitted no later than April 15. Applications can be emailed to: scholarship@gmva.org or mailed via postal service to: Grogans Mill Village Association; ATTN: Scholarship Committee; P.O. Box 7522, The Woodlands, TX, 77380. No contested races in local cities The 2020 municipal elections in two small Montgomery County cities will be low-key after no challengers filed candidate paperwork to challenge a trio of incumbents in both Shenandoah and Oak Ridge North. In Shenandoah, incumbent Mayor Ritch Wheeler as well as incumbent council members Ron Raymaker, Place No. 1, and Michael McLeod, Place No. 5, were the only candidates to file papers with the city by the 5 p.m. Friday, Feb. 14, deadline. Council members and the mayor serve two year terms. In Oak Ridge North, another trio of incumbents were the only people to file papers seeking office by the 5 p.m., Feb. 14, deadline. Newly apppointed Mayor Paul Bond is seeking his first re-election as mayor after replacing now-retired mayor Jim Kuykendall in 2019. Joining Bond in seeking re-election for two-year terms are incumbents Alex Jones, Place No. 3, and Thomas Reed Coale, Place No. 1. Write in candidates for the May election have until 5 p.m., Feb. 18, to file papers to be considered as a write-in candidate in the May 2 election. jeff.forward@chron.com LONDON An attacker entered London Central Mosque during afternoon prayer and stabbed a 70-year-old prayer leader on Thursday, before being subdued by worshipers and arrested on suspicion of attempted murder, the police said. People who attend the mosque regularly said they were familiar with the suspect, and the Metropolitan Police said they were not treating the stabbing as an act of terrorism. The victims wound was not considered life-threatening, the police said.The injured man was a muezzin, the person who leads the call to prayer, and he had just begun singing when he was assaulted, the mosque said in a statement. The attacker was apprehended by the worshipers until the police arrived and arrested him, the mosques statement read. Magdi Yousef, a regular worshiper who witnessed the assault, said the suspect was a friend of the victims, and that he often saw the two of them together. The national carrier had also suspended its Delhi-Hong Kong flights due to the coronavirus epidemic that has killed more than 2,000 people in China till date. IndiGo and SpiceJet too had suspended their operations between India and China. New Delhi: The Indian crew member who tested positive for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) along with 78 other new cases on cruise ship Diamond Princess has been shifted to a hospital for treatment in Japan. The Indian Embassy at Tokyo said all eight Indians who tested positive are responding well to the treatment in the hospital. The remaining Indians on board are braving out the trying circumstances, the Indian embassy said. There are 132 crew members and six passengers of Indian origin who are still on board Diamond Princess as 13 more COVID-19 cases were reported on Thursday. The Ministry of External Affairs said that they are in touch with the Japanese authorities. Though there is a slowdown in the spread of the COVID-19 and detection of fresh cases in China, Air India on Thursday decided to play safe and extended suspension of its flights to the country till June 30. The national carrier had suspended its six weekly Delhi-Shanghai flights from January 31 to February 14. However, it did not resume flight operations from Febr-uary 15 onwards. The national carrier had also suspended its Delhi-Hong Kong flights due to the coronavirus epidemic that has killed more than 2,000 people in China till date. IndiGo and SpiceJet too had suspended their operations between India and China. Donald Trump told supporters in Phoenix that Democrats led a "pathetic attempt" to "overthrow" his presidency and the entire federal government, mocking the opposition party as he kicks his reelection campaign into full gear. The president accused Democrats of trying to "poison" American democracy just as they accuse him of doing in an early preview of what promises to be a top attack line by the Republican president. He said he has had to survive "very unfair witch hunts and partisan ... crusades" to take him down, before openly mocking Democrats. "And guess what? They failed," he said to loud applause. "And our polls numbers today are higher than they've ever been before." "I actually think we're going to win by a lot just like we did last time," Mr Trump said to more applause. Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump styles his 'You're fired!' pose in his Trump Tower office in June 2012. At the time he was known as a reality TV star on The Apprentice Diane Bondareff/Invision/AP Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves He was also well known as the patron of the Miss Universe competition Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Early signs of Trump's ambition for the presidency can be found everywhere. Not least in his 2011 book 'Time to get tough: Making America #1 again' Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump with Piers Morgan in November 2010. Piers Morgan has long held that he and Trump are good friends Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump appeared on Fox & Friends, his favourite show, in August 2011 Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump considered running in the 2012 election, where he would have faced Barack Obama. He is speaking here at an event for a Republican women's group Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump was subject to a Comedy Central roast in 2011. He is pictured here being roasted by rapper Snoop Dogg Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Given that this Trump store is in the lobby of Trump Tower, it can be said that Trump sells merchandise of himself out of his own home Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump held meetings with prominent Republicans when considering his 2012 bid. He is pictured here with Alaska governor Sarah Palin Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves He didn't end up running in 2012 afterall, instead endorsing Republican candidate Mitt Romney AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump's golf course in Aberdeen proved controversial in 2012 when he began lobbying the Scottish government against wind power in order that they wouldn't install turbines off the shore by his new course Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves He even gave evidence to a Scottish parliamentary committee discouraging wind energy AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves He still found time for a round of course AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves On 16 June 2015, Trump announced that he would run for the presidency of the United States in the 2016 election as a Republican Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves His campaign was divisive, courting controversy wherever he went. Ultimately he was declared the Republican candidate in June 2016 Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump took part in the TV debate against opponent Hillary Clinton on 9 October Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump and wife Melania vote in the presidential election on 8 November 2016 AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Hillary Clinton conceded defeat at 2:50am on 9 November and president-elect Trump swiftly delivered his victory speech to a crowd of supporters Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves News coverage around the world focused on the huge political upset that Trump's victory spelled AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump met with president Obama to discusss transition planning on 10 November. AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Donald Trump and Nigel Farage pose in the golden elevator at Trump Tower on 12 November 2016. Farage was the first British politician to meet with Trump after the election LeaveEUOffical/Twitter Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves The inauguration of Donald Trump took place on 20 January 2017. Trump's press secretary Sean Spicer boasted that the crowd was the 'largest ever' to witness an inauguration, a claim that was proved not to be true Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves In his first 100 days as leader, Trump signed 24 executve orders, the most of any president AFP/Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves One of Trump's most memorable election pledges was to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He is standing here in front of a prototype for a section of the wall Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump's meetings with other world leaders have provided no short supply of photo opportunities Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Trump was welcomed to the UK by the Queen and a state banquet was held at Buckingham Palace in his honour Reuters Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves Not everyone welcomed the president. Mass protests were held in London throughout his visits in both 2018 and 2019 EPA Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves One of the most significant meetings Trump has held with another leader was with North Korea's Kim Jong Un. In June 2019, Trump became the first sitting president to set foot in North Korea Getty Donald Trump celebrity president: A decade in two halves 2020 will see president Trump fight for a second term in office, who knows what the next decade will bring? Getty Mr Trump's 2020 campaign slogan is "Keep America Great." But he appeared to contradict that when he said Democrats, with investigations and an impeachment inquiry, "really stole three years from us." The president launched the rally by slamming "radical" Democrats, whom he called "socialists" and told the audience he plans to "be back" in the state "a lot" during the campaign. Arizona is on a list of states that could be in play come November; Mr Trump won it in 2016 by over 3 percentage points. As he typically does at official White House and campaign events, he hailed the state of the economy and railed against previous presidents over trade deals, saying, "America is no longer for sale." Mr Trump again acknowledged he "loves" political programming on television, and showed he is studying the Democratic primary and polling data. Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been surging; for the second time in public remarks on Wednesday, the president referred to him as "Mini Mike," a shot at the former mayor's height. He also deemed Tom Steyer, who pushed for Mr Trump's impeachment long before House Democrats did just that, a "jerk." "How'd that work out, Steyer? You jerk," Mr Trump said to laughter from the crowd. And he hit Democrats and the Obama administration over HealthCare.gov, the website that accompanied the Affordable Care Act, claiming his 13-year-old son Barron Trump could have designed a better site for a couple of US dollars. The Democrats' site launched with a slew of problems, to the embarrassment of the Obama White House. The elbow-throwing commander in chief also had some tough words for some US allies who went unnamed, saying they often treat the United States worse than its enemies. Recommended Top Obama official tears into John Bolton on stage over testimony Mr Trump's Phoenix rally was the first of three in as many days that are part of a West Coast campaigning and fundraising swing that started Tuesday evening and ends Friday afternoon with a political rally in Las Vegas. He also will headline a campaign rally Thursday evening in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The West Coast swing's rallies are part of a broader Trump-Pence campaign strategy of dropping the president into states a the day before or a few days ahead of 2020 primaries. One goal is to disrupt the Democratic race by encouraging his supporters, in states where they can vote in the opposition party's primary of the GOP one that he will easily win, to cross over. Another is classic Trump: He wants to amass as many of his own primary votes as possible, even though he lacks a serious Republican challenger. Donald Trump arrives at a Keep America Great rally in Phoenix, Arizona (AFP via Getty Images) The president stops short of encouraging this behavior, but often mentions it on stage -- and drops in a line about his preferred Democratic nominee being Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described "democratic-socialist." Mr Trump was asked by a reporter as he departed Washington on Tuesday about his strategy for being in Nevada and nearby states ahead of Democrats' crucial Nevada caucuses, which will see voters pick sides on Saturday. "Well, I'll be making a speech in Nevada, and that will be probably the day before, I guess," he said. "That seems to be pretty effective. We got more votes than any incumbent president in history, in Iowa and in New Hampshire, as you saw." "And, in that case, I went just before, the day before, and I went the day before, in both cases, Iowa and New Hampshire," he said matter-of-factly. "So it seems to be effective." The president announced during that impromptu gaggle on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland that he also will hold a rally in South Carolina before that state's Feb. 29 primary. "I'll be going to South Carolina they're (campaign staff) working that out now probably the day before," he said. "But, you know, look, we have a big voice and we might as well use it." Mr Sanders leads former Vice President Joe Biden by 24 per centage points in Nevada, with Mr Biden leading him by just over 3 per centage points in South Carolina, according to an average of polls tabulated by RealClearPolitics. Mr Sanders has taken a 10-point lead in national polls, with Mr Biden running second, according to RealClear. As the coronavirus outbreak continues to cause concern around the globe, the insurance industry is facing a potentially far-reaching impact but has the experience to handle what might come its way. Based on what the industry has learned from historical pandemic issues such as The Spanish Flu of 1918, and more recently, the Ebola outbreak beginning in 2014, there is almost no aspect of the insurance business that would not be impacted by a global pandemic, Wilson Elser Partner Paul White told Insurance Journal in a recent audio interview about what the coronavirus outbreak could mean for the industry. A global pandemic could have serious consequences for the insurance industry. [I]n fact, for lack of a better word, the plague that arises from a global pandemic if it is not controlled truly can be a calamity, he said. A pandemic, broadly speaking, is a global disease outbreak, White explained. A flu pandemic, similar to what is happening now with the coronavirus, typically occurs when a new influenza virus emerges for which people have little-to-no immunity and no vaccine. Pandemics are increasingly threatening in our society because we have a small global community, widespread commercial air travel and extensive international shipping of food, which creates transmission opportunities and provides the means for the rapid spread of contamination and infection relative to a virus such as coronavirus, White said. Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are common in many different species of animals, including camels, cattle, cats and bats. Rarely, animal coronaviruses can infect people and then spread between people such as with MERS, SARS, and now with this new virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. On February 11, 2020, the World Health Organization announced an official name for the disease that is causing the current outbreak of coronavirus: COVID-19. The CDC is closely monitoring this outbreak, which was first detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, China, and continues to expand. Chinese health officials have reported tens of thousands of cases in China. Illnesses, most of them associated with travel from Wuhan, also are being reported in a growing number of international locations, including the U.S. The U.S. reported the first confirmed instance of person-to-person spread with this virus on January 30, 2020, according to the CDC website. Its being watched very closely because were in that stage where we have a virus, we dont have a vaccine for it, and we are in a situation where we are getting human-to-human transmission of the coronavirus, White said. Insurance Impact White added that the situation raises questions around multiple product lines. You could look at almost any product line in the insurance industry and say, Is there going to be business interruption coverage under a property policy? Are there going to be liability suits that look at the ongoing transmission of the virus? Are directors and officers going to be held accountable for anything that they do? Is the health care industry going to be held responsible? Are pharmaceuticals?' he said. So you end up with a lot of questions being asked about culpability, both for the origin and for the spread, and for any failure to prevent the spread. Robert Lane, senior vice president at Alliant Insurance, said business interruption (BI) losses in particular are mounting due to the coronavirus, and insurers are receiving claims notices by the thousands. Just think about how many U.S. companies manufacture parts or otherwise work in coordination with Chinese companies to produce products of all kinds, he said. If they cant ship their products or we cant import them due to governmental restrictions, BI losses could skyrocket. Additionally, Lane said insurers are moving quickly to add exclusions to event cancellation insurance policies and refusing to offer the coverage for going-forward policies. Otherwise, business interruption claims are pouring in under first-party property policies, he said. He said he was with a global insurer last week in London whose head of claims confirmed they had already received more than 1,000 claims notices related to BI losses for coronavirus. A more traditional property insurance policy with business interruption coverage is typically going to require direct physical loss to property, White said. If a business shuts down because of contamination of that physical facility due to the coronavirus, it may have a viable basis for a direct physical loss, he said. Other policies, however, are referred to as specified risks and may not include coverage for contamination that renders a property uninhabitable. General liability insurance also may be implicated by the coronavirus outbreak if there are third-party bodily injury claims resulting from exposure to harmful conditions or failures to exercise reasonable care in guarding against the risk of exposure to the virus, Sherilyn Pastor, chair of McCarter & Englishs Insurance Recovery, Litigation and Counseling practice, explained. Even when such coverage is afforded, there may be an exclusion for epidemics or pandemics, and the policy definition of those terms will be important, she said. Additionally, directors and officers liability insurance could be impacted if shareholder litigation occurs alleging a companys failure to develop adequate contingency plans, to observe recommended or required protocols or the disclosure of risks to financial performance, she added. Employment practice liability insurance also may be affected if employees allege they were mistreated when suspected of being infected. Coordinated efforts by insurers to respond in a consistent manner will be one of the main focuses of the insurers impacted, Lane said. He added that it is critical for policyholders to review their current insurance program in coordination with their broker and experienced coverage counsel. Property and all risk policies, business income and BI insurance, crisis response and key person coverage are all areas where coverage may be available, he said. Policyholder Considerations Because the insurance industry has historically evolved over time, carriers could begin revising exclusions or charging additional premiums for carve-outs from those exclusions following a viral outbreak, according to Jennifer Black Strutt, an attorney in McCarter & Englishs Stamford, Conn., office. She pointed to one example of how the pollution exclusion in policies has taken several forms over the last several decades in response to toxic tort litigation and judicial interpretation of applicable policy language. This is all the more reason for policyholders to be particularly cautious when purchasing insurance going forward, she said. If, upon renewal, an insurer attempts to broaden an existing exclusion or add a new exclusion, the policyholder should consider whether it needs to purchase the coverage that is not being renewed. To ensure they have the right insurance coverage, businesses must give careful consideration to their particular needs and risks, Pastor said. No two companies are identical, and an insurance product that is sufficient for one policyholder might have significant short-comings as applied to another policyholder, she said. Corporate policyholders facing such risks and losses should familiarize themselves with their insurance policies to confirm they meet their needs. If coverage is available, policyholders should be aware of all of the policies notice requirements, as failure to comply with notice requirements may lead to an insurer disputing coverage and arguing for an unintentional forfeiture or limitation on coverage, she explained. All too often, a policyholder assumes the insurance purchased will cover a loss, and then is surprised to learn the insurer is asserting a coverage defense based on a policy provision, condition or exclusion that it did not highlight or ignored when selling them the insurance, she said. The devil is in the details when it comes to insurance contracts. Industry Response White said that despite the widespread impact of the coronavirus outbreak, overall, he believes the insurance industry is well prepared to address a global pandemic. I know some insurers go so far as to set up pandemic teams, and Ive been involved in actually working with insurers on advising them on issues as they evaluate their own coverage, he said. They in some respects treat it similar to a CAT team that insurance companies have in place to respond to natural disasters. He said that the insurance industry has examined the current outbreak of coronavirus, offered coverages, and is continuing to develop new product lines. Im aware of at least one broker and insurer who have teams together to look at U.S.-based businesses with global operations affected by an infectious disease outbreak, and they have come up with risk modeling that integrates into the risk model what happens in the event of a pandemic and how can we extend coverage for that, he said. They look at those triggers, they look at the risk model, and they get analytics on infectious disease outbreaks, looking against threats they may face and customizing according to their own specific expenses, geography, the type of disease theyre facing, or a specific calendar year. Lane agreed that the insurance industry is well-prepared to face this coronavirus outbreak, particularly after weathering many catastrophic events of the past decade. With all the global catastrophic events over the past decade wildfires, hurricanes, tornados, previous outbreaks, and the like insurers have extensive experience dealing with unforeseen events impacting populations, he said. Topics Carriers Catastrophe COVID-19 Claims USA Property Market China Lower Nob Hill, Lower Pac Heights, Polk Out of the Closet, at Polk and California streets, may soon be demolished for new housing. | Photo: Carrie Sisto/Hoodline Last week, the Planning Commission approved plans to construct a seven-story building at the corner of Polk and California streets the current site of thrift store Out of the Closet. The site, at 1567 California St., was approved for a smaller-scale development back in 2016. But developer and designer David Baker Architects now plans to utilize the states Density Bonus Law to exceed the sites height limit and add more units. The original building plan called for 63 units of housing over 8,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space. That's been upped to 100 units over about 10,000 square feet of retail, by allowing the building to exceed the site's 80-foot height limit by an extra seven feet. More than half of those units will be either two or three bedrooms. And unlike the original proposal, the new building will have no on-site parking. The density bonus calls for 19% of the project to be affordable housing, and the developer will split the difference between on-site affordable units and cash for the city's affordable housing fund. Nine on-site units (two studios, three one-bedrooms, three two-bedrooms, and one three-bedroom) will be offered below market rates, while a fee of $3.2 million to the city's affordable housing fund will cover the rest. A rendering of the proposed seven-story building, looking south down Polk Street. | Rendering: SF Planning The original proposal called for the building to be wedged directly up against neighboring 1424 Polk St. But neighbors were concerned about losing their light shaft, so the building will now be broken up into four masses that allow extra light in. 39 of the units will have private balconies, and a central courtyard will provide another 3,799 square feet of common open space. Every unit will get bicycle parking, with additional class-2 bike spaces on the sidewalk. David Baker Architects' design is intended to blend the large building in with its smaller neighbors. | Rendering: SF Planning Several community members voiced concern about the projects lack of parking and its size, which will require the combination of three neighboring properties at the corner of California and Polk. Story continues But the Planning Commission asserted that the site has high access to public transit, with several nearby bus lines, a cable car line and a bike lane on Polk. It's also within walking distance of many neighborhood retailers, with both Trader Joe's and Whole Foods Market just two blocks away. Aerial rendering of the future building at 1567 California St. | Rendering: SF Planning The new building has room for up to seven retail storefronts on the ground floor, which will be designed to be flexible, allowing tenants to combine smaller spaces as needed. With the go-ahead from Planning, the new project will now seek building permits though if construction doesnt begin within three years of last weeks authorization, it will have to seek approval over again. We'll keep you posted on the fate of Out of the Closet and other neighboring businesses on the site, including when they plan to close and whether any will return in the new building. Yi-Chin Lee, Staff / Staff photographer Just a few years ago, Khalid was in high school in El Paso posting his songs to SoundCloud. Now, hes drawing enthusiastic crowds as one of pops brightest new stars. His second album, Free Spirit, was released last year and has produced his biggest hit to date, Talk. It follows a series of hits that includes Location, Young Dumb & Broke and Love Lies with Normani. Actor Ananya Panday has boarded the cast of director Puri Jagannadh's pan-India feature, also starring Vijay Devarakonda, the makers announced on Thursday. Tentatively titled "Fighter", the film is being simultaneously shot in Telugu and Hindi. "Couldn't be more excited to join a pan-India film. Thank you @purijagan, for this opportunity! Looking forward to a super fun time on the set," Panday wrote on Twitter. "Ananya, And we warmly welcome you to the Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam industries," tweeted Devarakonda. In an interview with PTI, the "Arjun Reddy" star recently confirmed that he will dub his own lines for the Hindi version, which will be presented by Dharma Productions' Karan Johar and Apoorva Mehta. The film will also be dubbed in other south Indian languages. Johar also welcomed Panday, who made her Bollywood debut with Dharma's "Student of the Year 2", to the new film. "Welcoming the stunning @ananyapandayy for our Pan-India venture with @TheDeverakonda, directed by @purijagan. It's going to be a thrilling ride," the filmmaker wrote on the microblogging site. The project marks the first collaboration between Deverakonda and Jagannadh, who is best known for films such as Mahesh Babu-starrer "Pokkiri" and Amitabh Bachchan-fronted "Bbudadh... Hoga Terra Baap". (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) M&T Bank Corp. (NYSE:MTB) and Xcel Energy Inc. (NASDAQ:XEL) declared quarterly dividends on Feb. 19. The two large-cap stocks are loyal payers as they have been distributing dividends for at least two decades. M&T Bank M&T Bank announced that a payment of $1.1 per common share will be made on March 31 to shareholders of record as of March 2. The ex-dividend date is scheduled for Feb. 28. The payment is in line with the previous distribution. Based on Wednesday's closing share price of $168.26, the quarterly dividend produces a trailing 12-month dividend yield of 2.45% and a forward yield of 2.62%. The industry median is 3.09% for the trailing 12-month dividend and 3.19% for the forward dividend. The Buffalo, New York-based regional bank has paid dividends since June 1998 and increased them by nearly 8% over the past five years. The company supports the quarterly dividend with $9.1 billion in cash on hand as of Dec. 30, 2019. Further, the business can generate an operating cash flow of $2 billion to $2.5 billion every 12 months. Year to date, the share price has declined by 1%. The 52-week range is $141.5 to $176.11. The stock has a market capitalization of $21.97 billion, a price-earnings ratio of 12.19, a price-book ratio of 1.59 and a price-sales ratio of 3.69. The Peter Lynch chart shows that the stock is trading below its fair value. Thus, it is not expensive. With 10.83% of outstanding shares, Vanguard Group Inc. is the company's largest institutional owner, followed by BlackRock Inc. with 7.5% and Wellington Management Group LLP with 4.80%. Sell-side analysts on Wall Street issued a hold recommendation rating for shares of M&T Bank with an average target price of $182.22 per share. Story continues Xcel Energy Xcel Energy announced a quarterly dividend of 43 cents per common share. The Minneapolis-based distributor of electricity will pay it on April 20 to shareholders of record as of March 13. The ex-dividend date is scheduled for March 12. The payment represents a 6.2% hike from the previous distribution. Based on Wednesday's closing price of $70.79, the quarterly distribution produces a forward dividend yield of 2.43% versus the industry median of 3.13% and a trailing 12-month yield of 2.29% versus the industry median of 3%. Xcel Energy has paid dividends since Sept. 2000. The company has hiked the dividend by 6.2% over the past five years. The company supports the payment of the dividend with $888 million in cash available on hand as of Dec. 30, 2019. The last 12 months of operations have generated about $3.2 billion in cash flows. The stock has climbed 11.5% year to date. The 52-week range is $53.35 to $71.43. The stock has a market capitalization of $37.12 billion, a price-earnings ratio of 26.81, a price-book ratio of 2.82 and a price-sales ratio of 3.15. The Peter Lynch chart below shows the shares are trading above their fair value, so they may be not cheap. With 9.87% of outstanding shares, BlackRock is the company's largest fundholder, followed by Vanguard Group with 9.25% and JPMorgan Chase & Co. with 7.38%. Sell-side analysts on Wall Street issued a hold recommendation rating for shares of Xcel Energy with an average target price of $68.35 per share. Disclosure: I have no positions in any securities mentioned. Read more here: Not a Premium Member of GuruFocus? Sign up for a free 7-day trial here. This article first appeared on GuruFocus. In a bid to avoid any controversy over the appointment of Shiv Sena MLA Ravindra Waikar and party MP Arvind Sawant to key posts with Cabinet rank, the Uddhav Thackeray-led government may issue a notification as per which they may not get perks and allowances for the posts. The state government had appointed Waikar as the chief coordinator in the chief minister's office (CMO) and Sawant as the head of the state Parliamentary Coordination Committee. "A notification or a revised Government Resolution (GR) will be issued as per which they may not get perks and allowances for the posts. This is to avoid any allegations of office of profit," an official said on Thursday. Waikar, who is an MLA from Jogeshwari constituency in suburban Mumbai, was appointed chief coordinator in CMO and also allotted the rank of Cabinet minister. His responsibility is to coordinate with public representatives and the chief minister on fast-tracking projects and fund allocations. Sawant, an MP from South Mumbai, was last week appointed as the chairman of a state-level parliamentary committee set up to follow up pending proposals related to Maharashtra with the central government. He was also given the rank of a Cabinet minister. However, the Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government thinks that the opposition BJP may try to corner it during the upcoming Budget session of the state legislature over these appointments citing the office of profit. Talking to PTI, Sawant said the office of profit issue will not arise if he and Waikar do not avail allowances and perks that come with the post. When contacted, Waikar said, "How can the government give us perks and allowances as elected representatives and in our new posts together? We have not yet taken charge. A rectification to the GR will be done." Waikar was Minister of State for Housing in the previous Devendra Fadnavis-led government, while Sawant was Minister for Heavy Industries in the Modi government. He was not inducted by Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray into his cabinet, while Sawant quit as Union minister when the Sena and BJP fell out over power sharing in Maharashtra. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Police have arrested two men after a South Jersey home was shot up twice early Wednesday morning. Penns Grove officers responded to Penn Street shortly after 2 a.m. Wednesday for a report of gunshots and found a home had been struck by several bullets, authorities said. Detectives processed and cleared the scene, with no suspects identified. A little more than an hour later, police were dispatched to Penn Street again for reports of gunshots around 3:30 a.m. Officers found the same house had been struck again by gunfire. A victim suffered a graze wound in the second attack, but refused medical treatment, police said. After learning the description of a vehicle allegedly tied to the shootings, police stopped a vehicle and arrested two men. A large quantity of drugs and a weapon were recovered, police said. The pair, who have not been identified by police, were charged with gun possession and drug offenses, but have not been charged yet in the shootings, officials confirmed. After the shootings, officials tried to calm concerns from residents via a post on Facebook, stating There is no current threat to the safety of the citizens of Penns Grove. Matt Gray may be reached at mgray@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @MattGraySJT. 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. Lounging on a beach with a tropical drink at a resort in Cancun or Tulum makes for a great escape from the frozen tundra. Thats why so many Americans myself included head to the Yucatan, that peninsula at the southern tip of Mexico that splits the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Sunshine is abundant. Thoughts of snow melt with the warmth. Relaxation rolls in with each wave. But Ive also ventured beyond the popular Yucatan beaches. During my last trip, I stayed in Merida, a landlocked city with a rich Mayan and colonial history. On day trips from there, I found places with more locals than tourists, I searched for alligators and flamingos, swam in caves and bumped down remote roads that led to shockingly pink waters, where river and the Gulf of Mexico meet. Each of these off-the-beaten-path places is alluring in its own way, and visiting them is surprisingly easy. In fact, some of the locations Ive explored all hidden oases of the Yucatan, within an hour or two of Merida can be easily experienced during a day trip from the Yucatans Caribbean side. As for the beach chair back at the resort with your name on it, well, itll be waiting for you. Ria Lagartos As my partner Joel and I climbed onto a small boat, a fisherman approached us. He showed us his days catch of a not-so-ordinary-looking fish. Then he wished us luck in capturing an alligator. I wondered about that comment, even though the small fishing village of Rio Lagartos translates to Alligator River. But we werent here after a two-and-a-half-hour ride from Merida to catch anything, least of all a scaly reptile. Wed come to explore the bird-rich tangle of nature on the towns edge known as the Ria Lagartos Biosphere Reserve. The 603-square-kilometre reserve holds mangrove forest, saltwater estuaries and sand dunes and about 400 species of birds, including snowy white ibis and brown pelicans. Its most known, though, for its vast population of flamingos, said to be the largest in Mexico. We cut our hour-long boat ride short because of an impending storm, so we didnt make it to the flamingos nesting site. We were, however, mesmerized by the number of beautiful birds we encountered. In the end we spotted one alligator and a handful of visitors with white clay smeared on their bodies for its alleged healing benefits. A beautiful sunset greeted us as we made our watery way back to our car. Find information on the UNESCO Biosphere Reserve at tinyurl.com/vvhrlwf. Las Coloradas After our adventure along the river, we took a short drive to the pink sea of Yucatan known as Las Coloradas. These saline lakes appear in otherworldly hues of rose and pink, a result of high concentrations of algae, shrimp and other organisms. Flamingos, which are grey early in life, become pink after feeding on the organisms in the coloured saltwater. It is prohibited to go into the water. There isnt much infrastructure for travellers bring your lunch but the scene is worth the drive (thetravelblog.at/pink-lagoon-las-coloradas/). Choco-Story Museum About 60 kilometres south of Merida, Joel and I hiked through the ancient Mayan city of Uxmal, where archeological finds include a pyramid, palaces and other buildings that are among the best preserved Mayan ruins in the country. So after exploring Uxmal, a popular tourist site, we didnt expect much in comparison when we dropped in at the Choco-Story Museum across the street. But the museum offered far more than anticipated. We learned about the history of cocoa and its importance to the Mayan people. I was even more surprised by the museum grounds, where paths cut through lush vegetation, past an array of parakeets and to a visit with rescued spider monkeys. We also saw a re-enactment of a Mayan shaman cleansing. And then there was the gift shop: Lets not forget about the amount of chocolate I coveted (choco-storymexico.com/uxmal-ingles.html). Cenote Hacienda Mucuyche One of the most unusual natural wonders in the Yucatan Peninsula are its cenotes, sinkholes created by the collapse of limestone. There are 6,000 of these pools in the Yucatan. They were once used as religious places for the Mayan people, who considered them sacred wells. Today, many offer rappelling activities, diving equipment and rope courses. Among my favourites are Cenote Hubiku in Valladolid, and Cenote Hacienda Mucuyche in Abala. One day, we set out from Merida to find Mucuyche. After an hours drive, we came to a village where thatch-roofed palapas lined dirt roads, their inhabitants sleeping in hammocks. A wooden sign with cenote carved into it seemed like a good omen. Horses were tied to a tree. The crowing of roosters penetrated the air. At the entrance to a deep cave, life jackets dangled from a rope. We were invited to visit the small family cenote for a small fee, but it wasnt Cenote Hacienda Mucuyche. Down the street, two blocks to the left, a man instructed. We soon came upon a large stone gate and our destination. We waited to buy tickets behind a handful of mostly Mexican tourists. Inside, we were led on a brief tour through what remained of a beautiful, historic hacienda that once housed a wealthy family. Then we followed a winding path lined by trees that led to a cave with turquoise water. It was magical, peaceful and tranquil. A guide led us, wading, through the pools into a dark cave. I put on the goggles the site provided, dipped my head into the water and saw a wonder of the world. That may be an exaggeration, but it looked like New Mexicos Carlsbad Caverns, only underwater. Stalactites seemed to go on forever. Back into the light, we floated down a long green stream lined by pothos vines to a subterranean waterfall. Like most cenotes today, Hacienda Mucuyche has locker rooms and a restaurant where local Mayan women make homemade corn tortillas (cenoteshaciendamucuyche.com/en). Celestun The small fishing village of Celestun, about 95 km from Merida, is near the Celestun Biosphere Reserve, a main courtship area for greater pink flamingos who flock there during fall and winter. Tour guides on the beach wait under palapas to take visitors on small-boat excursions to see the flamingos and freshwater springs. We opted to lounge on the secluded white-sand beach, which we shared with locals, cold beers in our hands. It was just another day on the Yucatan. Xcaret The only tourist trap we encountered was Xcaret, a park with a $132 entrance fee, in Playa del Carmen. It felt like a zoo by the ocean, but there was one part that we found phenomenal: the cultural area that included a maze through a makeshift Mexican cemetery, a Mexican rodeo and a big cultural show at the end of the evening that was worth the price of admission alone. Read more about: Campaign trail: Donald Trump talks to reporters before flying to a rally in California. AP Photo/Evan Vucci Donald Trump offered fugitive WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a pardon if he said Russia was not involved in the leak of Democratic emails, a court has heard. The claim that Mr Trump offered the deal through a Republican politician emerged as Mr Assange (48) appeared at Westminster Magistrates' Court in preparation for an extradition hearing next week. His barrister Edward Fitzgerald highlighted evidence alleging Dana Rohrabacher, then a US congressman, went to see Mr Assange while he was still claiming asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in August 2017. He said a statement from Mr Assange's lawyer Jennifer Robinson shows "Mr Rohrabacher going to see Mr Assange and saying, on instructions from the president, he was offering a pardon or some other way out, if Mr Assange... said Russia had nothing to do with the DNC leaks". A series of emails from the Democratic National Committee which proved embarrassing for the party and the Clinton presidential campaign were hacked before being published by WikiLeaks in 2016. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser told the court that the evidence was admissible. Mr Assange is wanted in America to face 18 charges, including conspiring to commit computer intrusion, relating to the publication of US cables a decade ago. Expand Close Video link: Julian Assange is being held at Belmarsh prison in London. Photo: REUTERS/Simon Dawson/File Photo / Facebook Twitter Email Whatsapp Video link: Julian Assange is being held at Belmarsh prison in London. Photo: REUTERS/Simon Dawson/File Photo He could face up to 175 years in jail if found guilty of working with former US army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak hundreds of thousands of classified documents. The extradition hearing is due to begin at Woolwich Crown Court on Monday, starting off with a week of legal argument. It will then be adjourned and continue with three weeks of evidence scheduled to begin on May 18. The decision, which is expected months later, is likely to be appealed against by the losing side, whatever the judge's ruling. Mr Assange has been held on remand in Belmarsh prison since last September after serving a 50-week jail sentence for breaching his bail conditions while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He entered the building in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex offence allegations, which he has always denied. They were dropped by Sweden in November, with prosecutors saying the evidence had been weakened by the amount of time that had elapsed since the alleged offences. Mr Assange appeared in court yesterday by videolink from Belmarsh, wearing dark tracksuit bottoms and a brown jumper over a white shirt. The Australian national spoke to confirm his name and date of birth, and sat holding a stack of papers during the hearing. It came after Australian MPs George Christensen and Andrew Wilkie called Boris Johnson to intervene and stop the extradition hearing. Shadow chancellor John McDonnell is expected to become the first British MP to see Mr Assange behind bars in a visit to Belmarsh today. It has emerged that fellow inmates at the high-security prison successfully lobbied for his release from solitary confinement. Mr Assange's father John Shipton said his son's condition had improved, but said the extradition going ahead would be akin to a "death sentence" for him. Meanwhile, William Barr, the US attorney general, has told people close to Mr Trump that he is considering quitting over the president's tweets about Justice Department matters, it has been claimed. Three officials in the Trump administration said Mr Barr had given the warning to members of the president's inner circle, both inside and outside the White House. It raises the prospect of a possible confrontation over the independence of the Justice Department. So far, Mr Trump has defied Mr Barr's requests, both public and private, to keep quiet on matters of federal law enforcement. The administration officials said that the attorney general seemed to be sharing his position with advisers in hopes that the president would get the message he should stop weighing in publicly on ongoing criminal investigations. "He has his limits," said one person familiar with Mr Barr's thinking. Late last week Mr Barr publicly warned the president in an interview with ABC News that his tweets "make it impossible for me to do my job". During the fair, applications will be reviewed, and interviews will be conducted for both full and part-time positions. Andrews Federal is a Certified Great Place to Work company with multiple positions available in Washington D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Open positions include but are not limited to Commercial Collector, Security Analyst (Information Technology), Teller, Financial Service Representative, and Assistant Branch Manager. Andrews Federal offers an environment where employees can flourish professionally and personally. Their benefits package is structured to help employees enjoy a healthy work-life balance. Employees are provided affordable medical, dental, vision, and prescription health plans, 11 paid holidays a year, a 401(K) match, tuition reimbursement, and more. Andrews Federal is seeking to hire professionals that are passionate about helping people and giving back to their communities. Interested job seekers should attend the Andrews Federal Career Fair on February 27 at the MGM. "We have a lot to be proud of." said Jim Hayes, President/CEO, Andrews Federal, "I look forward to seeing what our new team members will help us accomplish." About Andrews Federal Credit Union Initially founded in 1948, Andrews Federal has grown to serve more than 133,525 members in the District of Columbia, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey, and military installations in central Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Learn more at andrewsfcu.org and on Facebook and Instagram. PRESS CONTACT: Chelsea Reid, Andrews Federal Credit Union 301-702-5370 [email protected] SOURCE Andrews Federal Credit Union Related Links http://www.andrewsfcu.org Amid concerns in the party over leadership issue and calls for elections to the top post, the Thursday said was a clear successor for party president's post to his mother and incumbent Sonia Gandhi. sources said Rahul was the only contender in the race for the president's post because the entire rank and file of the party want him to lead, hinting that elections in that case may not even be necessary. With differing voices emerging within the party over the leadership issue, a senior leader claimed that Rahul has acceptability across the country and also the capability to lead the party. There is also speculation that Rahul may be elevated to the top post in the proposed plenary session of the Congress slated sometime in April. Sources in the party said that the session may be slated after the budget session of Parliament and a major section within the party wants Rahul to be installed as party president again. Congress leaders Sandeep Dikshit and Shashi Tharoor have made calls for fresh elections for the party's top post to infuse fresh vigour in the party. Asked about the remarks made by these leaders, Congress chief spokesperson said the Congress working committee has decided on the Congress president. "If anyone has any doubts about this, he should kindly read the resolution of the CWC before giving any statements in public and they will gain some knowledge," he told reporters when asked about Tharoor. On Dikshit's statement, Surjewala said though he has not read it but if Dikshit and leaders like him work hard in their own parliamentary constituencies the Congress will surely emerge victorious. "I have not seen Dikshit's remarks, but one must realise when the leaders contest themselves they should understand why they lost elections and how much votes they got. "Instead of giving statements on social media and interviews in the media, if Sandeep Dikshit works hard in his own constituency and politically encash the work initiated during Sheila Dikshit's rule, the Congress will emerge victorious. It is my appeal to every leader like Dikshit that instead of giving knowledge to the entire country, they should first show the benefits of their own work done in their constituencies," he said. While Dikshit has demanded that there should be fresh elections to the top post in the Congress respecting Rahul's decision of resigning and not having a Gandhi as the next Congress president, his remarks has been supported by Tharoor. "What Sandeep Dikshit said openly is what dozens of party leaders from across the country are saying privately, including many with responsible positions in the party. I renew my appeal to CWC to hold leadership elections to energise workers and inspire voters," he said. Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg locked horns on political philosophy in Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate, arguing over who's a communist and who's a socialist. Their bickering over Bloomberg's billions and Sanders' millions descended into a fight over who owned more homes during a contentious debate where the entire stage of candidates ganged up on the former New York City mayor and the Vermont senator found himself a target after becoming the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. Bloomberg was defending his net worth, estimated to be around $64 billion, pointing out he earned it through 'hard work' and that he was giving his money away when Sanders argued the workers helped make that money. Mr. Bloomberg, it wasn't you who made all that money. Maybe your workers played some role in that as well,' the Vermont senator said. 'And it is important those workers are able to share the benefits also. When we have so many people who go to work every day and they feel not good about their jobs. They feel like cogs in a machine. I want workers to be able to sit on corporate boards as well so they can have some say over what happens to their lives.' Mike Bloomberg accused Bernie Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, of being a communist Bernie Sanders charged the former mayor with taking a 'cheap shot' The former New York City mayor then accused Sanders, a self-described Democratic socialist, of being a communist. 'I can't think of a ways that would make it easier for Donald Trump to get reelected than listening to this conversation. This is ridiculous. We're not going to throw out capitalism. It was called communism and it just didn't work,' Bloomberg said. Democratic socialists believe the means of production should be collectively owned alongside a democratic political system of government. Communism advocates for the common ownership of the means of production and the absence of social classes, money and state. Sanders, who is worth $2.5 million according to Forbes, accused Bloomberg of taking a 'cheap shot' against him. 'Let's talk about democratic socialism, not communism, Mr. Bloomberg. That's a cheap shot,' he said. The two men represent the opposing ends of the Democratic Party - Bloomberg for the moderates and Sanders for the liberals. And they are both fighting to get their supporters to help them win the nomination. Bloomberg didn't let up against Sanders, pointing out the senator owns three homes. What a wonderful country we have. The best known socialist in the country happens to be a millionaire with three houses. What did I miss here?,' the former mayor said. Sanders outlined the three homes he owns. I work in Washington, house one. Live in Burlington, house two. Like thousands of other Vermonters, I have a summer camp. Which tax haven is your home?,' he shot back. New York City, thank you very much,' Bloomberg snapped back, 'and I pay all my taxes and I'm happy to do it because I get something for it.' The first debate featuring Bloomberg found the former mayor defending his record on race and gender amid his defense of the billions he made as a businessman in New York. Bernie Sanders walks behind Mike Bloomberg on the debate stage It was the first debate featuring Mike Bloomberg along with Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar Sanders, who has taken the lead in the recent national polls on the race, had to defend his health and his ability to beat Donald Trump in November. The debate, held in Las Vegas, comes three days before the Nevada caucuses - the third nominating contest for Democrats. Bloomberg may be on the debate stage but he won't be participating in the caucuses. He's skipping the first four voting states to focus on Super Tuesday - the March 3 date where 14 states pick one-third of the delegates needed for the nomination. While most of the hits were against Bloomberg, all of the candidates came under fire from one another and they all ended up on the defense at one point or another during the two-hour event. 'This has been quite a debate,' Amy Klobuchar said at its conclusion. Army Chief General M M Naravane on Thursday said there has been a decline in cross-border terrorism, making an indirect reference to terror financing watchdog FATFs recommendation that Pakistan should remain in the Grey List for its failure to check terror funding. The army chief reiterated that incidents of terror in Jammu and Kashmir too had decreased and the Indian Army was continuing its pressure on various terror groups that it had identified. There are at least 15-20 terrorist camps inside Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir where there are around 250-350 terrorists at any given time and numbers may fluctuate, General Naravane told news agency PTI. Speaking about the external dimension which has contributed to the decrease in cross-border terrorism, the army chief said, If the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) comes down heavily on them, they may have to do a rethink on their rhetoric and activities. FATF is a factor in the reduction of terror activities in the Kashmir valley. On the effect of the ongoing Financial Action Task Force plenary in Paris on Pakistan, the army chief said, China has also realized that they cannot continue to back their all-weather friend (Pakistan) all the time. We have been getting inputs. We have been able to foil (Pakistan Armys) BAT action attempts even before they have been able to launch them, General Naravane said. A sub-group of the global terror financing watchdog FATF on Tuesday had recommended continuation of Pakistan in the Grey List for its failure to check terror funding in and around its territory. Pakistan needs about 15 to 16 votes to move out of the Grey List and a minimum of three votes to avoid being blacklisted by the watchdog. The FATF is an inter-governmental body established in 1989 to fight money laundering, terrorist financing and other related threats to the integrity of the global financial system. The FATF currently comprises 36 members with voting powers and two regional organisations, representing most of the major financial centres across the world. A string of housebuilders hit record highs after HSBC tipped the sector as the latest winner from Boris Johnson's landslide election victory. In a bullish note, analysts upgraded profit and dividend forecasts as it said the Tory party's 80-seat majority has 'brought the prospect of a final settlement of Brexit closer and unleashed pent-up demand in housing'. This is especially true, HSBC said, in the South East, where Britain's major builders have a foothold and where it reckons prices will pick up most sharply after a drop in autumn. Builders tipped: HSBC analysts said the Tory party's 80-seat majority has 'brought the prospect of a final settlement of Brexit closer and unleashed pent-up demand in housing' This is added to an expected rush to take advantage of the Government's Help to Buy scheme, which will shut to all but first-time buyers from April 2021. Berkeley Group, Persimmon, Barratt Developments, Bellway and Redrow all closed at record highs. HSBC said Barratt and Redrow benefit from having a weighting to southern England. And it pointed to Bellway's conservative strategy of disciplined land-buying bumping its target price from 4300p to 5470p and Crest Nicholson's upcoming turnaround as reasons to be buoyant about the company, which is one of their top picks. Stock Watch - Distil Rum and vodka maker Distil has signed a deal to make new drinks with honey and gin maker British Honey Co (BHC). Each will put 30,000 into the joint venture and will trade other skills in a wider partnership. AIM-listed Distil will be able to use BHCs distillery and Distil will help with BHC marketing its own brands. Distil warned investors it is likely to rack up unbudgeted costs and these could mean profits come in below expectations but shares still rose 3 per cent, or 0.03p, to 0.85p. Crest rose 1.6 per cent, or 5.9p, to 519p while Persimmon was up 1.7 per cent, or 55p, to 3298p. HSBC also moved Berkeley Group up from 'hold' to 'buy', as it believes the firm, which climbed 2.1 per cent, or 112p, to 5474p, will see the smallest hit once the Help to Buy changes come into force. The upgrade means HSBC now has 'buy' ratings on all nine listed housebuilders. Shares in peer Taylor Wimpey also rose by 1.9 per cent, or 4.5p, to 236.2p. This nudged the FTSE 100 up 0.9 per cent, or 75.01 points, to close at 7457.02, though the blue-chip index also got a boost from a slowing in the rate of new cases of the coronavirus. But despite the slowdown, Berenberg analysts are not convinced the cruise industry will recover soon. The German investment bank kept a 'sell' rating on Carnival as it said a likely fall in future bookings will add to the initial damage of cancellations and compensations, meaning cruise companies may need to offer a 39 discount per passenger to fill ships. Carnival, whose Diamond Princess ship had the highest concentration of coronavirus cases outside of China, rose by 1.1 per cent, or 33p, to 3116p. The FTSE 250 climbed 0.6 per cent, or 172.40 points, to 21,850.86, helped by a 12.2 per cent rise in Hochschild Mining, which added 20.7p to close at 181.2p. The gold and silver miner saw its 2019 profits almost double to 59million as better prices for precious metals pushed higher by trade tensions between the US and China combined with lower costs. Tech group Micro Focus launched a 1.1billion debt refinancing soon after chairman Kevin Loosemore announced he would leave, and it kicked off a strategic review after revenues plunged almost 30 per cent last year. It finished 1.9 per cent, or 14.9p, higher at 801.2p. Royal Mail was the victim of a scathing broker update, falling 2.9 per cent, or 5.2p, to 174.2p as Liberum kept a 'sell' rating on its stock and slashed the price target to 120p form 175p. Analysts claimed its strategy is 'undeliverable', and that managers openly questioning whether it will meet its 2024 targets is 'hardly encouraging'. And small-cap group Avon Rubber, which makes equipment such as gas masks and dairy tubes that milk cows, rose 0.2 per cent, or 5p, to 275p as it clinched a new chairman, Bruce Thompson, and was tipped to join the FTSE 250 in the next reshuffle in March. LINCOLN, Neb., Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Sandhills Global, the tech company behind the online auction platform AuctionTime.com, will join RJ Stockwell Inc. Land & Auction Company in hosting a luncheon on Wednesday, February 26th for customers, farmers, and anyone else interested in auctioning equipment. The luncheon will be held from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. CST at the auction yard of RJ Stockwell Inc., located at N155 Highway 13 in Stetsonville, Wisconsin. Registration is not required to attend. The luncheon will provide local farmers, ranchers, contractors, and equipment owners with the opportunity to learn about strategic market opportunitiesdesigned specifically for equipment industriesavailable from AuctionTime.com and Sandhills. Sandhills and AuctionTime regularly host forums and seminars all over the country to provide customers and end users with easy, educational, and effective ways to learn about Sandhills' industry-leading marketplaces, which include TractorHouse, Machinery Trader, Truck Paper, and MarketBook. If you are interested in attending this luncheon, contact AuctionTime or RJ Stockwell Inc. Land & Auction Company, or stop by the event location on February 26th. About AuctionTime.com Powered by TractorHouse, Machinery Trader, CraneTrader, ForestryTrader, LiftsToday.com, Truck Paper, and MarketBook, AuctionTime.com is a product of Sandhills Globalan information processing company headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. AuctionTime equipment listings appear both online and in print across Sandhills' trade publications and corresponding websites to reach buyers around the world in the trucking, agriculture, construction, and heavy equipment industries. Contact AuctionTime 120 West Harvest Drive Lincoln, NE 68521 [email protected] 800-334-7443 About RJ Stockwell Inc. Land & Auction Company RJ Stockwell Inc. Land & Auction Company has rapidly grown to become one of the leading auction companies in the industry. The RJ Stockwell Auction Team brings a wealth of experience that is second to none. Our sales associates and auctioneers attend many continuing education seminars and are active members of state and national associations. RJ Stockwell Inc. auctioneers conducts several benefit auctions each year to help support many community service fundraisers and charities. With RJ Stockwell Agricultural and Commercial Auctions, clients benefit from the extensive background that the company has to offer, combined with the ability to provide services that meet the demands of the rapidly changing marketplace. Contact RJ Stockwell Inc. Land & Auction Company W5340 County Line Road Dorchester, WI 54425 715-654-5162 SOURCE AuctionTime.com Related Links https://www.auctiontime.com [February 20, 2020] Union Home Mortgage Becomes First Official Mortgage Partner of the Cleveland Indians The Cleveland Indians today announced that Union Home Mortgage has joined the Tribe as the official mortgage partner of the Cleveland Indians. The local Strongsville, Ohio company becomes the first official partner in the mortgage category. As part of the partnership, Union Home Mortgage will be the presenting partner of all Spring Training Broadcasts on the Cleveland Clinic Indians Radio Network, as well as the entitlement partner on the Cleveland Indians Warm-Up Show during the regular season. They will also have a signage presence within Progressive Field on the outfield wall and behind homeplate. "We are pleased to welcome Union Home Mortgage to the Tribe," said Brian Barren, Cleveland Indians President of Business Operations. "Union Home Mortgage is a local company that values people first and shares our purpose of uniting and inspiring our region with the power of team." Since its inception in 1970, Union Home Mortgage ha focused on making home ownership accessible to all. Today, the company has a national footprint with colleagues, which it calls 'Partners', serving customers through more than 150 branches. As the company continues to grow, they remain focused on their Northeast Ohio roots. A recognized top workplace for several years, the company proudly brings its Partners from across the country to Cleveland annually for a company-wide celebration. "I grew up in Northeast Ohio. I started my company here. It gives me tremendous pride to join with the Indians organization and elevate the incredible work being done by our Partners every day," said Bill Cosgrove, President & CEO of Union Home Mortgage. "We like to think we're building something very special here - just like the Tribe, and can't wait to see where this partnership takes us together." About Union Home Mortgage Union Home Mortgage Corp. (UHM) is a high-growth, full-service retail, wholesale and consumer direct independent mortgage banking company with over 150 branches across the U.S. For 5 consecutive years, UHM has been awarded a Top Workplace. With a world-class culture that stands out in the mortgage industry, UHM Partners (employees) are guided by a Code of Conduct that emphasizes respect, open communication and accountability. UHM is an approved direct lender of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, USDA and other conforming and non-QM loan products, with over $5 billion in responsible lending per year. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200220005097/en/ [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] With his composed, somewhat stiff persona, Abinader is not known for his charisma with the masses. But his pro-business, law-and-order message has resonated with voters who are tired of persistent crime and allegations of corruption in a ruling party that has been in power for 20 of the past 24 years. The Dominican Republic was ranked last year in the bottom quarter of Transparency Internationals list of most corrupt countries in the world. Author Carlos Jose Perez Samano helps Rosa Ruiz (left) get oriented at the typewriter he brought with him to lead a workshop at Mighty Writers for members and their immigrant families to write their own stories Feb. 18, 2020. He brought the typewriter with him for everyone to contribute a sentence or two to a collaborative writing project Read more The group was swapping stories at the back of the Mighty Writers El Futuro space in the Italian Market on Ninth Street. They were mothers and fathers, construction and restaurant workers, artists and poets at least on this night. They were from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Colombia. And now, Filadelfia. >>Haga click aqui para leer este articulo en espanol. Some liked to write, others not so much. But even the construction worker, his dark pants dotted with paint, his hands callused, conceded that there was something satisfying about writing down his goal of getting a job, and then crossing it off when he got one. With local Mexican writer Carlos Jose Perez Samano, 34, leading the informal workshop, they spoke of their native languages and cultures. Some faded long before they made their journey to the United States. A few told of being chided as children to speak Spanish instead of their indigenous dialects only to come to the United States to be told to speak English, not Spanish. And then Ivonne Pinto-Garcia, who earlier had exuberantly declared that writing was liberation, shared this: Shed found herself growing accustomed to feeling inferior in the United States. Afraid to say or do something that might brand her an outsider. Afraid, period. She never realized how much until a man, an American, she told the group, asked where she was from. From Puebla, she said tentatively. Wow, its beautiful there, she recalled him saying. De verdad? she asked suspiciously. Really? she repeated, bracing for judgment before he began ticking off all the things he loved: the cathedral, the plaza, the food. She told the group that in that moment she realized how she had allowed peoples negative perceptions of immigrants to dictate how she felt about herself and her country. And then she felt a rush of something else: pride for where shed come from and where she was. Of who that journey had made her and so many others who had made similar pilgrimages. Around the table, the others nodded. I wasnt sure what to expect when Samano invited me to come out to one of the nonprofit Mighty Writers bilingual sites that offers free programs for children and their families. Even so, at a time when black and brown immigrants are increasingly being discriminated against and dehumanized, I found myself drawn to a place where they are encouraged to value their origin, their language and their stories. Where they are empowered to tell those stories themselves. I really believe writing can change the world, Samano, who moved to Philadelphia from Mexico three years ago, had said when we spoke earlier. Samano on writing: Write to turn painful experiences into art. Write to turn fear into fearlessness. Write to stop discrimination. There it was. I turned to Samano during a break. This wasnt just a literary exercise. This was a powerful act of resistance. He smiled. From his backpack, he pulled out a manual typewriter his aunt had given him. One hes used for his own work. He invited everyone to take a turn at writing a word, a sentence, whatever moved them. One woman joked that as a girl she considered going to school to learn how to type, but her mother warned that a new-fangled machine wouldnt help land a husband. As she slowly pecked at the typewriter, another woman took her photo. This way, she teased, she could tell her mother that she got the man and the machine. Dont be shy, Samano told them. Bang on the keys. Get the words out. The final product was a beautiful combination of words and phrases and experiences, in English and Spanish: "Today, here, I found myself and my happy past. I left my past and come to my future. The shining moon, it shines in this dark night." As they said their goodbyes, I stepped outside. The fruit and vegetable vendors were gone for the night, but down the street a neon sign for a taqueria beckoned. As it was reported earlier, citizens of Ukraine, evacuated from China, would be transferred to the Internal Ministrys sanatorium in Novi Sanzhary, Poltava region Mass protests against the placement of Ukrainians, who were evacuated from the Chinese city of Wuhan, have begun in the Poltava region. The spokesman of National Police of the Poltava region Yurii Sulaiev informed about it in the comment to the 112 Ukraine TV Channel. "The residents of Novi Sanzhary were blocking the carriageway to the settlement almost all night. They protest, because they received information that people from China would come to them, and they categorically opposed it and went out to protest. In the morning, when police officers asked people to stop the offense and unblock the road, some citizens showed aggression and refused to comply with the lawful demands of police officers and clashes with the police began. Thus, the 10 most active people were taken out of the crowd and were dealt with," SulaevSulaiev noted. He added that the protests were ongoing at that moment. Law enforcement officers are talking to protesters, local authorities are also talking to people, there is a discussion. Kolo.news reports that police have blocked all entrances to Novi Sanzhary, exits from surrounding villages. The village has a lot of special equipment, including armored vehicles, several special-purpose buses. As we reported earlier, Ukrainians, evacuated from Wuhan, China, would be placed in the sanatorium of Ukraines Ministry of Internal Affairs in the Poltava region. This was reported by 112 Ukraine TV Channel correspondents. "At first, it was known that it was going to be the base under Kharkiv, but now it is reported that evacuated Ukrainians will be transferred to the Internal Ministrys sanatorium in Novi Sanzhary, Poltava region. A lot of people started writing that Kharkiv was poorly adapted for such kind of operation and urged to resist the placement, the correspondent stated. Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 19:14:44|Editor: huaxia Video Player Close VIENTIANE, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- China and the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) held a special foreign ministers' meeting on the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak here Thursday to discuss coordinating efforts in fighting the epidemic. The meeting was co-chaired by Wang Yi, Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister, and Teodoro Locsin, Foreign Secretary of the Philippines, the country coordinator of China-ASEAN relations. The meeting kicked off by playing a video clip showing Chinese people's concerted efforts to fight the COVID-19 outbreak and leaders of the 10 ASEAN countries showing firm support to China. The ministers made a rallying cry of "Stay strong, Wuhan! Stay strong, China!" at a joint photo session. During the meeting, Wang elaborated on the strong measures taken and the remarkable results achieved by China to battle the epidemic. Under the leadership of Chinese President Xi Jinping, 1.4 billion Chinese people have united to fight the virus, Wang said. China has adopted the most comprehensive, the most stringent and the most thorough preventive measures to establish a prevention system that is effectively stopping the disease from spreading, Wang said. The measures, implemented with the "China speed", have bought time for promptly saving patients and allowed the world to properly respond to the outbreak, showing China's role as a responsible major country, he said. "We firmly believe that under the leadership of the Communist Party of China and with the country's strong mobilizing ability, its system advantage and the overall national strength, China has the ability and confidence to completely defeat the epidemic as soon as possible," Wang said. The COVID-19 outbreak has posed challenges to China's economic and social development, but only in a temporary and limited way. Given the resilience and vitality of China's economy, the long-term positive economic trend would not change, he noted, adding that China will not only win the battle against the virus, but also endeavor to achieve its economic and social development goals. Epidemics see no boundaries, Wang said. Sharing a common future as brothers, China and ASEAN countries should effectively prevent the disease from spreading by carrying out closer and more active cooperation, so as to safeguard the health and lives of the people and to forge a closer China-ASEAN community of a shared future, he said. In this regard, Wang made a four-point cooperation proposal. Firstly, both sides should strengthen coordination for joint disease prevention and control. Efforts should be made to push forward the effective coordination and cooperation between health, quarantine, transport and immigration departments of both sides. The China-ASEAN special leaders' meeting on coronavirus disease should be held at a proper time to outline and guide the cooperation efforts from a higher level. Secondly, both sides should take a long-term perspective and establish long-acting cooperation mechanism. He proposed to establish a China-ASEAN public health emergency communication mechanism and a China-ASEAN anti-epidemic material reserve center to speed up the response against emergent health issues. Thirdly, both sides should rationally deal with this epidemic and conquer panic. The professional advice from WHO experts should be respected, and the normal exchanges and cooperation among trade and commerce personnel between the two sides should be restored comprehensively at an ealier date. Fourthly, both sides should turn the crisis into opportunity and foster new cooperation growth points. ASEAN and China should push the economy to transform into an Internet and digital economy, enhance cooperation in areas such as digital commerce and mobile payment, and improve cities' management level to better cope with major urgent public incidents. Foreign ministers of ASEAN countries all highly appreciate China's firm measures to fight the novel coronavirus epidemic, and its highly responsible and transparent manner. They fully affirmed China's important contribution to safeguarding regional and global public health security, and believed the Chinese side is abound to defeat the epidemic at the earliest date. ASEAN countries are willing to strengthen cooperation and solidarity with China, exchange experiences and jointly promote the ability on health security in the region, they said. The meeting also adopted a statement on the coronavirus disease 2019. At the joint press conference after the meeting, Lao Foreign Minister Saleumxay Kommasith said at the special meeting, ASEAN foreign ministers, and the Chinese state councilor and foreign minister had jointly and comprehensively reviewed the joint efforts and commitments and charted future direction to further prevent and respond to the outbreak of COVID-19. "We have also shared with each other the best practices, lessons learnt and effective methods in surveillance, detecting and researches," he added. Joobin Bekhrad at the TLS: The Persian language does not recognize gender, but it is hard to deny that history has favoured male Persian-language poets over their female counterparts. Since the revival of the language in the tenth century after its suppression by the Arabs, men have dominated the corpus of Persian literature; so much so, in fact, that a lay reader or enthusiast would be justified in questioning whether Khayyam, Sadi and Hafez, among many others, even had contemporaries of the opposite sex. While it is true that, with the exception of a handful of twentieth-century poets, female Persian-language poets can at best be said to have written verse in the shadows of men, they have indeed existed as this revelatory new compendium vividly shows. Translated by Dick Davis, a renowned scholar of Persian literature and a poet in his own right, The Mirror of My Heart examines the work of over eighty female Persian-language poets from the past thousand years. more here. Democratic Part FINALLY Starts Debating The Presidency!!! 3 winners and 4 losers from the Nevada Democratic debate The Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Wednesday night came at an important, even pivotal, time in the primary. Bernie Sanders's strong results in Iowa and New Hampshire, Joe Biden's national decline, and Bloomberg's ad-fueled rise have shaken up the race - and everyone's looking to take advantage. Bloomberg Blown Up Bloomberg Got Destroyed in the First 3 Minutes of the Debate LAS VEGAS - It took exactly one question at Wednesday's Democratic presidential debate for Michael Bloomberg's opponents to lay into him. Bernie Sanders slammed Bloomberg for his "stop-and-frisk" policy while he was New York's mayor, which the senator described as "outrageous" and a way to guarantee low turnout from black and Hispanic voters. Prez Trump Persists Mark Meadows says Democrats' debate had 1 winner: President Trump Who won the Democratic debate Wednesday night? That's easy, says U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C.: President Trump. "We now know why they've spent so much time on impeachment because they don't have a message that will resonate with the American people," Meadows said on " Fox News @ Night." Bernie Disavows Bernie Sanders distances himself from 'Bernie Bros' at Democratic debate They're not his bros! Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders distanced himself from the so-called "Bernie Bros" who have been criticized for using online bullying tactics while on stage at Wednesday's Democratic primary debate. "If there are a few people who make ugly remarks ... Debate Over Dox Michael Bloomberg Refused To Release Former Employees From Sexual Harassment NDAs During The Debate Democrats grilled Michael Bloomberg on the debate stage Wednesday over his refusal to release employees of his company, including women who accused him of sexual harassment, from nondisclosure agreements. "None of them accuse me of doing anything other than maybe they didn't like a joke I told," Bloomberg said. Senator Warren Wins Twitter Warren is most-tweeted-about Democrat during Wednesday's debate: Twitter Sen. Elizabeth Warren Elizabeth Ann Warren Biden leads Sanders by single digits in South Carolina: poll 2020 Democratic candidates support Las Vegas casino workers on debate day Sanders takes lead in new Hill/HarrisX poll MORE (D-Mass.) was the member of the 2020 Democratic field who was the focus of the most tweets after Wednesday night's debate in Las Vegas, according to Twitter. Somebody To Play The Bad Guy Thank you, Mike Bloomberg, for rescuing the debate Michael Bloomberg may have bought his way on to the debate stage in Las Vegas Wednesday night but the rest of us are in his debt. These once-every-couple-weeks rituals had become so familiar that watching til the end was a chore. Overall it was a winning night for the Republic as Democratic Party leaders ganged up against one of their biggest funders andthe man who pretty much single-handedly funded the "Blue Wave" of 2018.Still, the election isn't yet for sale to any single-bidder but remains firmly (thankfully) controlled by the military-industrial complex who thrive by way of constant culture war distractions that keep anybody asking why the troops are still in Afghanistan. Any guesses??? At this point the chicken/egg argument is more impactful to Americans scrolling their phones for any kind of benign stimuli programed into shopping algorithms.But I digress . . .Former NYC Mayor Bloomberg isn't going to be President. Senator Bernie still leads the pack. Senator Liz Warren made a serious comeback. Mayo Pete made sense about the DNC actually nominating a Democrat . . . Other than that it was all a bunch of static.Checkit:You decide . . . More civilians have been killed as the regime army continues their advance in Idleb, against opposition forces reports Zaman Al Wasl. On Tuesday, three civilians were killed in fresh airstrikes on Idleb province as regime forces backed by Russian air power made swift advances in northern Syria, according to Zaman al-Wasls reporter. The evening strikes hit the town of Termanin north of Idleb city. Syrian opposition activists reported airstrikes on several rebel-held areas Tuesday, including the outskirts of the town of Atareb and Daret Azzeh. The UN Human Rights Office said it recorded 298 civilian deaths in Idleb and Aleppo, where the regime offensive has been concentrated, since Jan. 1, 2020. It said 93 percent of those deaths were caused by the Syrian regime and its allies. In addition, 10 medical facilities and 19 educational facilities were either directly hit or affected by nearby strikes, the UN office said. Meanwhile, the United Nations human rights chief urged Syrian regime forces and their allies Tuesday to allow safe corridors in conflict areas in northwestern Syria, where the offensive has unleashed a massive wave of fleeing civilians in one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the long civil war. Michelle Bachelet told reporters in Geneva it was cruel beyond belief that civilians live under plastic sheeting in freezing conditions while getting bombed. Her appeal came after a day after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad pledged to press ahead with a military campaign in the northwest that has displaced more than 900,000 people from their homes since the start of December, according to UN officials. Many of the civilians are sleeping in open fields and under trees in freezing temperatures. Backed by Russian air power, Syrian regime troops have made rapid advances, seizing dozens of towns and villages in Idleb province and nearby rural areas around Aleppo. This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author. Nigerias development has been slow-paced for too long, largely due to lack of visionary leadership, an anti-corruption advocate told federal lawmakers on Wednesday. Patrick Lumumba, a former director of Kenyas anti-corruption commission, also asked the Nigerian lawmakers if they are honourable members or horrible members. He referred the lawmakers to late nationalists, Ahmadu Bello and Nnamdi Azikwe, asking them how much of their legacies have been preserved. He said the clarity of vision and the instinct to marshall people is the antidote to tackle Nigerias many challenges, as this was what worked for the nations founding fathers. The don who is also the Director, Kenya School of Laws, spoke at the launch of the House of Representatives Green Chamber magazine Wednesday in Abuja. Nigeria has been becoming great for too long, Mr Lumumba said in his speech. The time is now that Nigeria must be great. In fact, Nigeria should be in the same space economically as Germany is; Nigeria should be in the same space politically as the United States is. You are the successors of Nigerias great leaders. The question that you must ask yourself now that you have been given the honour and privilege of serving Nigeria, you should ask yourself, are you honourable members or horrible members? he asked amidst laughter from his audience. He said being honourable or horrible members is determined by the quality of service they deliver to Nigerians. He urged the lawmakers to be servants, rather than masters of the people, whose sole aim is to deliver the common good to Nigerians. Now that Nigerians have given you the opportunity to think for them, the question is: are you midwives of the good things of Nigeria or are you midwives that kill the children of the creator. READ ALSO: Today you are the leaders, even as I am congratulating you, ask yourself do you deserve to be congratulated? The don praised the can-do spirit of an average Nigerian, saying that vigour would be useless if Nigerian leaders do not use creativity and innovation to make their citizens thrive. Mr Lumumba lauded the move by the lawmakers to tell their stories themselves by launching the magazine. He urged them to ensure the publication remains within the ambit of facts and to tell the legislations the House is introducing to give Nigerians social and economic security. I hope that through this magazine that that ghost of ignorance which has not allowed Nigerians to appreciate and embrace their leaders will now be exorcised. I hope that that ghost would be consigned to Jahannam so that it will not rise again; so that going forward, Nigerians will understand their leaders for (whom) they are. Alex Friedmann was rearrested on Tuesday after authorities discovered his burglary charge was allegedly connected to a plan for a mass jail break from a Nashville prison A longtime prison reform advocate and former convict has been arrested for his alleged 'evil plan' to start a mass jail break by hiding loaded guns and 'escape devices' such as bolt cutters in an under-construction Tennessee prison. Alex Friedmann, 50, an ex-prisoner turned crusader against private prisons, was charged in January with attempted burglary, accused with gaining access to the new jail on several days in December by dressing as a construction worker and stealing keys. As the investigation continued, police discovered Friedmann's 'burglary' was all part of a further jail break plot in which he allegedly hid a weapons stockpile in the Nashville jail. He was accompanied by three other men police are still trying to identify. Authorities announced on Wednesday that Friedmann is now charged with vandalism of $250,000 or more. 'It was discovered that Mr. Friedmann, over many months, had developed and implemented an extremely deliberate and, in my opinion, evil plan,' Nashville Sheriff Daron Hall said during a Wednesday news conference announcing Friedmanns re-arrest on upgraded charges. 'What disturbed me most is not that this was about an escape, it was also about loss of life.' Hall said he believes Friedmann was the ringleader in designing the massive jail break that would endanger 'every inmate, every visitor and our entire community'. 'Virtually everything I'm telling you is on video,' Hall said, noting that investigators have poured through hundreds of hours of video to identify the areas of the building that were compromised. Alex Friedmann spent 10 years in jail for intent to murder and armed robbery but was alleged to have changed his life, becoming an advocate for prisoner rights and a critic of private jails The new detention center in Downtown Nashville where Friedmann and three other suspects allegedly stole a key and dressed as construction workers so they could hide weapons Friedmann was first caught and arrested on January 4 after entering the building for what is believed to be the fifth time. He was dressed as a construction worker at the time. He was charged with burglary, possession of burglary tools and evidence tampering after he was found with a cooler containing bolt cutters, a key chit (used as a security measure to identify keys), and a schematic document of the building. When caught, he allegedly tried to destroy the document by ripping it up and chewing it. Friedmann refused to answer questions from police and was initially charged with burglary until police watched further surveillance footage and discovered his alleged jail break plan. Further searches also revealed three loaded guns and further escape tools hidden in the detention center. One of the men Metro Nashville police is attempting to identify as Friedmann's accomplice These two men are suspected to be accomplices of Friedmann and were caught on surveillance footage as they allegedly dressed as construction workers to enter the jail He is believed to have entered the facility on several occasions in December, including on December 26 when he was accompanied by a man wearing a face mask and construction worker clothes. Friedmann interacted with two other men during visits, who police are also trying to identify. The Metro Nashville Police Department tweeted a photo of the other three suspects and called on the public to help identify them. On one of the days, Friedmann allegedly stole keys from the control room. The loss of keys and the discovery of the key chit is believed to have compromised the safety of the whole jail and will require all 2,000 locks to be refitted before it can safely open. Hall added that the case was particularly shocking because Friedmann is known in Tennessee as an advocate for prisoner rights. Alex Friedmann was sentenced to ten years for intent to murder in 1991, mugshots pictured here, but was said to have turned his life around and become an advocate for prison reform Alex Friedman being booked during his arrest for burglary in January. Police later discovered that this may have been part of a larger jail break plot in which weapons were hidden 'Mr. Friedmann served time and has spent a long time advocating for safe jails and prisons,' Hall said He was believed to have turned his life around after spending a decade in jail, sentenced to ten years behind bars in 1991 for assault with intent to murder and armed robbery. Up until his arrest for burglary in January, Friedmann has been the associate director for a prison watch group called Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC), under which he was a longtime editor at Prison Legal News. Friedmann resigned as editor after his earlier arrest, executive director Paul Wright said in a telephone interview. He was also a consultant for Senator Bernie Sanders' office when they were compiling a report for a new bill to ban private prisons in 2015. Friedmann's attorney, Ben Raybin, issued a statement on Wednesday. 'I am currently unable to comment on any of the factual allegations,' Raybin said. 'Mr. Friedmann is presumed innocent and will respond through the appropriate legal processes.' Friedmann is being held in Riverbend Maximum Security Institution and is due to appear in court in April. His bond has been set at $2.5million A GoFundMe has been established for Friedmann's legal defense, describing him as 'a national expert on private prisons and other criminal justice issue'. The page claims that 'his intentions were consistent with his history of advocacy and activism' and that 'his arrest was totally unexpected and completely unlike him'. It alleges that there is 'obviously much more to this story, but he cant tell it or explain his actions'. Construction photos of the new Nashville prison where Friedmann allegedly hid weapons. The new prison was due to open in April but is now been delayed as they search for weapons Riverbend Maximum Security Prison where Alex Friedmann is being held Hall, who currently serves as president of the National Sheriffs Association, said no one there has ever seen anything like this before. 'It will forever change how correctional facilities are built,' he said. The Nashville Downtown Detention Center was scheduled to open in April but its construction has now been delayed as authorities sweep the building for further hidden ammunition. 'I'm not confident we've found everything,' Hall said. 'We're not going to work here until we're comfortable.' A group of Rohingya Muslims are detained in Hlegu township of Myanmar's Yangon region after authorities arrested them as they tried to flee to Malaysia, Feb. 19, 2020. Myanmar authorities on Wednesday arrested nearly 50 Rohingya Muslims in Yangon region as they attempted to flee the country for Malaysia, a lawmaker said, while a separate group of Rohingya detainees appeared in court in Ayeyarwady region to face charges on traveling without official permission over their earlier attempt to flee. The 49 Rohingya picked up included 28 woman, 18 men, and three children in a wooded area in Hlegu township, said Myat Marlar Tun, a lawmaker in Yangons regional parliament. They were arrested last night, he told RFAs Myanmar Service. They are being interrogated. The authorities will transfer them this evening. I dont know if they will be sent to Insein Prison or someplace else, he added, referring to the notorious detention center on Yangons outskirts. Thazin Myint Myat Win, an attorney representing the Rohingya, told RFA that the detainees will appear in court on Friday. They are going through medical tests, he said. The authorities are preparing their case files and getting testimonies. They will go on trial tomorrow. It was not immediately clear whether the 49 Rohingya would be charged with traveling without official permission, or with immigration offenses. The Rohingya were from Kyaukphyu, Sittwe, Minbya, and Buthidaung townships in western Myanmars Rakhine state, Thazin Myint Myat Win said. The police think there could be more of them in the woods, and they are still searching, he said. Another group of 93 Rohingya, who tried to leave Myanmar for Malaysia by boat in November but were caught by naval authorities and arrested, appeared Thursday in a courthouse in Pathein township for another hearing in their ongoing trial on charges of traveling without official permission, RFA has learned. They face up to one to two years in prison with hard labor or a fine if they are found guilty. The adults are being detained in Pathein Prison, while most of the children are being held at a police station, though infants and toddlers have been allowed to stay with their mothers. Target of traffickers Rights advocates say officials are still not addressing the reasons why the Rohingya are putting themselves at the mercy of traffickers in order to flee the country. Whenever we observe human trafficking problems, we find the traffickers are targeting the people who want to leave their homeland due to instability and other reasons, said Aung Myo Min, executive director of Equality Myanmar, a Yangon-based organization that advocates for the protection and promotion of human rights in the country. So, people from Rakhine state become the target of traffickers, he said. They want to leave the country, but the authorities are not taking their actions seriously. Only when they do will they be able to prevent human trafficking gangs and brokers from exploiting those who flee, Aung Myo Min said. Noting that traffickers favor unstable areas where there is little or no rule of law or protection by locals, he suggested that authorities begin actively monitoring trafficking routes and prepare for possible scenarios to prevent people from being taken from the country, Nickey Diamond, a Myanmar human rights specialist with the Southeast Asia-based NGO Fortify Rights, said authorities must address the underlying causes pushing the Rohingya out of the country illegally. The government needs to learn and address the root causes of the problem why they are being trafficked, why they are falling victim to traffickers, and what it needs to do to rehabilitate the victims. The government needs to think about these questions, he said. But now they are giving them prison sentences after they arrest them and are sending them back. This is not the answer. Diamond previously told RFA that Myanmar authorities should issue travel documents for the Rohingya so that they can go wherever they want rather than being forced to return to Rakhine state. Systematic discrimination Myanmar views the Rohingya as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh and systematically discriminates against them by denying them citizenship, freedom of movement, and access to jobs, health care, and education. In recent years, thousands of Rohingya have fled or attempted to flee persecution in Buddhist-majority Myanmar on boats organized by human traffickers and bound for other Southeast Asian nations, especially Muslim-friendly Malaysia. Traffickers charge hundreds of dollars for each person they transport. A military-led crackdown on Rohingya communities in northern Rakhine state in 2017 left thousands dead and drove more than 740,000 members of the minority group across the border and into Bangladesh where they now live in sprawling displacement camps. Others live in displacement camps inside Rakhine state where they were forced to go following communal violence between Buddhists and Muslims in 2012 that displaced more than 120,000 Rohingya. The Myanmar government has been shutting down the camps one by one and relocating the Rohingya to other settlements in accordance with recommendations made in an August 2017 report by an advisory commission led by former U.N. chief Kofi Annan to help resolve the religious and ethnic divisions in the unstable region. Reported by Nandar Chan for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Ye Kaung Myint Maung. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin. Zurich 20 February 2020 Amun AG is delighted to welcome Sina Meier as the new Head of Business Development for Switzerland to its team. Sina joins Amun from her previous role at Credit Agricole next bank (Suisse) SA, where she was heading the business development for the Swiss-German and French-speaking part of Switzerland. During her extensive career, which spans over 25 years in the Swiss banking sector, Sina has held many positions within major financial institutions like Credit Agricole Indosuez, Clariden Leu and UBS. Sina was instrumental in the development of international High-Net-Worth Individuals as well as institutional investors in the Swiss market. Her expertise in the Swiss private banking and Swiss retail banking industry will allow Amun to further expand its mission to bridge the gap between the traditional financial world and the crypto industry in Switzerland. Sinas hire comes at a crucial point when Amun is expanding its scope to offer not only institutional-grade investment products in Switzerland and Europe but also to High-Net-Worth Individuals who have an appetite in crypto vehicles. Last month, Amun complemented its existing suite of crypto ETPs with the launch of the 21Shares Inverse Bitcoin ETP (SBTC) to equip both retail and institutional investors with secure and simple investment instruments to capitalize on the inherent volatility of the crypto market in a regulated environment. As a Swiss issuer of passive investment trackers for digital assets, Switzerland is and has always been the focal point of our attention. We have seen a rise in institutional demand for crypto products in Europe and Switzerland and Sinas wealth of experience in the Swiss institutional market will be invaluable in our mission to bring professionally structured investment products with digital assets as underlyings to the Swiss investors. We are delighted to welcome her to the team. Hany Rashwan, CEO of Amun AG says Her experience and knowledge will play an important role in successfully driving our next phase of development and will be instrumental in further reinforcing our efforts to build a solid client base in Switzerland. Amun has been at the forefront of innovation in the crypto finance space since the launch of the first fully-collateralized, listed crypto basket ETP (HODL) in November 2018. Since then, Amun listed a total of 11 crypto investment trackers on the SIX Swiss Exchange with additional share classes in CHF and EUR on BX Swiss and Boerse Stuttgart. The Amun crypto ETPs newly branded under the 21Shares banner not only provide retail and institutional investors with access to the overall crypto market, but also allows them to earn income through staking products such as the Tezos ETP and profit from adverse price movements in Bitcoin through the SBTC ETP. For 2020, Amun AG plans to continue to innovate and bring innovative investment products to the Swiss and European market. About Amun Amun makes investing in crypto assets as easy as buying shares using your conventional broker or bank. Investors can invest in cryptocurrencies using a conventional ETP structure (or tracker) easily, with total confidence, security and cost-effectively thanks to the 21Shares suite of ETPs launched by Amun now composed of 11 Crypto ETPs: the Amun Crypto Basket Index ETP (HODL:SW), Amun Bitcoin ETP (ABTC:SW), Amun Ethereum ETP (AETH:SW), Amun XRP ETP (AXRP:SW), AMUN Bitcoin Cash ETP (ABCH:SW), Amun Binance ETP (ABNB:SW), Amun Tezos ETP (AXTZ:SW), Amun Bitcoin Suisse ETP (ABBA:SW), Amun Bitwise 10 ETP (KEYS:SW) and Amun Sygnum Platform Winners Index ETP (MOON:SW). The entire suite is listed on a regulated framework on the SIX Swiss Exchange, BX Swiss and Boerse Stuttgart in CHF, USD, and EUR. Founded in 2018, Amun is led by a team of talented serial entrepreneurs and experienced banking professionals from the technology and financial world. Incorporated in Zug, with offices in Zurich, Berlin and New York, the company has launched several world firsts, including the first listed crypto index (HODL) in November 2018. Amun has 11 crypto ETPs listed today and has over $70 million in AuM. Press Contact Amun Laurent Kssis +41 44 260 86 60 press@amun.com Disclaimer The new Natural Resources Commission chair caught up in controversy over the Michigan Senates disapproval of another commissioner last week will soon face his own Senate scrutiny. George Heartwell, the former Grand Rapids mayor who until recently served on the Michigan Transportation Commission, is scheduled to testify before the Senates Advice and Consent Committee at noon Thursday. He was appointed to chair the NRC - which regulates the states hunting and fishing rules - by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Feb. 7. Under the state constitution, the Senate has 60 days to vet gubernatorial appointments and can reject one by majority vote. No Senate action results in automatic confirmation of the appointee. During Gov. Rick Snyders tenure, the Senate rarely exercised this oversight authority, known as advice and consent. But the Senate Advice and Consent Committee created this session has met regularly to vet Whitmer appointments - and the process was thrown into the spotlight last week when Anna Mitterling became the first Whitmer appointee to be rejected by the Senate. Mitterling, an independent from Mason, was selected by Whitmer to serve on the Natural Resources Commission. A few days before the 60-day vetting window was up, the Senate voted 20-16 to reject her appointment. Whitmer spokesperson Tiffany Brown said last week Senate Republicans demanded the governor pull Heartwells appointment in exchange for keeping Mitterling on the Natural Resources Commission. Sen. Shirkey had promised to turn over a new leaf, but its now clear that they care more about their sexist, partisan games than the well-being of our state, Brown said in a statement. A group called Great Lakes Gun Rights, which has tens of thousands of members across the state, recently urged people to contact their senators opposing Heartwells appointment to the commission on grounds that he advocated for banning guns from public meetings after people showed up to a city meeting with guns. The group had not urged the Senate to reject Mitterlings appointment. Heartwell recently told MLive he grew up hunting and is comfortable around guns, and noted the board isnt in charge of gun regulation. I think that people have taken my stand on guns in public meetings and conflated that to assume that Im opposed to all guns, or that Im opposed to hunting. Im not, Heartwell said. Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey, R-Clark Lake, told reporters Wednesday he stood by the Senates action regarding Mitterling. He said the Senate Advice and Consent Committee would follow the exact same process for Heartwell thats been done for every other appointee who has testified before the panel. This is all about vetting, he said. I dont have any expectations of learning anything other than letting the process play out." Currently chairing the Advice and Consent Committee is Sen. Pete Lucido, R-Shelby Township, who is under investigation by the Senate Business Office over sexual harassment allegations, including complaints from Sen. Mallory McMorrow, D-Royal Oak, and Michigan Advance reporter Allison Donahue. Related coverage: Whitmer natural resources appointee was smeared by Michigan Senate rejection, critics say New Michigan NRC chair says hes not anti-gun, despite gun group opposition Michigan GOP Senate scrutinizes Whitmer appointments under partisan power split Michigan Senate rejects Whitmer appointee, governor alleges sexist, partisan games Arlington (United States) (AFP) - On the national level, President Donald Trump is appointing judges by the dozens to positions on US federal courts, ensuring a conservative tilt for a generation. But on the local level, a small group of progressive state prosecutors have been elected, and they have big ideas about criminal justice reform. Parisa Dehghani-Tafti -- who is now the top prosecutor in northern Virginia's Arlington county in the Washington suburbs -- knows she is not the "typical" candidate for the job. "I am an immigrant. I grew up very poor. I have done some (public) defender work," says the 46-year-old, who was born in Iran, and is a mother to two black children. "The federal judiciary is changing, it's becoming very conservative. It's even more important that folks who are reform-informed people are running and engaged in the local system," she told AFP. "We are now the frontline." Since he won the White House, Trump has named nearly 200 judges to the federal bench. In that time, about 40 unorthodox prosecutors -- one is even a tattooed biker -- have taken office. For Miriam Krinsky -- a former federal prosecutor and the executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution (FJP), which is supporting these local attorneys -- the progressives represent a "drop in the ocean." But many of them have emerged in major cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, and Orlando: "jurisdictions that impact large numbers in terms of prison population." - 'Justice League' - The United States has the largest number of prison detainees in the world at more than 2.2 million, according to the World Prison Brief database. But only 10 percent of those prisoners have been convicted in federal courts. The others are the domain of state and local jurisdictions. In the past, local prosecutors were known to favor tough sentences for even minor offenses, often as a way of ensuring re-election. Story continues But the new guard is advocating a different approach. "We need more people joining the Justice League of progressive prosecutors," says Rachael Rollins, the district attorney in Suffolk County in Massachusetts, which includes Boston. "We are looking at our profession and crafts differently than many of our predecessors have ... They would almost exclusively say that the right solution to every single problem -- no matter small or big -- is jail." The 48-year-old Rollins, who is African-American, is the first woman of color to serve as a district attorney in the state. She has been in the position since January 2019. Her two brothers have served jail time, and she campaigned on a promise to no longer prosecute a list of low-level offenses, including marijuana possession. Rollins won 80 percent of the vote in the traditionally Democratic city. Since her election, she has made headlines by refusing to allow immigration agents to arrest those without papers in her county's courts. "If they witness a crime, I want them to feel safe to come forward," she said. Like her progressive peers, Rollins is also working to reduce racial inequality in the prison system, police brutality and errors in court procedures. - Tattoos and convict parents - The conviction of a black friend for a crime he did not commit pushed Dehghani-Tafti to go to law school and then to work on the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which tackles wrongful convictions. "I kept seeing over and over problems -- not with one case, they were systemic. I decided at one point ... that I couldn't not try to do something," she explains. Dehghani-Tafti then launched her campaign to be the commonwealth's attorney for Arlington county, running against an incumbent. She had the financial backing of billionaire philanthropist George Soros. She cruised to victory in the left-leaning county after bitterly contested debates. Like Dehghani-Tafti, Chesa Boudin and Marc Gonzalez never prosecuted criminals before taking their jobs in San Francisco and Corpus Christi, Texas, respectively. Both have interesting backgrounds: Boudin was just 14 months old when his parents -- far-left militants -- were sentenced to long prison terms for a deadly robbery. Gonzalez is a member of a biker gang. His torso is covered in tattoos, including the words "Not Guilty" along his collarbone. - Subjected to abuse - The need for criminal justice reform "provided a platform for people like me," says Aramis Ayala, the first black woman elected as a prosecutor in Florida. She has worked in the Orlando area since 2016. Since taking office, Ayala has been subjected to a hail of racist and sexist insults -- and death threats. "A federal official said I should be lynched," she recalls. Ayala thinks the attacks are as much about who she is as what she wants to achieve. "If you are of a minority group and you go along with the status quo, you fit in, they celebrate you," she says. "But the minute you bring along with you all of your life experience and insights and your true perspective, then it becomes a problem." The 44-year-old will not run for re-election this year -- the state's top prosecutor took cases away from her once she made it clear she would no longer seek the death penalty, even for capital offenses. - 'Rogue prosecutors' - Some of the sharpest criticism of these new prosecutors has come from the Oval Office. Trump has accused them of failing to prosecute "many criminals who pose a severe threat to public safety and community wellbeing." US Attorney General Bill Barr has called them "rogue prosecutors" who are "undercutting the police, letting criminals off the hook and refusing to enforce the law." Dehghani-Tafti is not backing down. "We live in our communities -- we do not want them to be less safe," she says. "I expect the criticism but I am not going to be deterred." In Boston, Rollins says there were 38 homicides in 2019, down from 62 the year before. "If we had had 63 homicides, I would be all over every cover of every publication," she says sarcastically. For Hadar Aviram, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, it's too soon to know what kind of impact the prosecutors are having on prison populations and racial justice. "It's only possible to examine after a person has been in office for several years," Aviram says. Details added (first version posted at 20:53 on Feb.14) BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 14 Trend: President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with President of the Republic of Moldova Igor Dodon in Munich. Greeting the President of Moldova, President Ilham Aliyev said: - I am very glad to see you again, Igor Nikolayevich. We regularly meet at international events and continue this tradition of using any platform to see each other again, review our agenda and determine further ways of developing cooperation. The year is just beginning. Therefore, I think that it should be successful for our relationship. In principle, what we have outlined is being implemented. The available contacts are evidence of the active development of relations. We have exchanged views on how to fill our relations with specific economic factors. I think there will be more active economic cooperation this year. Of course, our contacts will continue. Therefore, I think that this year will also be very positive for our relations. We have friendly relations. We always try to support each other. Of course, I recall your visit to our country. Again, we will look forward to seeing you at the international events planned this year so that such an active political dialogue does not stop. President Igor Dodon said: - Dear Mr. President, first of all, I am very pleased to meet with you here at an important international venue in Munich again. I want to note the very good dynamics of our bilateral relations, and the agreements we have signed actually cover the whole range of our contacts. I want to congratulate you on the holding of the parliamentary elections, to congratulate you on the result that the party supporting you has received. I know that there were our observers there. Also, representatives of the pro-presidential party of socialists were observers as well. They noted a very good level of organization and the fact that the elections were democratic. We congratulate you on this. This year is a very important one for our bilateral relations. In 2017, we launched a social project in Moldova, in Gagauzia. I want to officially invite you to the Republic of Moldova again. We should already open the project this year. I hope that your official visit will take place this year. We will hold several important events. It is necessary to hold a meeting of the intergovernmental commission. As you may know, we have a new government in Moldova now, and it is led by my former adviser, Mr. Ion Chicu. From our side, we have already approved the new composition of the intergovernmental commission. I do hope that a meeting of co-chairs will be held in the near future to prepare a meeting of the intergovernmental commission. It can be held in our country or in yours. It depends on what we agree on. But we really hope that you pay an official visit to our country in the coming months. President Ilham Aliyev: Thank you for the invitation. I will gladly take this opportunity to visit beautiful Moldova. I have very good memories. The sides exchanged views on other issues of mutual interest. INDIANAPOLIS, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Citing The American Legion's "historic victory" during an important Supreme Court ruling last year, the head of the nation's largest veterans organization welcomed another court decision yesterday as a sign that veterans memorials will now have permanent legal protection. "Last year, The American Legion easily prevailed by a 7-2 ruling protecting a veterans memorial in Bladensburg, Md.," said American Legion National Commander James W. "Bill" Oxford. "We said at the time that the ruling in The American Legion v. American Humanist Association was not simply about one cross. It was about protecting the religious freedom of those wishing to honor and memorialize veterans. Thankfully, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals used our earlier victory to reverse a previous decision that called for the removal of a World War II-era cross at a park in Pensacola. The Bayview cross in Florida will remain in place. The American Legion is grateful to our friends and allies in the veterans and legal community who have helped us in this long struggle to protect these precious memorials." With a current membership of nearly two million wartime veterans, The American Legion was founded in 1919 on the four pillars of a strong national security, veterans affairs, patriotic youth programs and Americanism. Legionnaires work for the betterment of their communities through nearly 13,000 posts worldwide. From the drafting of the original GI Bill to the creation of the Department of Veterans Affairs, The American Legion, www.legion.org, is the most influential voice for America's veterans. Media contacts: John Raughter, [email protected], (317) 630-1350 SOURCE The American Legion Related Links www.legion.org Nithya Gnanapandithan By Express News Service Its not easy to describe The Ghost Bride in a few words. The new Taiwanese-Malaysian Netflix series is set in 1890s Malacca (now Malaysia) but its not exactly a period drama. The soundtrack, for one, doesnt fit. Its filled with very modern sounds hip hop, techno, rock, pop that are not associated with that part of the world, and definitely not from that time. As the title suggests, it features ghosts, but its not a horror show. Theres a murder mystery at its centre, but its not an investigative thriller. There is also romance and comedy but its not a romantic comedy. Its actually a mix of all these and then some. The Ghost Bride, one of Netflixs first Mandarin-language originals, is akin to our masala cinema in a lot of ways. All it lacks is a few song and dance numbers. It has mother and father sentiment, the nanny/foster mother who watches over the heroine like a hawk, two people who squabble a lot before inevitably falling for one another, a villain with scary-looking henchmen who captures the good guys and tortures them, the works. There is a difference though. It is centred on the titular heroine instead of a hero. And its this heroine, Pan Li Lan, who makes this show so eminently watchable. Li Lan is a 20-year-old from a semi-affluent family that has fallen on hard times. Given her age, its about time for her to be married. But Li Lan isnt interested in marriage. She feels it is just a bunch of limitations and rules. What she would rather do is travel the world. Unfortunately, thats isnt really an option for a girl in those times. So when a proposal to become a ghost bride to the recently deceased Lim Tian Ching comes along, she is not entirely opposed to the idea. As a ghost bride, she would have to mourn Tian Ching for all her life and join him after death, but at least it will give her an independence of sorts. Li Lan is a very relatable character. She is no superhero, or even a hero in the usual sense. But she is plucky, quick-witted, and brave for the sake of others. The actor who plays her, Huang Pei-jia, is effortlessly charming and makes Li Lan even more sympathetic. In a way, The Ghost Bride is coming-of-age story of Li Lan. It can be described as a sort of young adult (YA) soap opera. Albeit one with a supernatural background. The show delves into the custom of ghost brides, the tradition of burning offerings for the dead which they can then use in the netherworld (a kind of purgatory), heavenly guards (angelic investigators of a kind), and so forth. In fact, about half the series is set in the netherworld. And this half, as you would expect, is filled with some serious action and thriller elements. The second half of the show moves quite briskly. Netflix has not skimped on the production values either. The Ghost Bride has excellent production design and good quality CGI, which helps immerse us into this world. But whats really delightful about it, is the way the show marries these mystical elements from Chinese culture with the drama of a young woman coming into her own. It really makes for an entertaining and extremely bingeable show (it also helps that there are only six sub-hour-long episodes in this first season). Its not without its flaws. There is some subpar acting from a few of the supporting cast, for instance. Though this is balanced out by the lovely performances from the lead and her chemistry with some other key characters like the aforementioned nanny (the amah, as she is called) and a certain heavenly guard. The main mystery is resolved rather clumsily, but like I said before, this is not an investigative thriller or a whodunit. Its less about that and more about the character arc of Li Lan. And that, is quite satisfying indeed. The Ghost Bride ends on a lovely note. It also leaves open the possibility of a second season so we will likely get more adorable adventures of Li Lan in the not-too-distant future. And what a charming prospect that is. It has been nothing short of being caught in a real nightmare for those living within the Chinese borders. Since the outbreak of the fatal and highly contagious Novel Coronavirus infection in mainland China, the country has been busy counting casualties. As China continues to work through this nightmare, India also reached out to its people stranded in the infection epicentre, Wuhan. While an estimated 55,000 NRIs and Indian nationals live in China, the Indian government recently managed to successfully evacuate 640 citizens from Wuhan. BCCL The risky evacuation mission was carried out by 68 highly dedicated Air India crew consisting of eight pilots, 30 cabin crew and 10 commercial staff, who risked their lives not once but twice in airlifting stranded citizens on January 31 and again on February 1. Air India captain Amitabh Singh who was at the helm of the first mission as the director of operations at Air India, shared his first-hand experience about the task in an interview with Quartz India and said, When we landed, the entire region was deathly quiet. Roads and buildings were well-lit, but there werent any humans around. It was eerie. Twitter Though this wasnt the first time Singh or Air India was carrying out an evacuation mission, he admits that this rescue-op was different. He recalled the events and said, The Wuhan evacuation was different. Here, we went to the epicentre of an epidemic, which would require staff to attend to patients who might have been infected. However, with the support of both Air India and government doctors who explained the dos and don'ts to the crew, Singh and his team successfully carried out the mission. Talking about the apocalypse-like feel of the airport, Captain Kamal Mohan said, "the streets were lit but there weren't any humans or vehicles. An airport blanketed in darkness with all airplanes locked up. It was like an apocalypse." He further added that beholding the sight of Wuhan did feel "frightening". Twitter However, for all of these daredevils, the sighs of relief and happy smiles of those evacuated made it all worth it. Talking about the same Singh said, When they came on board they obviously looked scared, tired, and worried. However, after they processed that they are on their way back home, there was a big sigh of relief. We could see smiles on their faces. When we took off, there was euphoric clapping. Naturally, the government took note of their generous service during a time of crisis and decided to express its gratitude. Therefore on February 17, Civil Aviation Minister Hardeep Singh Puri gave out Prime Minister Narendra Modis letters of appreciation to all the 68 Air India who made the evacuation mission a success, as per the reports. Twitter Puri, in his interview with Bloomberg, said, We are proud of the commitment shown by the Air India team to bring home their countrymen despite the trying conditions in Wuhan. Kudos to these good-doers who decided to risk their well-being and land themselves in the middle of an epidemic to help those in need. It takes a lot of courage to put others needs and safety before yours during moments of such crisis. But not only did these guys do it without a second thought, they also ensured that the official order was carried out without a glitch and fellow Indians were brought back to the safety of their motherland. Twitter Reportedly, the Indian government is now planning to rescue Pakistani students from Wuhan, along with many more Indians very soon. Apart from evacuating people, India will also be delivering a large consignment of medical supplies to help the casualties in China. And guess what, Singh and his team are more than happy to do it all, all over again. French insurer AXA lowered its 2020 profit guidance for its companies-focused XL unit and named a new boss for the division, as it stepped up measures to reduce exposure to risks stemming from natural disasters that become more frequent. Insurers are becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of bad weather linked to climate change, with more frequent wildfires in California among the most costly in recent years. Insurers have also been hit by a series of hurricanes and, more recently, intense bushfires in Australia. AXA guided that underlying earnings at the AXA XL unit which it swooped on in 2018 in a $15.3 billion bid to create a world leader in property and casualty insurance would be 200 million euros ($216 million) lower than previously expected in 2020, at 1.2 billion euros. The division is focused on offering property damage coverage to companies and insurance in specialist areas from ships to arts. It accounted for about a fifth of group revenue in 2019. Although this should help reduce earnings volatility, a reduction in guidance even with strong pricing momentum is slightly disappointing to us, analysts at JP Morgan Cazenove said. AXAs shares were down 3% at 0838 GMT. Some industry peers were also hit, with shares in reinsurer Swiss Re falling 4.7% after it posted a lower-than-expected rise in net profit. The French insurer appointed Scott Gunter, previously senior vice president of rival Chubb Ltd, as chief executive of AXA XL. Gunter replaces Greg Hendrick, who was leaving the group, AXA said. The group said it was reducing underwriting where it identified risks and changing its reinsurance approach for the unit. Of course, it means we give up turnover, but at the same time we protect ourselves better against frequency risk, AXA Chief Financial Officer Etienne Bouas-Laurent told journalists. We had reinsurance contracts that protected us well against the severity of an event, but not enough against the frequency. AXA Chief Executive Thomas Buberl, appointed in 2016, said he stood by his strategy to buy XL, saying he wanted the insurer to be more exposed to the risk of property damage and health and less to market risks. AXA, the second-largest European insurer after Allianz , reported a 4% rise in 2019 underlying earnings, as higher results from property and casualty insurance helped offset weaker life and savings business. Globally, Bouas-Laurent said the insurer was on track to meet its 2020 goals. AXAs return on equity stood at 16% versus a 14% to 16% target it had set for 2020. AXAs revenue rose by 5% in 2019 to 103.5 billion euros. ($1 = 0.9264 euros) (Reporting by Maya Nikolaeva and Matthieu Protard; editing by Lisa Shumaker and Edmund Blair) Topics Carriers Profit Loss AXA XL Senior Tory MPs have demanded ministers act on 'deadly serious' warnings from the US that the involvement of Huawei in the construction of the UK's 5G network will put intelligence sharing at risk. Owen Paterson, the former Cabinet minister, said the government's attitude to the Chinese tech giant was 'incomprehensible' given White House opposition to using the firm. Mr Paterson is one of many Conservative MPs who are urging Downing Street to reverse its backing for Huawei and his intervention came after Donald Trump's acting chief of staff had crunch talks on the issue in Number 10 today. Mick Mulvaney is understood to have led a delegation of US officials in a meeting with UK counterparts including Sir Edward Lister, one of Boris Johnson's top advisers. The meeting came after Mr Mulvaney told an event last night that the UK's 5G decision on Huawei will have a 'direct and dramatic impact' on intelligence sharing with the US. Washington has urged its allies not to do business with Huawei due to security concerns. But Huawei has always denied that it poses a security risk. Mr Johnson announced at the end of January that the firm would be given a limited role in the UK's 5G network. The decision sparked fury across the Atlantic and there is a growing Tory rebellion on the issue. Owen Paterson, the former Cabinet minister pictured in June last year, said US warnings over Huawei and intelligence sharing 'confirm our very worst fears' Donald Trump, pictured in Phoenix, Arizona, yesterday, is furious at the UK's decision to grant Huawei a role in building 5G infrastructure A delegation led by Mr Trump's acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney (above right) met with key No 10 figures today to discuss Huawei. Last night he said it would have a 'direct and dramatic impact' on intelligence sharing Mr Paterson told MailOnline that Mr Mulvaney's comments 'confirm our very worst fears'. He said that the government must now commit to eliminating Huawei involvement in the infrastructure 'by a fixed date' rather than just restricting the scale of the firm's role. 'Rather than aiming for 35 per cent market share they should be aiming for zero and it should be a coordinated programme, working with our Five Eyes allies,' he said. 'The government should be aiming for zero Huawei involvement by a fixed date. 'This is deadly serious. We have this incredibly close relationship with these four other like-minded Western nations and I just find the governments attitude incomprehensible. What is the upside? 'If it delays 5G for a few months or a year or so, fine, we can live with that.' Mr Paterson has formed a group with other concerned Tory MPs, including former party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith and David Davis, to coordinate their efforts as they call for 'high risk' vendors to be removed from the network. Sir Iain said the UK had been 'cosying up' to China for the past two decades and it is 'becoming an embarrassment'. The UK government has labelled Huawei 'high risk' but has still given the green light to it to help build non-core parts of the network. Mr Johnson has insisted the decision will not impact on intelligence sharing with the UK's allies, including its Five Eyes partners - Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. Huawei has always rejected accusations that it poses a security risk, as claimed by the US However, the US has repeatedly warned it will have an impact, with Mr Mulvaney last night piling the pressure on the British government as he addressed the Oxford Union. 'Our governments share a tremendous amount of security information,' he said in comments reported by The Telegraph. 'We are very much concerned that integrity of that information is hardwired into your computer systems, and if you folks go forward with the decision, it will have a direct and dramatic impact on our ability to share information with you. 'Period, end of story.' The delegation led by Mr Mulvaney was reportedly going to deliver a 'b******ing' to their UK counterparts over the Huawei decision during today's meeting. Fury is not just confined to the US either with Australian MPs believed to have cancelled a visit to the UK next month because of their opposition to the move. Canberra has refused to allow Huawei involvement in its telecoms systems. Although it has been widely disproved, he believed in the broken windows theory of policing, where stopping small infractions would prevent an escalation of crime. He believed his police commissioner, Ray Kelly, who told him that young black men would leave their guns at home if they thought they would be stopped. This was misguided because a stop based on racial profiling instead of reasonable suspicion is unconstitutional. But this does not mean he hates black people. The most I can say is he had a pure heart but an empty head; the stop-and-frisk program was very poorly executed. It is easy to write in general terms about the humiliation of being stopped and frisked. So consider two examples which reveal the impact on the victims and the futility of the policy. In August 2008, a black man in his 30s stood in front of a chain-link fence near his house and talked to a friend on his cellphone. He held the phone in one hand and the mouthpiece on a cord in the other. Two white plainclothes officers approached him. One officer said it looked like he was smoking weed and shoved him against the fence. The man explained that he was talking on his phone, not smoking marijuana, and that he was a drug counselor. Without asking permission, the officers patted him down and reached into his pockets. No contraband was found. In March 2010, a boy, 13, was stopped on his way home by two white officers in plain clothes who were responding to 911 calls about a group of rowdy men. They pulled up alongside the boy, pushed him down on the hood of the police car, handcuffed him and patted him down as he cried. The officers recovered only a cellphone and a few dollars. Yet they took him to the precinct and wrote a false report stating that he was in criminal possession of a weapon. The reason for the stop was listed as fits description and furtive movements. After nearly six decades, founder and CEO Leslie Wexner will step down from his executive role at L Brands, the company announced Thursday. L Brands -- the conglomerate behind mall staples Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works and Pink -- will also separate into two companies. Bath & Body Works will become a standalone public company, and Victoria's Secret, Victoria's Secret Beauty and Pink are going private as a single brand, L Brands said. "We believe this structure will allow Bath & Body Works -- which represents the vast majority of 2019 consolidated operating income -- to continue to achieve strong growth and receive its appropriate market valuation," Wexner said in a statement Thursday. "The transaction will also allow the company to reduce debt." MORE: Halsey slams comments made by Victoria's Secret exec about trans community He added that they believe Victoria's Secret going private "provides the best path to restoring these businesses to their historic levels of growth and profitability." Victoria's Secret will become a privately-held company majority-owned by private equity firm Sycamore Partners. As part of the deal, Sycamore will purchase a 55% interest in Victoria's Secret for approximately $525 million, and L Brands will retain a 45% stake in the lingerie company. Wexner, 82, has led L Brands since 1963. He will continue at the company in the non-executive role of chairman emeritus of the board. In recent years, Wexner has come under fire for his ties to the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide while awaiting trial in a New York jail in August. PHOTO: Retail mogul Leslie Wexner speaks at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, Sept. 19, 2014. (Jay Laprete/AP, FILE) Wexner acknowledged his ties to Epstein during a call with investors in September, saying he was "embarrassed" by them. Wexner said he was taken advantage of by Epstein, describing him as "so sick, so cunning, so depraved is something that I'm embarrassed that I was even close to," according to the Associated Press. Story continues "But that is in the past," Wexner added, saying he severed ties with Epstein approximately 12 years ago. The billionaire retail mogul has also accused Epstein of misappropriating "vast sums" of his personal fortune. MORE: Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepping down as CEO and president Management at Victoria's Secret has also courted controversy in recent years. L Brands' chief marketing officer Ed Razek stepped down in August 2019 after coming under fire for comments that he didn't want to cast transgender models in the fashion show because they might ruin its "fantasy" appeal. The company also canceled broadcasting its once-iconic fashion shows in 2018. Andrew Meslow, currently the COO of Bath and Body Works, has been promoted to the CEO of Bath and Body Works and will become the new CEO Of L Brands after the transaction is closed, the company said. Nick Coe, the current CEO of Bath and Body Works, has been named Vice Chairman of Bath and Body Works Brand Strategy and New Ventures. "We are pleased to name Andrew as CEO of Bath & Body Works and have Nick step into this new, more focused role as the team propels the brand and business forward," Wexner said. This report was featured in the Feb. 2 episode of Start Here, ABC News daily news podcast. "Start Here" offers a straightforward look at the day's top stories in 20 minutes. Listen for free every weekday on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, the ABC News app or wherever you get your podcasts. Victoria's Secret goes private as L Brands CEO Les Wexner steps down originally appeared on abcnews.go.com Women of Michigan Action Network (WOMAN) has announced that Sarah Schulz, candidate for state representative of House District 98, has stepped down from the leadership team of the progressive action group, effective Sept. 1, 2019. In addition, Casey Hillstrom has joined the leadership team, which also includes Carol Arnosky, Alaynah Smith, Cherie Marks and Allison Wilcox. The group also announced that their monthly action meetings will now occur on the second Tuesday of most months, instead of the third Thursday as they had in the past. "The members of WOMAN are very grateful for Sarah's leadership of the group, and her vision was instrumental in our efforts to become a positive force in the Midland community," stated Wilcox. "In addition, we are excited to add Casey to the leadership team. His energy and youth will bring a new dynamic to the group as we continue to advocate for forward progress in human and civil rights." Korea has reported nearly 50 new cases of coronavirus infection in the southeastern city of Daegu and nearby towns in just two days this week, bringing the total confirmed cases to 82 and prompting health authorities to scramble into emergency mode. Most of the newly infected people apparently came into contact with the 31st confirmed case, a Daegu resident who had not traveled abroad recently and did not cross paths with any of the previously confirmed cases. The crisis unfolding in Daegu suggest that other cities in Korea are not safe either. The mayor of Seoul recently told President Moon Jae-in that quarantine efforts in the capital are "progressing smoothly in contrast to the [way the previous government handled] the outbreak of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome." But soon after the mayor voiced such confidence, another mysterious case was detected in Seoul. The Korea Medical Association says initial quarantine measures have "failed." After no new confirmed cases emerged over three days after Feb. 13, Moon said the outbreak here "appears to be receding" and even forecast an imminent end. But now thousands of students are arriving from China after their winter break. Under these circumstances other countries might soon consider banning Koreans from entering. A minor alert would be fine if an infectious disease's spread across borders is limited. But Korea now faces the threat of a nationwide epidemic. The government must think about raising the alert to "serious" and make concerted efforts to stem the spread of infections. So far quarantine efforts have focused on high-risk groups such as incoming visitors from China with symptoms. Now authorities must rush to identify infected people showing no symptoms and isolate them. They also need to inspect all pneumonia patients in the country as well as some 1,470 nursing homes. They need to prepare for a surge in infections by allocating more hospital beds, while privately owned hospitals must get ready to handle coronavirus patients to take up the overspill from state hospitals. The 31st patient apparently twice refused requests from doctors to be checked for coronavirus and went to her church and even a wedding at a large hotel. Under the current law, health officials can conduct on-site checks on suspected carriers who refuse to be tested. They must enforce that law. The law also requires restaurants, hotels, schools, landlords, hospitals and companies to notify suspected carriers with tell-tale symptoms to health authorities. This needs to be publicized more. COVID-19 is difficult for quarantine officials to curb due to its rapid spread in the early stage of infection. The public needs to become more wary and refrain from gathering anywhere at all for the time being. December 12, 2018: World Bank Country Manager Yasser El-Gammal (left) and Minister for Finance and Economic Planning Dr Uzziel Ndagijimana exchange documents after signing an MoU in Kigali. Such signings are a regular feat in Kigali between Rwandan and WB officials. Former World Bank chief economist and colleagues from two European universities have published a long-awaited research in which they show that global aid to poorest countries like Rwanda, is instead Former World Bank chief economist and colleagues from two European universities have published a long-awaited research in which they show that global aid to poorest countries like Rwanda, is instead being retransferred to offshore havens. The research was done by Penny Goldberg, a World Bank chief economist, who resigned two weeks ago from her job when the leaks about the research emerged. The other colleagues are Jrgen Juel Andersen of BI Norwegian Business School and Niels Johannesen of the University of Copenhagen and CEBI. The final contributor to the research was the World Banks Bob Rijkers. The research titled Elite Capture of Foreign Aid: Evidence from Offshore Bank Accounts, was done for the World Bank, but then the findings proved too embarrassing for publication. The researchers were reportedly not allowed to share its contents. Penny Goldberg decided to leave her job, and the whole document is now published on her website. The Chronicles reviewed the 46-page document and it gives grim reading. Reviewing data of 22 countries including Rwanda, the team shows that aid granted by the World Bank is falling into the wrong hands. After aid to a country increased, money departs for offshore havens, reads the research in part. The other countries in the research are Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, Afghanistan, Armenia, Burkina Faso, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Kyrgyz-Republic, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mozambique, Niger, Sao Tome and Principe, and Sierra Leone. The research document is rather complicated. The research used quarterly information on aid disbursements from the World Bank, to these 22 most aid-dependent countries, in combination with Bank for International Settlements banking statistics, which cover the flows between the country receiving the aid and havens such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands and Singapore, where secrecy and asset protection are paramount. For comparison, the research also looks at flows between the recipient country and Germany, France and Sweden places not as vaunted for their banking secrecy. Scenarios that you would expect to lead to higher inflows and outflows, such as wars or financial crises, are excluded. For the case of each country, the research shows how much much money moved out from the state coffers, immediately it arrived from the World Bank. For Rwandas case, the annual World Bank disbursement is 2.7% of GDP. For example, in 2018, Rwanda got double what it used to get in previous years, rising to $545m from the World Bank. The researchers shows that in their investigation, $149m exited Rwanda and was deposited in offshore havens. During the same period, $41m left Rwanda for non-offshore havens. This means $190m left Rwanda in a very short period of time. For offshore deposits of money from Rwanda, the researchers found a quarterly increase of 0.06% in deposits for offshore havens, but the deposits in non-offshore havens reduced by -1.0%. For Uganda, the researchers discovered the opposite from Rwanda. They found $73m was deposited in offshore havens, while $188m left Uganda for non-offshore regions. In Tanzania, the money leaving the countrys coffers to be hidden away, is exorbitant. During the period that the researchers investigated, $145m left Tanzania for offshore accounts. However, a whooping $437m was deposited in non-offshore havens. Here is compilation of how money is flowing out the sampled countries (courtesy document) For the smallest economy in the East African Community (EAC) region, Burundi, $103m was ferried out of the country to offshore accounts. At the same time, just $19m was swindled off to non-offshore regions. South Sudan and Kenya, both EAC menbers are not in the research. What is clear is that Rwandans and Burundians prefer hiding most of their money in those deeply secret havens where no one will ask questions. While, Ugandans and Tanzanians are fine with stealing the World Bank cash and sending to places that dont tolerate spoils of theft from poor countries. There was a problem that the researchers admit in the paper. For instance, it was impossible for them to tell who exacy in terms of names, is moving the funds out of the country, with the statistics used, only counting the total flows per quarter between countries. While there have been different leaks over the years showing how money was flowing from poor countries to Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands and Singapore, it is the first time Rwanda has been highlighted. It is particularly shocking as the data comes from inside the World Bank, which has repeatedly given a clean bill of health for different aspects of Rwanda Beth Smith was the logical choice to fill the major void left by Chris Clouets impending departure, according to Mayor Mark Lauretti. Lauretti was responding to critics that charge that Smiths demeanor and penchant for controversy make her a poor choice for the interim superintendents post. I believe she is up to the challenge, said Lauretti. When your boss ups and walks out midstream, there is a big void to fill. Beth understands the system. She has incredible experience, and she worked the toughest job in the system at Shelton High School. Smith, who has been the director of special education and pupil services, began her career as a special education teacher at Shelton High, ultimately becoming department head. After leaving the district, she returned as Shelton High School principal, where she served for 10 years before being placed on administrative leave last year after investigation into her handling of an alleged sexual assault at the school. After a police and internal investigation, she was cleared of charges that included interfering with police. Former Board of Education member David Gioiello said, given her history of actions, he was dismayed with the appointment. Over the time I was on the board, she took actions that forced the Board of Education to first support her and then when all the information was available override her decision, said Gioiello. The issue that occurred in March was just more of the same as she exceeded her authority. I support the four Democrats on the board that voted no. The mayor supports her so the Republicans on the BOE must do his bidding. Board of Education Chair Kathy Yolish said she was impressed with Smiths work at the high school. She did an outstanding job. Did she make some mistakes? Yes. Did we have our disagreements? Yes. But when you look at her overall experience and knowledge of the system, she has all the skills we need to help us through this time, said Yolish, who was still teaching in the Shelton schools when she first met Smith. Lauretti said Smith brought structure and discipline to Shelton High upon her arrival as principal, and that will generate resentment from people. No one knows better than I some of her miscues, but we have gotten past all that, said Lauretti, referring to the police investigation that engulfed Smith and the high school last year. That was a failure in leadership from her superiors. Social media exploded Thursday once word of Smiths promotion hit the city. Most writing on social media stated that the Board of Education made a poor decision. Shelton High senior and former Democratic Board of Aldermen candidate Matt McGee has started an online petition calling for the community to reject Smiths appointment. Board of Education member James Orazietti said the boards decision to oblige Clouets request to waive his 90-day contractual separation notification during budget season placed the board in a time-sensitive predicament. Smith has the state certification and the experience to serve as our interim superintendent, said Orazietti. Her expertise in special education, supervision, building operations as well as organizational and fiscal budget preparation will be invaluable during a very demanding transition. Orazietti said the Board of Education and administrators will work diligently with Dr. Smith to ensure our budget and her assignment go as smoothly as possible, hopefully without further disruptive distraction. I have total confidence Dr. Smith will excel in this assignment benefiting our student population. Mark Holden, board chair during Smiths time at Shelton High through last years investigation, said she is smart and has the necessary certifications for the post. READ MORE: Who is Beth Smith? Sheltons interim superintendent has controversial past Hopefully in this interim position, she'll be an effective and collaborative leader, said Holden. After the Board of Education decision Wednesday, Clouet said, I wish Dr. Smith and the board all the best. brian.gioiele@hearstmediact.com CHICAGO The ascendant Democratic left may have found the opening it needs to finally dislodge one of the partys few anti-abortion House members in next month's Illinois primary. The effort to defeat Rep. Dan Lipinski, who represents part of Chicago and its southwest suburbs, is drawing presidential contenders and the states top Democratic leaders. And if liberals succeed in ousting the self-proclaimed moderate, it would leave just two House Democrats who oppose abortion rights. Lipinski has been targeted by the left before, only to dust himself off and power though an eighth term. But liberals are putting the squeeze on him this election cycle, emboldened by intra-party victories by challengers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) two years ago, and a progressive wing enraged by Donald Trump. Presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have endorsed Lipinski's Democratic opponent, Marie Newman, a businesswoman and former marketing consultant who came within 2,200 votes of defeating Lipinski in 2018. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a Democrat, recently threw her support to Newman saying "Lipinski is on the wrong side of history." Fellow House Democrats, including members of the Illinois delegation, have joined the pile-on too. "The credibility she has built up and whatever changes in the past two years demographically in the district give her a better shot, Don Rose, a veteran Chicago political consultant who has advised elected Illinois Democrats for more than two decades, said of Newman. The March 17 primary will test Lipinskis intimacy with his district and Newman's persistence. And it will also measure the staying power of organizations like the Justice Democrats, which helped Ocasio-Cortez oust an establishment figure. The group endorsed seven candidates this cycle, including Newman, who launched primaries against sitting Democrats like Reps. Henry Cuellar in Texas and Eliot Engel in New York. But the Lipinski-Newman rematch where previous data exists and the incumbent conflicts with the party should be one of their easiest wins. Story continues Lipinski, who has the support of numerous unions, suburban mayors, and some female elected officials in his district, insists hes representing the majority of his constituents, many who were familiar with his father's 22-year tenure in the seat. Abortion rights just doesnt come up that often, he told POLITICO, saying instead the media and Newman are the ones eager to single out the issue. FILE - In this Feb. 13, 2018, file photo, Democratic candidate for the 3rd congressional district Marie Newman speaks with supporters at a campaign event in LaGrange, Ill. Ahead of the fall midterm elections, Democrats have contested primaries around the country that will help shape their general election matchups against Republicans this fall. Newman is challenging Rep. Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., in the March 20 primary. (AP Photo/Sara Burnett) Put aside what anyone thinks [about abortion], Lipinski said in the interview. Its bad for the party that we do not want anyone whos pro-life in the party. One of three Democratic voters say they are pro-life. Its a dangerous message for the party to send that to be pro-life you arent welcome in the party. Lipinski has long leaned on his Catholic faith as a reason for his opposition to abortion rights. And Newman is brandishing her Catholic bona fides in an ad released earlier this month highlighting her upbringing noting where she was born and where she was baptized while emphasizing health care and wages. Besides better name recognition two years later, a half-dozen Chicago-area political analysts, consultants and Democratic insiders say Newman will likely benefit from a presidential primary process that's driving a large, more progressive group of voters to the polls. These observers say Lipinskis operation has proven it can deploy a steady stream of supporters each election cycle but his political machine of labor unions and moderate voters can get steamrolled in presidential years. Lipinski is more prepared for this race unlike the last one. But its a presidential year and he can be in trouble because so many Democrats will come out to vote and more will likely sway towards Newman," said Becky Carroll, a Democratic strategist who worked on Barack Obamas 2008 campaign. One of the big unknowns for a race where the margins were so narrow in 2018 is the entry of two lesser-known Democrats, Rush Darwish and Charles Hughes, who both support abortion rights and could siphon votes from Newman. But Newman told POLITICO shes improved her ground game and built her base to accommodate the new pressures of this year's campaign. "Awareness is higher" about her and Lipinski's positions, she said, arguing that a big voter turnout would break in her favor. She's also banking on support from Indivisible Chicago, a progressive get-out-the-vote group that helped freshmen Illinois Reps. Lauren Underwood and Sean Casten flip their districts two years ago. Perhaps the biggest saving grace for Lipinski's 2020 reelection effort was a decision by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee not to hire companies working for primary challengers, cutting off substantial resources to candidates like Newman. However, the move only emboldened progressives, who have stepped up their own anti-Lipinski campaign. Amid a slew of new anti-abortion laws passed in predominantly Republican states last spring, women's organizations and activist groups pressured DCCC chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) to back out of a fundraiser for the congressman a friend who helped whip support for her DCCC job. Lipinski, and Reps. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas) and Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) are the last three anti-abortion Democrats left in the House. But Cuellar and Peterson represent conservative, mostly rural areas, where the broader Democratic message might not appeal. So, what's made Lipinski a marked man is the combination of how openly and actively he defies a core principle of the party while holding a left-leaning district where the November election is rarely competitive in a deep-blue state. Hes also been out of step with his party on issues related to the LGBTQ community, including his initial opposition to same-sex marriage, although he supported repealing "don't ask, don't tell." His views on social issues aren't aligning with the Democratic Party's big-tent coalition, which is "built more now on the strength of suburban women and people of color and less on the votes of rural white working-class men" that once defined Lipinski's district, said Lanae Erickson, an executive vice president for social policy and politics at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank. "That means we still need lots of moderate candidates, but the ones who prevail will likely be a different breed than the old Blue Dog social conservatives." Lipinski frequents rallies against abortion rights and, along with Peterson, was among just two Democrats to join Republicans earlier this year in calling on the Supreme Court to consider overturning Roe v. Wade, the landmark decision granting a constitutional right to an abortion in the United States. His signing on with Republicans was a thumb in the eye" to Democrats who are sympathetic to Lipinski's beliefs but don't see the need to embrace his anti-Roe efforts, said Rose, the Chicago consultant. But Lipinski counters by that isolating abortion critics within the Democratic Party plays right into the hands of Trump. That was a factor in President Trump getting elected in the first place. Its frustrating for me personally for my position in the party but I think its bad for the Democratic Party to be sending that message. Still, while he's conservative, Lipinski hasnt vowed allegiance to President Donald Trump or switched parties like Democrat-turned-Republican New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew. And though he didnt endorse fellow Illinoisan Barack Obama for a second term, Lipinski very much sees himself as a Democrat. He says his views fit with the Democratic ideals of government protecting constituents, in this case, babies in the womb. Lipinski says his blue-collar constituents want to talk about health care. And though he has pivoted to support Obamacare after initially voting against it, he is unmoved by his partys progressive shift on abortion rights. Still, he recognizes the pressure to replace him with a more liberal Democrat is mounting and has ramped up his campaign operation. Were better organized. Weve had people out canvassing for the past three or four weeks, so we have a good ground game. And we have a much more active social media presence than we did two years ago, he said. There's no evidence of customers advancing their decision to buy cars or two-wheelers due to the impending transition to BS-VI emission norms as retail sale of automobiles in January registered over 7 per cent decline in India. The onset of new emission norms is expected to make petrol vehicles expensive by Rs 20,000 for cars; Rs 6,000 for two-wheelers; and Rs 100,000 for diesel vehicles. Some manufacturers anticipated advance purchases by consumers to beat the price hike. Instead, the Federation of Automobile Dealers Association (FADA) said customers might be postponing their decisions. "Auto sales continue to be in the negative territory in the month of January, except for 3W, with many consumers still not concluding on their decisions. The ongoing transition of BS-IV to BS-VI is also a factor in delayed purchase decision," said Ashish Harsharaj Kale, President, FADA. "Overall weak economic sentiment continues and even the Budget 2020 did not have any direct measures to spur growth in the immediate term for the sector," Kale added. Sale of passenger vehicles in the month declined 4.6 per cent at 290,879 units, while two-wheeler sale fell 8.8 per cent at 12,67,366 units. The overall decline was, however, much less compared to December when sales declined 15 per cent. Also read: Slowdown Blues: Passenger vehicle sales decline 6.2% in January, steepest in four months Dealers had approached the Supreme Court for an extension of the deadline for the registration of BS-IV vehicles beyond March 31, but with the apex court dismissing their petition they have told manufacturers not to dispatch BS-IV vehicles anymore. "With weak demand, the liquidation of complete BS-IV inventory is our top focus. We have already appealed to all OEM's to switch over completely to BS6," Kale said. "The last 14 months has seen the one of its toughest times for auto sales. We have also told manufacturers through SIAM that any BS-IV Vehicle Billed further, which are not against specific customer orders, should be on a returnable basis to avoid financial loss to dealers." Also read: Auto sales show no signs of recovery; two-wheelers decline 16.6%, cars down 8.4% in December The inventory level for passenger vehicles stood at 15-20 days in January against 20-25 days in December. For two-wheelers and commercial vehicles, it was 25-30 days against 30-35 days in December. FADA said a majority of its dealers -- 72 per cent -- expected sales to either decline or remain "flat" this month, while about 22 per cent dealers rated the inventory situation "bad". In April 2017, the industry had witnessed a messy changeover in emission norms from BS III to IV. The SC's last-minute verdict saying no BS III vehicle could be registered or manufactured beyond April 1, 2017, led to distress sale and a mad rush to liquidate stocks. It had also led to significant losses to a number of dealers. Also read: SC refuses to extend March 31 deadline for BS-IV vehicle sales CLEVELAND, Ohio Cleveland proposes giving Sherwin-Williams incentives totaling as much as $100 million to keep the company in the city, including a rebate of sorts of city income tax revenue. But the package contains no newly created incentives. What makes this package different from those offered to others is the scale, reflecting the size of the Fortune 500 company the city is trying to keep. The amounts are larger, and the durations are somewhat longer, but they are our basic package, Mayor Frank Jackson told City Council members on Thursday. The package will be introduced before City Council on Monday. Council is expected to review the incentives during hearings before voting on the proposal. Related coverage Clevelands incentive package to Sherwin-Williams would commit millions to secure Fortune 500 company for generations Sherwin-Williams to build its new headquarters in Greater Cleveland, sources say Sherwin-Williams confirms plans for new downtown Cleveland HQ, Brecksville R&D center Taxpayer incentives in Sherwin-Williams deal wont be disclosed immediately, in some cases are still being worked out, officials say Sherwin-Williams has been a Cleveland fixture for 154 years, legacy expected to continue in NE Ohio The Jackson administration proposes offering the company a construction grant worth $13.5 million and a job-creation grant of up to $11.5 million, money that would come from income taxes generated by new employees. The package also calls for tax increment financing expected to have a total value of $60 million to $75 million over 30 years. Those basic tools are often offered to developers as incentives, administraton officials told cleveland.com. Cleveland offered a giant package of incentives in its failed bid to land Amazon's second headquarters. That package offered up to $803.6 million, including a 15-year, job-creation grant based that would have committed $489.4 million in payroll tax revenues. That package promised to create tax increment financing worth up to $314 million over 30 years. But most development packages arent nearly that large. For example, the recently approved incentives for Market Square, a $135-million project across from the West Side Market that will include commercial space and housing, included tax-increment financing that will divert about $1.4 million a year from new property taxes to help pay for the project. That project doesnt involve a job-creation grant. Job-creation grants involve rebating 50% of the income tax collected on new jobs from a project. That program has been around for about a decade. The city usually has four or five such deals a year, but they often involve smaller businesses, Economic Development Director David Ebersole told cleveland.com. said. The most recent large package involved Dealer Tire, which planned a few years ago. It planned to add up to 100 jobs at its headquarters site on Euclid Avenue in Midtown. The incentive for Sherwin-Williams starts with 140 new jobs expected to carry a payroll of more than $12.5 million a year. That would lead to an annual grant of nearly $157,000 a year for job creation -- a total of more than $2.3 million over 15 years from the new income taxes. But that leaves the company eligible to receive an additional $9 million. The tax incentives ultimately are an investment in the future, Jackson said Thursday. They all are based on newly created revenues, not money that the city already is receiving. And they dont affect school funding. "At the end of the day, we will not only have kept the revenue that we would have lost [had Sherwin-Williams left Cleveland], but we will have increased revenue, Jackson said. More from Cleveland City Hall Cleveland police Chief Calvin Williams says staffing now above 1,600, wants to focus on stability, efficiency, good policing Cleveland could weather a 2-year recession without cutting services, Mayor Frank Jackson says Cleveland, neighborhood non-profit target 14-block, East Side commercial strip for growing new businesses Street projects to force one-way traffic on major Cleveland roadways, detours for at least seven months Cuyahoga County elections board grants Cleveland request to cancel charter issues to cut City Council seats, members pay Get insider texts about Cleveland City Hall on your phone from Robert Higgs. Cut through the clutter of social media and communicate directly with cleveland.coms City Hall reporter, just like you would with your friends. Sign up here and give it a try. Its just $3.99 a month, which works out to about 13 cents a day. Lusaka, Zambia (PANA) Zambia's Human Rights Commission in Zambia (HRC) has expressed concern at continuing reports of gassing activities and the killing of people suspected of being behind ritual killings and gassing incidents The man who allegedly ripped off hundreds of people in Majorca by selling them houses that didnt exist, is now tucked up in jail in Palma. Carlos Garcia Roldan, whos also known as Charly, was the alleged the mastermind behind the biggest real estate scam the island had ever seen. His company, Promociones Lujo Casa, or Luxury House Promotions, allegedly scammed more than 200 people out of between 4 million and 7 million euros. When the first complaint about the scam was filed in Majorca in 2018, Charly fled to Colombia, lost weight and reportedly had cosmetic surgery in an effort to hide his identity. He was arrested last year after a joint operation between the Colombian Police and the Guardia Civil and extradited to Spain to stand trial. On Tuesday afternoon, he was transferred to Palma jail from Soto del Real in Madrid under armed guard and is facing a raft of charges, including aggravated fraud, document forgery, money laundering and membership of a criminal organisation. The Harlandale Independent School District board has voted 5-2 to approve the sale of roughly 100 acres on Southeast Loop 410, but district officials were unable to name the buyer or describe the price pending final negotiations. Trustees Elaine Anaya-Ortiz and Norma Anel Cavazos were the two dissenters, though neither made any statement before the vote Tuesday night. I feel we are needing the influx of human capital and also tax revenue, board president Ricardo Moreno said. That is something that could potentially help our community in being able to build infrastructure for our kids and also providing resources for our staff and teachers. Robert Woody Wilson, a lawyer for the district, said the board will need to vote again on a final contract, which would be subject to public release. Trustees considered four proposals, he said. On ExpressNews.com: Harlandale ISD has land, wants students and mulls a possible swap Moreno said the board wanted the land to be used for residential development. The tract faces Southeast Loop 410 and Roosevelt Avenue on Harlandales southern boundary, next to its maintenance and transportation building. A formal bidding process the board authorized in 2018 drew a set of proposals last year which the board has been considering since, he said. It will take time before the district reaps the benefits of an increased property tax base, with new homes and families contributing to enrollment and state per-pupil funding, Moreno said. I feel strongly that this is an opportunity that weve given much and careful consideration to and I think this is an opportunity that could potentially do wonders for our school district and, most particularly, for our kids, our students, Moreno said. Consideration of the sale at previous meetings drew community members voicing opposition, but on Tuesday night, more supporters addressed the board. Required Reading: Get San Antonio education news sent directly to your inbox Once again, I would like to reiterate the need for the district to move forward as soon as possible with the sale of this acreage for the housing projects offered to the district. The sale brings the district a huge amount of income from property taxes and (state funding) forever in the future, said Josie Scales, a former president of the district-wide Harlandale Council of PTAs. What we need is to increase our student enrollment. We need to provide opportunities for families to buy homes in this great district, said Julie Gimbel, president of Harlandale Education Association. She said she had opposed the prospect of a sale several years ago because of suspicion of a sweetheart deal and a too-low price. Only regular board critic Gina Castaneda spoke in opposition. Save it. Invest in it ... Wait til more of the development comes in. Youll get a higher price for your land, Castaneda said. Krista Torralva covers several school districts and public universities in the San Antonio and Bexar County area. Read her on our free site, mySA.com, and on our subscriber site, ExpressNews.com. | Krista.Torralva@express-news.net | Twitter: @KMTorralva The UN-backed government says schools in safer areas are becoming increasingly overcrowded. The United Nations hopes talks aimed at reaching a ceasefire in Libya will restart. The talks were suspended this week after forces loyal to renegade military commander Khalifa Haftar shelled a Tripoli port. With civilians in the firing line, more than 200 schools have shut. And, as Al Jazeeras Charles Stratford explains from Tripoli, that means thousands of children are not getting the education they deserve. PR-Inside.com: 2020-02-20 18:51:44 Press Information Published by ACCESSWIRE News Network 888.952.4446 e-mail http://www.accesswire.com # 508 Words ACCESSWIRE News Network888.952.4446 SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESSWIRE / February 20, 2020 / The think tank dGen, an organization specifically focusing on a rapidly decentralizing technology landscape, has released its much-anticipated "Blockchain in Europe 2020" report. The formal announcement, via dGen's Medium blog, provides an overview of some of dGen's impressive efforts, including reaching out to more than 60 experts and reviewing 1,200 organizations in over 20 countries."It's interesting to analyze the culture that drives much of contemporary blockchain development, as it appears very endemic to Europe," details Jake Scott, a founding board member of dGen in the blog statement. "Whether we look at The Enlightenment, the fall of the Berlin Wall, or our more recent history of fading borders for increased cross-country collaboration: it feels blockchain has a welcome home in the European discourse." Mapping out the geopolitical landscape of any emerging technology is a daunting task. The efforts of dGen were comprehensive. The think tank primarily examined the blockchain sentiment in six major European countries including Germany, France, UK, Malta, Switzerland, and The Netherlands. Deploying a proprietary scoring model, dGen evaluated each country through the prism of five categories: regulation, adoption, startups, funding, and fiscal situation."To gather this information, we collected a database of companies, funds, events, spaces, non-profits, and other organizations operating in the European blockchain ecosystem," continues Scott in the report. "We then looked at these, along with regulations, to determine how friendly countries are to blockchain innovations, and how active the ecosystem is." The report goes on to enumerate the advantages and disadvantages of each country's blockchain scene. In conclusion, dGen views Europe as possessing the potential to absorb market share from the US and Asia due to its unique history of collaboration among countries under a broader regulatory body -- the EU."Collaboration, clarity, and focus are key for EU players to succeed [in] giving the EU a unique position," concludes Simon Schwerin, co-founder of Scalewonder, in the report. "We should start seeing our efforts more as EU wide or global efforts, which is very hard due to local bubble' bias." The dGen perspective mirrors Schwerin's sentiment and the team furnishes a retinue of information in the new report supporting his hypothesis that organizations, task forces, and startups are tackling collaborating head-on.The Blockchain in Europe 2020 report is the third to emerge from the rising think tank, and another three releases are scheduled for Q1 2020.About dGendGen (short for decentralized generation) is an emerging think tank based in Berlin, Germany that focuses on understanding the convergence of societal and technological developments in the context of the movement towards more decentralized borders, technologies, and social dynamics. The dGen research initiative takes the perspective of a new generation, after Millennials and Gen Z, into a broader image of how decentralized technologies will affect the future of society in key industries. The dGen think tank was founded by Jake Scott and Nick Dijkstra, the current two founding board members.Media contact:Jennifer SpencerJennifer@ energentmedia.net 301-675-7848SOURCE: dGen Credit:Illustration: Matthew Absalom-Wong Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size The Democratic Party's presidential contenders are busy tearing each other apart in a complicated process to decide who will go up against Donald Trump in November for election to President of the United States. The Democratic primaries, which officially began in Iowa on February 3, are complicated and hugely expensive. They're drawn out too, culminating in the Democratic National Convention in July, a stadium event featuring blizzards of red, white and Democrat blue streamers and balloons. Democratic Party political elites used to decide the party's nominee with only token input from ordinary voters. That changed following the violent Democratic National Convention of 1968 a year of all-round civil unrest at the height of the Vietnam War and after Robert Kennedy's assassination in which Hubert Humphrey was chosen as the party's presidential candidate without winning a primary contest under his name. Above: TV anchor Dan Rather is jostled to the ground at the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention. In 1972, the party changed its rules to give voters rather than political insiders a dominant say over the process. This trend has continued ever since, and the Republican Party uses a similar process to decide its nominee. Advertisement In short, today the successful candidate who emerges in July is decided in an incremental way in the preceding six months through a series of primaries and caucuses. The votes that a candidate receives in these contests allows them to amass "pledged delegates" to support them at the convention. If a candidate secures 50 per cent of these delegates, they become the party's nominee. At one point last year, almost 30 candidates were running for the nomination but most of them have dropped out. Some simply ran out of money; others decided they had no realistic prospect of emerging the winner. These includes high-profile senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker and several state governors. Some low-polling candidates, such as businessman Tom Steyer and Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, have competed even though they seemed to have no viable path to victory. So who is voting for what? Who are the remaining contenders? And what is the difference between a caucus and a primary? How does the delegate system work? Delegates are people who are able to vote at the party convention, and there are two groups of them, pledged and super-delegates (more on them later). Pledged delegates represent their state and "pledge" to vote in accordance with their state's wishes (occasionally they defect to another candidate but this is rare). Each state uses its own rules to determine how its pledged delegates are selected. Some use a "primary" and others use a caucus. Advertisement In some states, you must be a registered Democrat to participate in voting; in other states, everyone is allowed to have a say, including Republicans. Some states allow you to mail in a ballot well ahead of polling day; other states do not. The most populous states send the most delegates to the convention: for example, California sends 415 pledged delegates to the convention while Wyoming sends just 14. What's the difference between a primary and a caucus? Primaries are the most common form of contest. Participants show up at a polling booth on a given day and select their chosen candidate from a ballot. There is no preferential voting: voters just select the one candidate they prefer. The process is run by state and local governments. Only four states Iowa, Nevada, North Dakota and Wyoming now use the caucus system, which is run by the party itself. Participants collectively decide who they want to support. At the Iowa caucuses, for example, voters gather in groups to express their support for a chosen candidate. The Republicans run a caucus system in Kentucky. The Democratic Party uses a proportional system to convert the results of the primary/caucus into pledged delegate numbers. This means a candidate could rack up a considerable number of convention delegates without "winning" the majority of votes overall in many, or even any, states. (The Republican selection process has several differences but most notably, it traditionally uses a first-past-the-post system where a winning candidate receives all delegates from a particular state, regardless of what portion of the votes they attract although some states favour a proportional approach.) But, crucially, candidates must win 15 per cent in a contest to claim any delegates for that state. There will be 3979 pledged delegates in total at the 2020 convention in July and only they are allowed to participate in the first round of voting. If a candidate receives a majority of pledged delegates in the first round that is, 1991 delegates they are declared the party's nominee. Advertisement How did the voting start in 2020? In February, there were four contests: caucuses in Iowa and Nevada, and primaries in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Because these were the first contests, they got a lot of attention. But the actual number of pledged delegates up for grabs in February was small: just 155, or 4 per cent, of total pledged delegates. This is why a candidate such as Michael Bloomberg could skip the early states, opting instead to hit the stage on Super Tuesday in March. Advertisement In the Iowa caucuses, Pete Buttigieg secured 14 delegates compared to 12 for Sanders and eight for Elizabeth Warren and six for Joe Biden. The results were embarrassingly delayed after the count was derailed by a technical error. "Democrats are stewing in a caucus mess of their own creation with the sloppiest train wreck in history," Trump's campaign manager Brad Parscale said of the count. New Hampshire provided a snapshot of the spectacle surrounding these primaries. Some 5000 people turned out to a rally for Bernie Sanders, who had enlisted rock band The Strokes, Sex and the City actress Cynthia Nixon and high-profile congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to energise his progressive base. Sanders narrowly beat Buttigieg they came away with the same number of delegates. Warren and Biden finished beneath the 15 per cent threshold, with 9 and 8 per cent respectively, meaning they did not claim any delegates in this state. After the caucuses in Nevada, Sanders was on the verge of running away with the nomination. The results above show that he received triple the number of delegates of Biden. The Nevada caucuses provided a definitive answer to what had been a lingering question. Could Sanders so left-wing and so old really be a serious contender for the presidency, especially given he had a heart attack in October? Yes he could, and he is. Advertisement David Linden MP has written to the UK Prime Minister calling on the British government to do everything in its power to help secure the release of Christian schoolgirl Leah Sharibu . The letter , dated 19 February, was written to mark the second anniversary of the abduction of Leah Sharibu, along with 109 other girls, from her school in Dapchi, Nigeria, by the Islamic State West African Province (ISWAP) faction of Boko Haram. While all of her surviving classmates were subsequently released, Ms Sharibu was denied her freedom for refusing to convert as a precondition for release. Mr Linden writes: The context of Ms Sharibus continuing captivity provides clear evidence that she has been held captive because of her religious beliefs It is a terrible indictment of the Nigerian government's failure to assist a vulnerable citizen, and of an international community that has not held it sufficiently to account for this. Mr Linden adds in a video message : We will work tirelessly to ensure that Leah is back with her family where she belongs. Well do that through prayer, well do that through campaigning, because ultimately we know that chains can be broken. Yesterday, Ms Sharibus mother Rebecca joined a protest organised by CSW outside the Nigerian High Commission in London, where she delivered a petition with 12,132 signatures calling on the Nigerian government to take action to secure Leahs release. CSWs Chief Executive Mervyn Thomas said: We welcome this letter from David Linden MP, and every effort made to draw international attention to Leahs case. We continue to call on the Nigerian government to do everything in its power to secure Leahs immediate and unconditional release, and urge the international community to assist wherever possible. For further information or to arrange interviews please contact Kiri Kankhwende, Press and Public Affairs Team Leader at CSW on +44 (0)782 332 9663 or email [email protected] . CSW is a human rights organisation specialising in freedom of religion or belief. We work on over 20 countries across Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. www.csw.org.uk Gandhinagar, Feb 20 : Two Tweets, one from the Ministry of External Affairs and the other from Ajay Tomar (Special Commissioner of Police, Crime Branch Ahmedabad) contradicting each other on Thursday created confusion about the possibility of the US President Donald Trump's visit to the Gandhi Ashram at Sabarmati. The MEAIndia tweet states that the US President and First Lady Melania Trump accompanied by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be going to the Motera Stadium for the 'Namaste Trump' event directly from the Ahmedabad airport. However, an official tweet from Ajay Tomar, the Special CP, Crime Branch Ahmedabad says that the US President will arrive at Ahmedabad on February 24 and to welcome him, PM Narendra Modi will be here. Both of them will go to Sabarmati Ashram first, then they will go to Motera Stadium to attend 'Namaste Trump' event.' Following the expected visit four days from now, the preparations were underway at the famous Gandhi Ashram. Apart from turning the place into a fortress and getting all the security aspects covered, there were also some infrastructure changes put in place at the Ashram. The Trump couple was expected to spend half an hour at the Ashram. A new parking space was being created at the place. To the rear side of the ashram, a platform was being built so that PM Modi could show the entire Sabarmati riverfront to the visiting dignitaries from one place. A special room was also being prepared at the Ashram, where the dignitaries would be spending some time. Sources said all that ongoing work has been halted for now. Authorities looking for a missing 15-month-old girl from Tennessee who was last seen in late December confirmed Friday evening that a vehicle possibly tied to the investigation was located in North Carolina. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation released new information Friday saying they were on the lookout for individuals that may have information on the whereabouts of Evelyn Mae Boswell, who was reportedly last seen Dec. 26, 2019. Workers perform docking operations at a port in Qingdao, East China's Shandong province, on Feb 11. [Photo by Yu Fangping/For China Daily] China has released measures to help firms that export their goods resume production and stabilize trade growth by mitigating the impact of the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak on the economy, the Ministry of Commerce said in a statement on Tuesday. The ministry made the announcement amid efforts by Chinese companies to quickly resume production to fulfill overseas orders while observing proper epidemic precautionary measures. The government will simplify foreign trade management procedures and offer legal services to help Chinese companies that export their goods cope with potential risks and promote the development of major projects related to the Belt and Road Initiative, the document said. The ministry urged domestic companies to rely on the protection of trade promotion agencies and legal advice services to deal with foreign trade restrictions from concerns about the spread of the epidemic. It said China respects the authority and professional opinion of the World Health Organization and opposes overreaction and imposition of trade restrictions by foreign governments. The move will offer companies, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, extra help to minimize damage, said Yan Yun, deputy director of the commercial certification service center of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. "Manufacturers are major contributors to job creation. Supporting these businesses will help support employment and protect economic vitality," said Yan, adding that quickly resuming production while taking proper epidemic precautions can save markets. Over 50 percent of large companies in key export provinces and municipalities such as Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces and Shanghai have restarted production, Tang Shemin, an official at the National Development and Reform Commission, said on Wednesday. Large enterprises are ahead of SMEs in resuming work, and upstream players and capital- and technology-intensive companies have reported a faster resumption, Tang said at a news conference. Eager to restore their earning ability, manufacturers that export from Zhejiang province's Hangzhou, Ningbo and Jiaxing have already chartered airplane, train and bus services to transport the workers from inland provinces, such as Sichuan and Guizhou, to factories so production can resume. "Our clients showed concern when the novel coronavirus broke out and spread across China," said Chen Liu, who owns a company in Hangzhou that exports its fireproof materials to Australia, Europe and Africa. "But they trust China's mature supply chain and are mostly positive about the upcoming recovery and production rebound here." She said the biggest problems are stagnating logistics and the lack of workers and raw materials. "We are negotiating with clients to postpone the day of delivery and are trying to find affordable ways to accelerate the process" such as shipping by air instead, Chen said. Although foreign trade has been affected by the virus, major exporting provinces such as Jiangsu, Zhe-jiang, Guangdong and Fujian have not been severely affected by the epidemic, said Chen Wenling, chief economist at Beijing-based China Center for International Economic Exchanges. The epidemic is expected to be controlled before the end of February in most provinces and regions, and both trade and consumption will rebound soon, she added. Some Chinese companies are continuing to expand in overseas markets. CRRC Qiqihar Co, a subsidiary of China Railway Rolling Stock Corp, the country's biggest train manufacturer, will ship 134 coal hopper cars to Australia on Thursday. China International Marine Containers (Group) announced on Tuesday that its subsidiary Shen-zhen CIMC-TianDa Airport Support Co sealed a 70 million yuan ($10 million) deal to supply 18 boarding bridges and related equipment to Clark International Airport in the Philippines. Feasterville, PA -- (SBWIRE) -- 02/20/2020 -- From blackouts to power outages, an electrical emergency can strike at any time. Home and business owners are urged to keep the number to A-1 Electric's team in their list of emergency contacts this spring and to quickly call for emergency electrical services when they're needed. A-1 Electric is an independent third-party team of Peco-certified electrical inspectors and repair professionals. A-1 Electric understands that electrical outages and blackouts can be sudden and startling and they understand that in some cases, a delayed repair can mean lost product or even a medical emergency. The team at A-1 Electric prides itself on responding quickly to electrical outages and issues, sending out an inspector or repair professional within 24 hours of receiving a call from a client. A-1 Electric employs a full team of master electricians and fully-certified electrical repair professionals. Home and business owners consistently choose A-1 Electric because they always know that they'll receive top-of-the-line, expert services at an affordable price. Anyone in need of fast and reliable electrical inspections or repairs in the Philadelphia area should call the team at A-1 Electric now. The company can also be found online at https://www.a-1-electric.com/, where interested parties can fill out a contact form or read more about currently available services and specials. Please keep in mind that A-1 Electric may not serve as both an inspection agency and a repair team on a single visit. However, the company is more than happy to schedule multiple visits to fit all of a client's needs. About A-1 Electric A-1 Electric is an organization of Electrical Inspectors and Master Electricians operating out of Feasterville-Trevose, PA. They service Bucks County, Chester County, Delaware County, Montgomery County, Philadelphia and all of Pennsylvania, with electrical underwriting, reintroduction of services, installation of electrical infrastructure and implementation of electrical equipment. They also offer complete electrical inspection and authorization consulting services certified by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, all local AHJs (Authorities Having Jurisdiction) and all PA electrical utilities. Rating agency ICRA has revised its outlook for Indian cut and polished diamond industry from stable to negative in the light of coronavirus pandemic and weak demand in key markets. The downgrade in outlook comes as parts of China and Hong Kong remain under lockdown due to the deadly virus outbreak. The ratings agency pointed out that China and Hong Kong (C&HK) region accounts for 14-15 per cent of global demand of cut and polished diamonds. Industry estimates show that the region accounts for 35 per cent of India's overall cut and polished diamond (CPD) exports. China is a major market as it not only consumes imported diamonds locally, but also produces diamond studded jewellery and exports the same to the US, South East Asia and other markets in a big way, ICRA said. The export of polished diamonds to China is largely routed through Hong Kong, which is a major global diamond trading hub alongside Belgium and the United Arab Emirates, the ratings agency further added. ALSO READ: Global GDP to dip 1 percentage point if coronavirus containment delayed beyond June: report The cut and polished diamond industry has been feeling the heat due to ongoing trade and political tensions between China and the United States. Matters have taken a turn for the worse with economic shutdown due to coronavirus outbreak, which "occurred during the busiest period for jewellery sales in China - the peak of the festive Lunar New Year extending from January 25 to February 08, 2020", ICRA said. "Apart from recent developments in China, the CPD industry had been going through weak demand conditions in key markets and pressure on gross margins due to declining finished prices. If the business lockdown continues in C&HK, industry pressure will aggravate thereby impacting cash flows. This can have a serious bearing, especially given the cautious lending to the sector and; potentially impact CPD players' credit profile," said Jay Seth, Vice President, Corporate Ratings, ICRA Limited. "The pandemic in China will also hit near-term global demand for CPD and the widespread economic shutdown in C&HK region which will further delay demand recovery," he further added. ALSO READ: Coronavirus: Manufacturers face logistical challenges as China moves back to normalcy CPD exports from India are down 17.6 per cent Y-o-Y during 9M FY2020 on account of the trade and political tensions and subdued macro-economic environment in markets other than the US. And now with potential adverse coronavirus impact, exports are likely to remain weak in current fiscal, ICRA said. The cash flows of CPD companies will be also impacted due to delay in collections and inventory build-up. Most of them avail pre-shipment or post shipment credit (export bills discounting of tenor upto 120-150 days) from banks to fund their working capital requirements, the ratings agency said. The impact on companies' liquidity will become evident as more bills come overdue during the second half of February and March, if the amount is significant, it further added. "Receivables delay from C&HK region beyond a reasonable time will mean companies will have to make good the payment out of their funds which in turn could pressurise their liquidity position," ICRA said. On the positive side, Indian CPD companies could fulfil the demand for diamond studded jewellery in key markets as China and Hong Kong remain under lockdown. However, the industry would face elevated inventory levels if the shutdown continues till April, the report cautioned. ALSO READ: New coronavirus cases drop in China but dangers remain Please register or log in to keep reading. No credit card required! Stay logged in to skip the surveys. An Air France at an airport near Toulouse, France. (Reuters/Regis Duvignau) Two of the worlds largest airlines on Thursday warned that coronavirus-related disruption would have far-reaching effects on their bottom lines, as the aviation industry continues to contend with the outbreak. Air France-KLM (AF.PA) said that the February to March suspension of its operations in China could cost it between 150m (125m, $161.9m) and 200m alone. The group on Thursday became the first major European airline to publish forecasts for 2020. Like other airlines, Air France-KLM has canceled all flights to mainland China until the end of March, and its forecasts assume that flights will resume at a steady pace beyond that point. Thats the hypothesis were using for the moment but we dont know how credible it is, said chief financial officer Frederic Gagey on Thursday. Obviously if it lasts longer, the impact will be heavier. Australias Qantas (QAN.AX), meanwhile, warned that a 15% reduction in flights to Asia as a result of the outbreak would cost it as much as 77m ($99m). The airline said it will ground the equivalent of 18 planes and encourage its 30,000 employees to take annual leave as it battles falling demand from Asia. It will also freeze the recruitment of new employees. Qantas last month suspended its direct flights from Sydney to Beijing and Sydney to Shanghai. Coronavirus resulted in the suspension of our flights to mainland China and were now seeing some secondary impacts with weaker demand on Hong Kong, Singapore and to a lesser extent, Japan, said Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce on Thursday. Joyce noted that the airline had not seen any impact to its other key routes, such as those to the US and UK. The World Health Organisation said on Wednesday that there are now more than 75,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the world. Some 2,000 people have died from the virus, with a huge proportion of those deaths occurring in China. Two people have died in Iran after testing positive on Wednesday for the new coronavirus, the health ministry said, in the Islamic republic's first cases of the disease. According to YJC news agency, a branch of state television, the pair who died were Iranian citizens and residents of the holy city of Qom. They are also the first deaths from the COVID-19 virus in the Middle East and only the seventh and eighth outside China, where the outbreak has killed more than 2,000 people. State news agency IRNA quoted Kianoush Jahanpour, a ministry spokesman, as saying the virus was detected in two elderly people with immunity problems in Qom, south of the Iranian capital. "Following the recent cases of chronic respiratory diseases in Qom, two of the patients tested positive in preliminary tests," it quoted him as saying. "Unfortunately both passed away in the intensive care unit due to old age and issues with their immune system." IRNA had earlier quoted Jahanpour as saying that the "new coronavirus" had been confirmed in two people and that other suspected cases were isolated. The state news agency also quoted a media adviser to Iran's health minister as saying two people had died after testing positive for the coronavirus. "Both of the people who had tested positive for coronavirus were in Qom and were old. Both have passed away," said Alireza Vahabzadeh. - Quarantine hospitals readied - Qom is a centre for Islamic studies attracting scholars from Iran and beyond. However, the head of the health ministry's contagious diseases unit said the pair who died were Qom residents who were not known to have left Iran. "These two were from Qom and visited (us) two days ago after falling ill... they didn't even have a history of going abroad," IRNA quoted Mohammad Mehdi Gouya as saying. Another official in Qom said people suspected of being infected with the coronavirus would be put into quarantine in two hospitals. Mohammadreza Ghadir, head of the city's medical sciences unit, told IRNA that "the spread of coronavirus in Qom has been controlled and we want the people not to worry about it." The new coronavirus has now claimed the lives of eight people outside mainland China. One has died in Japan, one in Taiwan, another in the Philippines and two in Hong Kong. One has also died in France. The United Arab Emirates last month became the first country in the Middle East to report cases of the coronavirus strain. Egypt has also reported cases. Iran's health sector has been hit by sanctions imposed by the United States since Washington withdrew in 2018 from a landmark nuclear deal between the Islamic republic and world powers. Its famously said that what happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas. Whether its a lost weekend of mayhem, a big loss at the tables, or a spur of the moment decision to be married by an Elvis Presley lookalike as he croons the words to Love Me Tender, the implications and the evidence, are not supposed to escape the confines of this desert resort. That is not always what happens. And on Wednesday night several Democrats, in particular Elizabeth Warren, will be hoping what played out here is seen and heard across the country. After a disappointing third place finish in Iowa, a similarly disappointing fourth in New Hampshire, and with national polls putting her in fifth place, the 70-year-old Massachusetts senator put in the sort of debate performance that echoed her very first. Back then you will recall, many observers believed Warren was going to walk away with the show. She was raising more money than her rivals, she provided evidence and detail to back up her policy proposals, and she showed a knack for connecting with voters that people loved. She was smart and she was organised and her supporters and campaign staff thrilled at the prospect of a showdown with Donald Trump. Some allowed themselves to dream they were about to elect the countrys first woman president. Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Show all 18 1 /18 Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Jessica Canicosa, a precinct captain for Bernie Sanders, waits to greet caucus voters at Liberty High School in Henderson, Nevada REUTERS Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Hotel workers at the Bellagio in Las Vegas get to grips with voting papers during the Nevada caucuses AFP via Getty Images Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A caricature of Bernie Sanders is projected on to a tree during a rally in Las Vegas EPA Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A woman waits to have a photo taken with Elizabeth Warren during a town hall meeting in Las Vegas REUTERS Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures The threat of coronavirus and other germ-borne illnesses was on some voters' minds at the Democratic caucuses in Henderson, Nevada Getty Images Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Former vice-president Joe Biden takes a selfie with a voter in Las Vegas ahead of the Nevada caucuses REUTERS Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Amy Klobuchar changes her shoes backstage after giving a speech in Exeter, New Hampshire AFP/Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A warmly-wrapped-up dog attends an Elizabeth Warren event at Amherst Elementary School in Nashua, New Hampshire AFP/Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Bernie Sanders, who romped to victory in New Hampshire against Hillary Clinton in 2016, talks to the media in Manchester Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Joe Biden was hoping to improve on his poor showing in Iowa in the New Hampshire primary Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Elizabeth Warren, renowned for giving time to supporters for selfies, works the crowd at the University of New Hampshire in Durham Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Joe Biden takes a selfie with a supporter and his child outside a campaign event in Somersworth, New Hampshire on 5 February Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders quarrel after a confrontation in a TV debate in which Sanders claimed that Warren was not telling the truth about a conversation in which she claimed he had said a woman could not win the presidency on 14 January AP Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Supporter Pat Provencher listens to Pete Buttigieg in Laconia, New Hampshire on 4 February Getty Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Pete Buttigieg speaks at a campaign event in Concord, New Hampshire while awaiting the results of the Iowa caucus Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures Elizabeth Warren is presented with a balloon effigy of herself at a campaign event in Nashua, New Hampshire on 5 February Reuters Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A Trump supporter rides past a rally for Amy Klobuchar in Des Moines, Iowa on 14 January AP Democratic candidates compete on the campaign trail: In pictures A man holds up a sign criticising billionaires in the presidential race in front of Michael Bloomberg in Compton, Califronia. The former New York mayor skipped the first caucus in Iowa and instead campaigned in California on 3 February Reuters Then things started to go wrong. While support for her fellow progressive Bernie Sanders continued to rise, her numbers began to slip. Some said it was the result of her failure to control the narrative on her healthcare plan. Others that she was unwilling to shake up her campaign, as the slide began. One problem, one faced by many, was the sheer number of contenders. With up to 25 people taking the plunge, how much support could any one person hope to gather up? On Wednesday, Warren found some of the passion and fire that her supporters had loved. Id like to talk about who we are running against. A billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse faced lesbians. And no, I am not talking about Donald Trump. I am talking about Mayor Bloomberg, she said. Look, Ill support whoever the Democratic nominee is, but understand this, Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another. New Hampshire Rally: Elizabeth Warren battles to stay in the Democratic race Bloomberg was an easy target. A billionaire and onetime Republican turned independent, he skipped the usual hard slog of contesting the first four voting states and spent around $400m of his own money on political advertising in many of the battleground states that will determine the outcome of the election. By contrast, Warren, Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Joe Biden and all the others put in the time and effort to meet voters in coffee shops and church halls. Many of them have been at it for more than a year now. All of them also had a reasonably strong performance in Las Vegas. Bloomberg reportedly only entered the race because he felt Biden was not certain of winning the nomination. He arrived here tonight, not by hard slog but by dint of his money. That was a story that Warren, Sanders, Buttigieg, Klobuchar and Biden shouted loud and clear. The Minister of Niger Delta Affairs, Godswill Akpabio, may have pushed for the removal of Joy Nunieh as the acting managing director of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC). Mr Akpabios ministry supervises the NDDC. Sources close to both Mr Akpabio and Ms Nunieh said the relationship between the two individuals became rancorous lately to a point that the former NDDC chief refused to pick the ministers telephone calls. President Muhammadu Buhari on Wednesday named Kemebradikumo Pondei, a professor of medicine, as a replacement for Ms Nunieh. Mr Pondei is to serve as acting managing director of the troubled NDDC until the completion of a planned forensic audit of the agency. Besides Cairo Ojougboh and Ibanga Etang who remain acting director (projects) and the acting director (finance and administration) respectively, Mr Buhari also expanded the interim management committee to include a former Vice President of African Development Bank, Cecilia Akintomide, and one Caroline Nagbo as members. Mr Akpabios relationship with the sacked NDDC chief was fraught with mutual suspicion and powerplay, according to people familiar with the matter. The expected cooperation was not there (between the ministry and the NDDC), a source close to Mr Akpabio told PREMIUM TIMES. Godswill Akpabio (Photo Credit: Independent Newspapers) Some sources said Ms Nunieh stayed away from the first tripartite meeting between the NDDC interim management, the lead forensic consultant, Messrs Olumuyiwa Basiru & Company, and the ministry of Niger Delta Affairs in January in Abuja. The two other directors in the NDDC attended the meeting, the sources said. Some people in government suspect that she may not give the needed cooperation for the forensic audit to be done timeously. You know the government does not want the interim management to drag on with the forensic audit for too long, the source said. If you dont cooperate with them and they dont conclude the work on time, it means your tenure will continue. One source said the relationship between Ms Nunieh and Mr Akpabio remained frosty for several weeks. She said the former NDDC chief later tried to break the ice between her and the minister when an uncomplimentary story about her surfaced in some newspapers in January. PREMIUM TIMES could not verify the authenticity of the allegations against Ms Nunieh in the publications. Ms Nunieh was said to have reached out to Mr Akpabio at the Port Harcourt airport sometime in January while the minister was on his way to a sporting event at the Federal Government College, Port Harcourt. Inside the VIP lounge at the airport, the former NDDC chief was said to have requested a peaceful settlement of her conflict with the minister. It had nothing to do with contract-award, the source said of the disagreement between the minister and the former acting managing director of the NDDC. The interim management committee is not supposed to be awarding contracts, their job was to supervise the forensic audit, she said. No comment! Says Ms Nunieh. When PREMIUM TIMES contacted Ms Nuniehs media aide, Ibanga Isine, for comments, he said the former acting managing director of the NDDC had no comment for now and that she would issue a statement at an appropriate time. However, an official in the commission who did not want his name mentioned said Mr Akpabio fought Ms Nunieh because of her principled and uncompromising position on the affairs of the NDDC. The source corroborated the claims that Ms Nunieh did not answer or return Mr Akpabios telephone calls at times rough that she stayed away from a tripartite meeting with the lead forensic consultant. The woman stayed away from the meeting with the audit firm because she was insisting that the World Bank and the National Financial Intelligence Unit should be involved to supervise the forensic audit since the firm handling it was handpicked by the minister, he said. Advertisements Ms Nunieh is a longtime political ally to President Buhari but it is believed that Mr Akpabio may have contributed to her appointment in the NDDC. Efforts to reach Mr Akpabio for this report were not successful. Calls to his known telephone number did not go through and he is yet to respond to a message sent to him, Mr Akpabio, a former governor of Akwa Ibom State, said last year that the NDDC was bedeviled by corruption, so much so that the commission was being seen as an automated teller machine (ATM) where people could just walk in to pick cash. Mr Akpabio later made a shocking revelation claimed that the NDDC abandoned $70 million in a bank for 13 years, while hundreds of its projects remain abandoned and uncompleted across the oil producing states, partly due to non-release of funds. Bone Grafts and Substitutes Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report, By Material Type (Natural, Synthetic); By Application Type (Spinal Fusion, Craniomaxillofacial, Long Bone); By Region, Segment Forecasts, 2020 2026 Bone Grafts & Substitutes Market 2020-2026 According to a new study by Polaris Market Research global bone grafts and substitutes market size is expected to reach USD 4.15 billion by 2026. The report gives a detailed insight into current market dynamics and provides analysis on future industry growth. For decades, bone grafts have been utilized in regenerate the bone, restore the structure and relieve pain. Autographs were traditionally utilized for bone grafting, using the bone of patience itself as a graft. Added to this, autologous bone grafts have been regarded as bone transplant gold standard. However, the use of autologous bone grafts in both tissue harvesting and transplant locations includes the danger of transferring infection during surgical procedures. This can lead to delayed healing of wound and extended stays in hospital. In order to overcome the drawbacks associated with autologous grafts, allografts were introduced in the market. Request a Sample at @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/bone-grafts-substitutes-market/request-for-sample Market Overview Increasing instances of orthopedic surgery and musculoskeletal illnesses (MSD) requiring the use of bone grafts and replacements will drive market growth. Approximately 3 million musculoskeletal interventions operate annually in the United States, for instance, according to the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons. Moreover, bone grafts are also reported to be used worldwide in approximately 2.2 million orthopedic procedures. Increasing use of bone grafts combined with growing instances of illnesses requiring the use of these products will therefore increase the development of the market for bone grafts and replacements. Allografts have both osteo-inductive and osteo-conductive characteristics and therefore serve as autograph replacements. During the forecast period, ready availability of allografts in different shapes and sizes that can be processed in different forms like chips and others as required is likely to increase the allografts segment of the bone grafts and replacements market. Bone grafts and substitutes have been used to treat flaws considerably. Osteogenesis, osteoinduction, osteoconduction, and structural support are the basic characteristics of bone graft. The fast advances seen in technology and product innovations fuel the development of the worldwide industry for bone grafts and replacements. In addition, the growing amount of musculoskeletal circumstances such as osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriatic arthritis is another key factor likely to further boost the worldwide bone grafts and replacements market over the timeframe forecast. Increasing the amount of bone grafting processes, growing aging population with demand for high-quality musculoskeletal function in ancient age, and increasing penetration of specialty orthopedic clinics and health insurance are the main drivers of industry growth. The danger and complications of bone grafting processes and elevated bone graft therapy costs, however, restrict industry growth. Growing consumer awareness of appearance, increasing preference for natural / organic goods, increasing disposable income in emerging economies, the accessibility of technologically sophisticated are driving this industrys development. On the other side, it is probable that deceptive marketing methods will restrict market growth. It is anticipated that the increasing number of middle-aged people, a fast-paced life and a burgeoning urban population will further drive demand. Request for Discount Pricing With Your Specific Research Needs At @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/bone-grafts-substitutes-market/request-for-discount-pricing Region Analysis of Bone Grafts & Substitutes Market (2020 2026) North America is expected to lead the worldwide bone grafts industry North America retained approximately 38 percent of worldwide bone grafts and replacement market share in 2019. US is leading the worldwide industry by generating enormous demand for products due to a large incidence of trauma-related accidents and orthopedic illnesses. Rising osteoarthritis events have resulted to increased demand for bone grafts and replacements used for therapy and transplantation. This also drives the North American bone grafts & substitutes market. In the years ahead Europe is expected to demonstrate fast development in bone grafts and replace the globally Europe was the worlds second major industry in 2019.Due to the increasing demand for innovative and technologically advanced therapies for chronic disease therapy and the existence of major players List of key companies mentioned in Bone Grafts and Substitutes Market Orthofix Holdings Inc DePuy Synthes; Medtronic PLC Stryker Corp Nuvasive Inc AlloSource Inc Have Questions? Request a sample or make an Inquiry before buying this report by clicking the link below @ https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/bone-grafts-substitutes-market/speak-to-analyst Polaris Market research has segmented the bone grafts and substitutes industry report on the basis of material, application type, and region Bone Grafts and Substitutes Material Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 2026) Natural Synthetic Bone Grafts and Substitutes Application Type Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 2026) Spinal Fusion Craniomaxillofacial Long Bone Bone Grafts and Substitutes Regional Outlook (Revenue, USD Million, 2015 2026) North America U.S Canada Europe UK Germany France Italy Russia Asia Pacific India Japan China South Korea Latin America Brazil Mexico Colombia Middle East & Africa Saudi Arabia South Africa Israel UAE About Us- Polaris 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 Us: Mr. Likhil Corporate Sales Polaris Market Research Phone: +1-646-568-9980 Email: sales@polarismarketresearch.com Web: https://www.polarismarketresearch.com/industry-analysis/bone-grafts-substitutes-market The fate of the HNA Group, one of the biggest global asset buyers to emerge from China in the past decade, hangs in the balance as its debt workout plan has been scuppered by a business slump caused by the coronavirus outbreak. Hainan Airlines, the crown jewel and biggest cash earner for the highly leveraged conglomerate, faces the risk of being taken over and its aviation assets dispersed among several state-owned carriers, according to a Bloomberg report citing unidentified people familiar with the matter. Company executives declined to comment, but posted a blog on HNA Group's website that showed the airline's co-founder and chairman Chen Feng meeting flight and cabin crew at its home base at Meilan airport in the Hainan provincial capital of Haikou. The conglomerate, with a combined 660 planes in its two airlines and aircraft leasing company serving more than 1,400 routes, is prepared to help China win the fight against the coronavirus outbreak, he said. A seizure of Hainan Airlines, if true, would place the Haikou-based conglomerate " with 525.6 billion yuan (US$75 billion) in debt at the end of June 2019 " in peril as it is barely halfway through its debt workout. SCMP Graphics alt=SCMP Graphics HNA Group grew out of Hainan Airlines, which began in 1989 as a regional carrier flying between the provincial capital of Haikou with mainland China. The airline grew quickly, enabling the HNA Group to be established in 2000 around the aviation assets, which by that time had bought Shanxi Airlines, Chan An Airlines and China Xinhua Airlines. The addition of other carriers to Hainan Airlines was to be the first attempt by China's aviation regulator to merge the country's regional carriers into fewer, larger groups to improve their efficiency. In 2006, the HNA Group established Hong Kong Airlines. From its core aviation business, HNA quickly expanded, going on a global shopping spree that added a myriad range of companies and brands to its portfolio, from golf courses and a stake in Deutsche Bank to Manhattan office towers and waterfront land parcels in Hong Kong. Story continues SCMP Graphics alt=SCMP Graphics Concerned about the impact of private sector debt on China's banking system, regulators in 2017 arm-twisted HNA and a handful of the country's biggest asset acquirers " Anbang Group, Dalian Wanda Group, and Fosun Group " to stop their debt-fuelled shopping spree and pare back their loans. HNA reversed its acquisitions since, selling a string of assets. HNA Group reported a net loss of 1.08 billion yuan in the first-half of 2019, its second consecutive interim deficit. Operating profit, which strips out some non-cash expenses, fell 11 per cent to 11.8 billion yuan " the lowest since the end of 2016. While long-term borrowings fell to the lowest level since December 2016, short-term debt rose 9.7 per cent to 187.1 billion yuan. That makes HNA Group more dependent on Hainan Airlines, China's biggest non-state carrier by fleet which once counted American financier George Soros as a major shareholder, as the biggest income earner for the group. The airline, with a route network of 110 destinations and a fleet of 233 aircraft, was expected to play a pivotal role in helping the HNA Group chart a course back to profitability. Third-quarter revenue at the carrier rose 10 per cent to 21.44 billion yuan according to its latest available financial results, making it the biggest quarterly turnover since 2009. HNA Group's co-founder and chairman Chen Feng during a 23 June 2017 interview at the company's head office in Haikou. Photo: Xiaomei Chen alt=HNA Group's co-founder and chairman Chen Feng during a 23 June 2017 interview at the company's head office in Haikou. Photo: Xiaomei Chen Hainan Airlines shares jumped by their 10 per cent daily limit on the Shanghai exchange to a five-week high of 1.76 yuan on news of the pending seizure of the carrier's assets. The HNA Group reshuffled its senior management in 2018 after the death of co-founder Wang Jian. Chief executive officer Adam Tan Xiaodong was promoted to chairman of the group's overseas unit HNA International. During the company's 20th anniversary in 2013, HNA Group's co-founder Chen and his five partners pledged to pass all their HNA stakes to the Cihang Foundation, established under the Hainan provincial government. Chen and Wang were directors of the foundation. "The idea is that we bring nothing with us when we die and we pass nothing to our families," Chen said during a 2017 interview with South China Morning Post. "While we're alive, we can enjoy the benefits of being part of the company, but all that goes when we expire." This year was meant to be the "decisive year" for HNA Group, Chen said in his new year message to employees, as company approaches a key turning point in its workout strategy. But his best-laid plans ran into China's coronavirus outbreak over the peak travel season of the Lunar New Year holiday, as dozens of cities and provincial authorities enforced lockdowns that prevented citizens from travelling either domestically, or overseas. The virus has sickened more than 75,000 people globally and killed, ore than 2,000 patients, most of them in mainland China. A Boeing 737 aircraft of Hainan Airlines at Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport on November 3, 1996. Photo: SCMP alt=A Boeing 737 aircraft of Hainan Airlines at Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport on November 3, 1996. Photo: SCMP In Hainan province, where HNA Group is based, 163 confirmed cases had been reported, with 14 deaths, according to the World Health Organisation's February 19 Situation Report, ranked 20th out of 34 Chinese regions including Hong Kong and Macau. Still, that has not spared Hainan Airlines from the travel slump, as 82 global destinations barred Chinese travellers from crossing their borders. The carrier flew 4.6 million passengers in January, 35 per cent fewer than a year ago, while its passenger capacity fell 21.2 per cent to, according to data released on February 17. Further adding to its woes, Hainan Airlines was the third-biggest operator among Chinese fleets of Boeing's ill-fated 737 MAX aircraft, which had to be grounded after back-to-back crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia of the same model. SCMP Graphics alt=SCMP Graphics The triggers for the Chinese government's decision to seize the HNA Group can be "short-term financial pressure on the aviation industry, the group's heavy debt despite a series of asset sales and political reasons, similar to what happened with Anbang," said Gao Feng Advisory chief executive Edward Tse, a former corporate adviser to HNA Group. More corporate takeovers can be expected as more companies, not just HNA, come undone because of the business slump related to the coronavirus outbreak. Under the emerging plan, China would sell the bulk of HNA's airline assets to the country's three biggest carriers " Air China, China Southern Airlines and China Eastern Airlines, according to the people. Discussions with the airlines are continuing, according to the report. "If these three big state-owned airlines were to further consolidate the sector, this could be positive for them, as it would help them gain market share and reduce competitive pressures,"" Goldman Sachs wrote in a report. "Together, these largest three airlines had a 63 per cent market share by capacity in 2019." Shares of the Chinese airlines that are poised to take over Hainan Airlines' assets were mixed. China Southern Airlines, the country's largest carrier by fleet, closed down 0.9 per cent in Hong Kong but rose 2.6 per cent in Shanghai. Air China, the country's flag carrier, advanced by 0.6 per cent in Hong Kong, gaining 3.3 per cent in Shanghai. China Eastern, fell 0.5 per cent in Hong Kong and gained 2.4 per cent in its home base Shanghai. Purchase the China AI Report 2020 brought to you by SCMP Research and enjoy a 20% discount (original price US$400). This 60-page all new intelligence report gives you first-hand insights and analysis into the latest industry developments and intelligence about China AI. Get exclusive access to our webinars for continuous learning, and interact with China AI executives in live Q&A. Offer valid until 31 March 2020. This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright 2020 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. Copyright (c) 2020. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved. The three-part series will focus on the future of earned media and marcomm trends CHICAGO, Feb. 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Today Cision and PRWeek announced they will host a new series together, The Earned Media Rising Exchange, focused on the importance of earned media and marcomm trends for 2020 and beyond. The invitation-only series will take place this February and March in London, New York, and San Francisco. Each event will feature leading media and communication executives discussing 2020 content trends and how to best integrate media throughout their PR and marketing campaigns. "As part of PRWeek's continued partnership with Cision, now in its third year, I am absolutely delighted with this year's addition of the Earned Media Rising Exchange to our program," said Gideon Fidelzeid, Managing Editor of PRWeek. "Headlined by amazing keynotes and panelists, those in attendance will be privy to a terrific opportunity to network and learn about the latest media trends and tactics from pre-eminent experts in comms and media." Topics discussed will include: Key trends and issues in the media landscape Crafting stories that stand out in a modern media environment Making the most of your media partners The continuing role of traditional media Each Earned Media Rising Exchange event will feature a keynote presentation and panel session of communications leaders from organizations like IBM, PwC, Bacardi, and Kimpton Hotels and Restaurants. The keynote presentations will be given by: Mike Federle , CEO, Forbes , CEO, Forbes Audrey Cooper , Editor-in-Chief, The San Francisco Chronicle , Editor-in-Chief, The San Francisco Chronicle James Wildman , CEO, Hearst U.K. and President, Hearst Europe In addition, attendees will have the opportunity to network with industry peers from Fortune 1000 companies. "Cision continues to look for opportunities that will provide real value to our clients, and we are confident that The Earned Media Rising Exchange series will do just that, in large part due to our incredible speakers," said Mary-Morgan Culver, Cision's Director of Global Event and Field Marketing. "We look forward to taking part in the thoughtful and productive conversations about the state of the industry and the solutions that are proving to be most beneficial in our evolving media landscape." To request an invitation to an Earned Media Rising Exchange event, please email Marisa Hernandez at marisa.hernandez@cision.com. About Cision Cision Ltd is a leading global provider of earned media software and services to public relations and marketing communications professionals. Cision's software allows users to identify key influencers, craft and distribute strategic content, and measure meaningful impact. Cision has over 4,800 employees with offices in 22 countries throughout the Americas, EMEA, and APAC. For more information about its award-winning products and services, including the Cision Communications Cloud, visit www.cision.com and follow Cision on Twitter @Cision. About PRWeek PRWeek epitomizes the modern business publishing brand, spanning online, print, events, and social media, incorporating a paid-for content strategy and gated website. Launched in November 1998, it is the essential title for PR pros. PRWeek reflects an industry playing a more pivotal role than ever, not only in the marketing strategies of companies, brands, and organizations, but also within boardrooms and in the C-suite. In the transparent world epitomized by social media, corporate reputation is crucial. Executives need timely, authoritative, insightful content to navigate this landscape - that's where PRWeek comes in. Breaking news, analysis, and opinion fuels PRWeek's content. And the brand extends into the iconic PRWeek Awards, annual conferences, roundtables, webcasts, and virtual forums. For more, visit prweek.com. Media Contacts: Cision: Rebecca Dersh PR Manager cisionpr@cision.com PRWeek: Gideon Fidelzeid Managing Editor gideon.fidelzeid@prweek.com Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1090339/Cision_Earned_Media_Rising_Exchange.jpg Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/1090340/Cision_PRWeek_Logo.jpg The Government of Ukraine changes the approach to the formation and implementation of reforms and creates separate directorates for this purpose. "We are finally heading towards separating the formation and implementation of policy at the level of ministries. The policymakers will be reform experts, with a salary slightly bigger than average, but with a very clear area of responsibility and requirements for how they shape this policy," Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine Dmytro Dubilet said at the meeting of the Verkhovna Rada Committee on Organization of State Authority, Local Self-Government, Regional Development and Urban Development on February 19, an Ukrinform correspondent reported. Dubilet explained that the structural units in which the reform experts work are called directorates. Each ministry changes its staffing plan, and these directorates are created around a goal enshrined in the Government's action plan. On September 30, 2019, the Government of Ukraine released its action plan setting out goals and priorities for the next five years. ol The Home Office has gone ahead with a charter flight deporting asylum seekers this morning despite a stark warning from immigration solicitors that these individuals may have been denied access to justice. The flight, which departed at around 7am, was removing people to Germany, Austria and Switzerland under the Dublin convention a law that requires asylum seekers to claim asylum in the first safe EU country they arrive in and not move from one to another. But lawyers said many of those scheduled to be on the charter plane were potential victims of trafficking or torture, meaning they should be exempt from this rule until their vulnerability is assessed. At least 16 people who had been issued removal directions were granted last minute reprieve after solicitors intervened and challenged their deportation on the basis that they were trafficking victims. It is not known how many people were on the flight. Legal practitioners also raised urgent concerns directly to the Home Secretary that those on the flight did not have adequate access to justice while in immigration removal centres prior to their deportation, as required by Home Office policy. This may have led to deportees not having the opportunity to disclose that they were trafficking victims. It comes after a controversial charter flight to Jamaica last week amid serious concerns over access to justice in detention centres, which resulted in a Court of Appeal ruling that prevented the majority of the planned deportations. Immigration lawyer Isabella Kirwan, of Duncan Lewis Solicitors, said she and her team had successfully deferred the removal of six people due to be on the flight, all of whom had disclosed indicators of exploitation to the Home Office which she said should have triggered referals to the National Referral Mechaism (NRM), the UK's framework or identifying victims of modern slavery and trafficking. A letter to Priti Patel from Detention Action and ILPA warned there had been minimal solicitors available in at least three removal centres last week, and expressed "grave concerns" that several firms working iin detention were regularly in breach of their contractual obligations providing either no or poor advice to those detained. Bella Sankey, director of Detention Action, said the government had pressed ahead with the charter flight "despite widespread concerns that its system for the provision of legal advice in detention centres was in meltdown". A Home Office spokesperson said: Anyone who makes a trafficking or modern slavery claim has them properly considered and concluded before removal. The UK only ever returns those who both the Home Office and the courts are satisfied do not need our protection and have no legal basis to remain in the UK. During Thanksgiving break, a student at a Berkeley County school opened a Google document on her school-provided Chromebook laptop and began listing suicidal thoughts. She wanted to take her life, she said in her online diary. In short order, local law enforcement went to the girl's house for a welfare check. Her parents were notified and she had a subsequent meeting with a guidance counselor when she returned to school. It was the third suicide threat written on a Chromebook by a student during that school break. In this new era of technology, the Berkeley school district lives with third-party monitoring software programmed to flag keywords and notify employees of potentially dangerous situations ahead of parents and law enforcement. Nearly 40,000 Berkeley County students have access to Chromebooks, a Google laptop which uses the Chrome internet browser as its operating system. It allows students to use apps such as Google Docs to edit, write and share homework and assignments with classmates in real-time. It is a useful resource for one of South Carolina's largest school districts. Every first- through 12th-grader at Berkeley County schools has a Chromebook as a result of numerous donations from Google. The tech giant has a massive data center in the area and often gives back through philanthropic partnerships. While the charity was appreciated, the district didn't know what it was getting into: The access to technology has opened up a vault of unintended consequences. Cyberbullying, suicide threats and sexting happens on the devices and applications, school officials say. Weve put so many Chromebooks in our kids' hands, said Tim Knight, school safety officer for the district. Weve got thousands of them, which is great. But we have to look at the bad side of that and weve had to put a whole lot of procedures in place. A Google Doc can act like a live chatroom, with messages and photos being deleted and added in real time. Most of the flagged cases happen outside of school hours, according to Diane Driggers, the chief information technology officer for the district. Driggers is tasked with monitoring third-party software which scans through the Google Docs and flags keywords that could indicate bullying, threats or lewd images or memes. These keywords include apparent phrases such as "kill," "knife," or "school shootings" but also some more subtle code words such as "kms" which stands for "kill myself," Driggers and Knight said. The district office can be flagged with anywhere from 15 to 17 alerts a day. Many are false alarms, but others are more suspect. "It's par for the course with the change in technology," Driggers said. "We'll get alerts and calls at 2 or 3 in the morning on the weekends and holidays. It's something different than we've had before." A new era of bullying Because some of the circumstances involved minors, Berkeley County School District didn't discuss too many specifics. Knight said items reported in Google Docs have led to suspensions and other disciplinary actions. He said there have been instances of sexting and threats of violence. In some cases, law enforcement got involved. School board member David Barrow said he was disappointed to see that cyberbullying was happening on school devices and felt bad for the district having to manage the influx of alerts. "It's unfortunate, but not at all surprising in this era of social media," Barrow said. "It's becoming more of an issue for the administrators." It also mirrors a national trend. Officials at Bark, one of many third-party monitoring software companies that exist to prevent cyberbullying and abuse on school devices, said they've seen upward of 60,000 cases of kids ganging up on other children in Google Docs across the nation. Titania Jordan, the chief parent officer of the company, said Google products create a unique environment for bullying. "Children are collaborating on Google Docs for schoolwork and projects," Jordan said. "But because it's a living, breathing document, there is the nuance that a bunch of comments can be there one minute and then deleted the next. You can upload photos, you can make comments and you can exclude access to certain people." She described a trend in which students use a shared Google document as a private, digital "burn book" a reference to the diary that included cruel and harmful rumors in the 2004 movie "Mean Girls." Students at Berkeley County can bring their Chromebooks home with them. Whether they are on school grounds or not, all content is monitored through the school's network and is flagged by the third-party software. If a student violates school policy frequently with the laptop, his or her access can be cut off or the Chromebook can ultimately be taken away, Driggers said. Berkeley County uses Gaggle, an Illinois-based company that monitors school systems. In 2018 and 2019, Gaggle recorded more than 52,000 references across the country to suicide or self-harm in students online activity. Knight said serious cases are either forwarded to law enforcement or school principals to determine punishment or guidance. The district also hosts semi-regular internet workshops for parents to educate them on cyberbullying. Staying vigilant The degree to which students have access to individual school-issued technology varies greatly across surrounding districts in the tri-county area. Some students, like those in Dorchester School District 2, do not have individual access to school-owned iPads or Chromebooks. Instead, they mostly use computers in the media center or designated computer labs. Since the district primarily uses Microsoft products, students generally don't utilize Google Docs. "We definitely have those devices in our schools for classroom support, but certainly not for every student," spokeswoman Pat Raynor said. The district will begin to distribute iPads to third- through 12th-graders in August. Others, like students in Dorchester District 4, have access to Chromebooks but are not allowed to take the devices home. Instead, each teacher is issued a classroom set for students to use. Neither district reported any incidents of cyberbullying or student misconduct via Google docs. Charleston County School District officials were also unaware of this type of behavior occurring on school-owned technology. Students do have access via Chromebooks and tablets, district spokesman Andy Pruitt said, but the district hasnt received any discipline reports detailing Google Docs harassment or bullying. Charleston County School District also has the capability to monitor students school-issued Gmail accounts. To be clear, we arent saying this hasnt happened, but it hasnt risen to the level where the reports from the school level are confirming this is a major issue, Pruitt said. We just dont have proof that this is a widespread concern in CCSD. The school districts IT department confirmed that some students do use Google Docs as a messaging platform, although some of that communication is used for collaborating on group projects, Pruitt said. As electronic devices continue to become more and more prevalent in schools across the country, all tri-county districts have implemented safeguards to better ensure students are using their technology appropriately. They all use software that allows teachers or computer lab instructors to monitor students technology use. "We're talking about teenagers. A lot of times they make decisions and do things where they are not thinking about the consequences," Knight said. "They know we're monitoring, but unfortunately they may make a bad decision and post something. We try to stay proactive." The Director of Communications of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), Buaben Asamoa has taken on the Minority in Parliament for boycotting the State of the Nation Address delivered by President Akufo-Addo on Thursday, February 20. He said the conduct of the members of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was disgraceful and a huge disappointment to the followers of the party. The members of the Minority caucus, clad in black, chanted parts of the national anthem as they walked out of the chamber shortly after President Nana Akufo-Addo assumed his seat in Parliament on Thursday. And help us to resist oppressors' rule with all our will, and might forevermore, they chanted as they left the Chamber. The Minority in Parliament explained that their walkout was in opposition to supposed threats against the democracy of the state. They claimed that their action was in reaction to a number of decisions adopted by the government that poses a threat to the gains of the countrys democracy. But Yaw Buabeng Asamoa, who is also the Member of Parliament for Adenta lashed out at the Minority. The NDC leadership has disgraced itself today, it has disappointed its followership and it has detracted from the democracy that we all want, however, we [NPP] stayed behind and we have enjoyed ourselves, he told Citi News in an interview. Mahama instigated the boycott He further accused the flagbearer of the NDC, John Mahama of instigating the boycott. He said the issue of the voters register which formed one of the basis for the minoritys boycott is not an issue they should still be contesting. Only the NDC is insisting on this old register. 64% of Ghanaians say they want a new register. The EC has demonstrated that it is practically impossible to go back to the new register [Everybody supports the EC] except for the NDC who insist and then you come to Parliament, you are advised by John Mahama to abandon parliamentary proceedings and the entire group follow John Mahamas advice and leave? What kind of leadership is the NDC faithful suffering? This is probably the worst collective leadership of the NDC I have ever seen, he said. NDCs absence gave us a serene atmosphere I think their absence enhanced the atmosphere in the room because it wasnt unruly, it was serene, and it was beautiful, he added. Our past parliamentary boycott had legal basis When confronted with the fact that the NPP boycotted parliamentary proceedings during the erstwhile NDC government, Yaw Buaben Asamoa said that action had legal basis. ---citinewsroom PLAY THE RED QUEEN By Juris Jurjevics 350 pp. Soho Crime. $27.95. The year is 1963 and the city is Saigon, still a humid backwater but about to become the red-hot center of a geopolitical firestorm. One sign of impending trouble: A gorgeous young Vietnamese woman has been tearing around the city on the back of a scooter, assassinating prominent American Army officers. At the scene of each of her hits, investigators find a playing card bearing the image of a red female in traditional Vietnamese dress. Charged with stopping the so-called Red Queen are two amiable, not particularly ambitious Army cops. Ellsworth Miser, the narrator, has been biding his time in Saigon hoping this swell little war would stay that way. Clovis Robeson, understandably, would simply rather hang around Southeast Asia than take over his family mortuary business. The pair are content to drink at the local bars and run their side hustles, but the Red Queens ingenuity and the status of some of her targets get their attention. Cracking this case turns out to be tough and dangerous. No one in Saigon can be trusted, from the lowliest domestic to the countrys highest officials, let alone the dodgy American spooks lurking in the background. The plot speeds along faster than the Red Queens Vespa, as the sleuths shoot from one grisly crime scene to the next (the Queen stabs a particularly luckless victim with the broken stem of a wineglass). There are pit stops for opium cigarettes and bourbon cocktails, decorous conversations at diplomatic parties, steamy bedroom adventures, and visits to morgues, prisons and temples. Jurjevics brings all of it to colorful, fragrant, often ugly life. The cops fictional pursuit of the Red Queen intersects with historical events and there are some delightful real-life cameos here, particularly the portrait of a wry and courtly Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., then the ambassador to South Vietnam. We meet dozens of equally vivid fictional characters, among them a toothless Army sergeant who, midway through the novel, gleefully shows off his portable antique guillotine. The late Jurjevics, who spent most of his career as an editor, knew how to structure a story. You can be sure that, like Chekhovs proverbial gun, the guillotine is put to maximally effective use by the novels end. Brace yourself. THE ONLY CHILD By Mi-Ae Seo Translated by Yewon Jung 293 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins. $26.99. What turns an ordinary person into a serial killer? Sorry, Mom and Dad, its all your fault. Thats the principal takeaway from Seos pedestrian thriller, translated from the Korean by Jung. Byeongdo Yi, a notorious murderer sitting on death row for killing at least 13 women, summons the criminal psychologist Seonkyeong Yi for a series of prison interviews. Why Seonkyeong? She has no idea, but shes up for the challenge. Byeongdo turns out to be handsome, sympathetic and charismatic. At their first interview Seonkyeong thinks, If they had been meeting by chance somewhere else, her heart would have fluttered at the smile. Over the last decade Eyal Weizman and his colleagues within the London-based investigative group Forensic Architecture have examined violent occurrences around the world, often using video and architectural rendering software in efforts to parse confusing and often murky political and corporate events. Last week Mr. Weizman confronted an unexpected mystery when he was informed by email that his right to travel to the United States under a visa waiver program had been revoked. The next day, on Feb. 14, he went to the U.S. Embassy in London to apply for a visa, but, he said, an official told him, without elaboration that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him. Mr. Weizman, who holds British and Israeli passports, had hoped to attend the opening of an art exhibition Wednesday night at Miami Dade Colleges Museum of Art and Design. Called True to Scale, it is a survey of Forensic Architectures work. Mr. Weizman said by email on Wednesday that he has visited the United States dozens of times, most recently in December 2019. He said that the embassy official had told him that the threat that surfaced could be related to something he was involved in, people he had been in contact with, places he had visited, hotels at which he had stayed, or a pattern of relations among those. VANCOUVERDozens of cargo ships sit in the narrow inlet just outside Canadas largest port, waiting. On most days, there are about 25 ships in Vancouvers Burrard Inlet. Today, there are 50. Dotting the water, they are reminders of the Indigenous pipeline fight that has disrupted Canadas supply chain from coast to coast. Inside the ships, hundreds of likely restless sailors are also waiting. They may not touch land for weeks due to a backlog at the Vancouver port. They have very little access to the outside world, so they are quite isolated, said Peter Smyth, a senior chaplain with the Mission to Seafarers. Smyth has met thousands of ship workers seafarers in the four years he has worked at the mission. When ships dock at the Port of Vancouver or nearby Deltaport, Smyth and others from the mission go to the vessel to see what the workers may need. Mission to Seafarers helps sailors access services when they land, facilitating money transfers, offering rides to a local mall and delivering parcels. Workers on ships often dont have access to wi-fi, Smyth explained. Most end up using a satellite phone on the ship or maybe a member of the crew has a SIM card and they will share it. Canadas ports on both east and west coasts are working hard to mitigate the impact of the past weeks rail disruptions. Its unclear yet what, if any, long-term impact there will be in Halifax and Vancouver. But in the immediate term, at least some signs of strain are evident. Thursday on the West Coast, there were 50 ships at anchorage, according to Danielle Jang, spokesperson for the Port of Vancouver. Ships do not have permission to dock at the port if their cargo has not arrived yet and, because so much rail-shipped cargo has been delayed, the ships are having to wait outside of the port. The congestion means the port has almost reached its limit on the number of vessels allowed to anchor near it, as the local port authority must ensure anchorages are still available for essential services. The Canadian Coast Guard said it has positioned an emergency tow vessel nearby in case any of the cargo ships need assistance. The Port of Vancouver is as big as the next five largest ports in Canada combined. It enables the trade of about $200 billion worth of goods. One out of every three dollars of Canadas trade beyond North America comes through Vancouver, according to the port. So any disruption is impactful, said Jang. According to the port, average anchorage time is one to two weeks. But if rail disruptions continue, the ships currently anchored at English Bay will likely be waiting far longer than that, said Robert Lewis-Manning, president of the Chamber of Shipping, an organization that represents the marine transportation industry in Canada. Logistics companies already have a tough job matching up land, ocean, and air transport schedules. Any disruption to that system could take weeks to recover from, he said. Youre trying to match cargo coming from somewhere inland to a ship that is arriving from somewhere else in the world. Hopefully the two arrive at the same time and then you have an efficient loading, he said. As you can imagine, that is not the scenario we have at the moment. Protests in solidarity with the hereditary chiefs of the Wetsuweten First Nation in their attempt to halt construction of Coastal GasLinks natural gas pipeline in northern B.C. have led to rail blockades across the country. CN Rail and Via Rail were forced to suspend large portions of their train service last week, leading to a flurry of temporary layoffs among railworkers and longshoremen. Lewis-Manning spent 24 years as a senior officer in the Royal Canadian Navy, sailing around the world. Anchoring for long periods of time is unpleasant for any mariner, he said. But the larger problem is one of reputation, he said. If carrier companies delay arrival, or starts diverting to other ports in North America, that tarnishes the reputation of Canadas supply chain. One carrier on the East Coast has done exactly that. The CEO of one of the worlds major container shipping lines said this week hes diverting his ships away from the Port of Halifax and toward U.S. ports amid the protests. Atlantic Container Lines (ACL) CEO Andrew Abbott said Thursday his container ships, which usually dock twice a week in Halifax, will instead be sent to ports in New York and Baltimore. Its real simple: The trains arent running, said Abbott. With no trains, theres no cargo, so weve re-routed everything via the U.S. Theres no possibility of getting that cargo in, so obviously theres no sense to go to Halifax right now. ACLs ships carry a thousand containers a week through Halifax ports. For the immediate future, those containers will pass through other ports, although Abbott said hell return ACL ships to Halifax as soon as the rail situation is settled. Hopefully itll just get resolved and it goes into the history books and we can move on quickly, Abbott said. Thats what Im hoping for. The last report on the Port of Halifaxs impact on the economy of Halifax and Nova Scotia put the figure at about $2 billion. The ongoing rail shutdown, and subsequent diversion of vessels and cargo from Halifax ports will certainly take a bite out of that number, said port authorities, but how much exactly will remain uncertain for some time. Weve been saying from the beginning that the longer this carries on, that there will be a cascading effect if this disruption continues, and thats what were seeing right now, said Lane Farguson, spokesperson for the Port of Halifax. The impact is greater than just one shipping line. It is the simple reality that if theres no cargo to pick up and you cant drop cargo off, then theres less reason for ships to call. Peter Hall, a professor at Simon Fraser University who studies ports and logistics, said the absolute economic impact of the rail disruption has been small so far especially in Vancouver. Whereas Halifax has one rail line, the CN railway, transporting goods in and out of the city, there are multiple rail lines feeding into Vancouver, including Canadian Pacific and Canadian National rail lines, as well as several American rail routes, said Hall. When a supply chain gets disrupted, theres all sorts of activity that shifts from one place and one person to another, he said. There is a disruption and it is inefficient, but the value doesnt disappear, for the most part. Hall said if the rail disruption continues, logistics companies may start to divert cargo off rail lines and onto trucks, or companies may direct ships to drop off their cargo at the nearest U.S. port instead, as ACL has already done. Kevin Piper, president of the International Longshoremens Association in Halifax, said hes worried that the diversion of vessels might have long-term consequences. ACL has made this decision that their vessels are going to bypass Halifax until this blockade is over. And I see this as just being the tip of the iceberg unless something happens in the short term. The bigger picture is that once shippers and customers start using other ports, theres always the potential that that cargo wont come back to Halifax. The amount of time a container spends in a port is called the dwell time. Under normal cirumstances, the dwell time of a container in a Halifax port is measured in hours. Now, with the railway not running, that time is being measured in days. Now were at the point were (looking at) days and potentially weeks now, he said. So most of our containers are (usually) in and out of here within 12 to 24 hours, instead of being in here for seven to 10 days Piper said hes also concerned about the finances of his members. His union represents about 600 longshoremen in Halifax. They dont work on salary, so when ships arent coming in to Halifax ports, his members dont get paid. Weve got a lot of members that are going without paycheques for the last 10 days. And thats only scratching the surface. If this goes on, itll be a huge financial burden on a lot of the members in Halifax. As the sun set Thursday over Vancouvers English Bay, seafarers in the 50 cargo ships were waiting for good news. When they are at anchor, in some cases, they may not have been ashore for the previous five months as is, said Smyth. Theres just the sheer stress of that extra time at anchor you want to go home, but you cant go home and there is a uncertainty. SM Steve McKinley is a Toronto Star reporter based in Halifax. Read more about: World Bank aid payments to the neediest countries appear to trigger money flows to offshore bank accounts, suggesting funds are siphoned off from the nations they are meant to help, according to a study published Tuesday. Data showed these aid payments are mirrored by rising deposits in tax havens such as Switzerland, Luxembourg, Cayman Islands and Singapore, with no increase in non-haven countries, according to the report issued by the World Bank. "We document that aid disbursements to the most aid-dependent countries coincide with significant increases in deposits held in offshore financial centers known for bank secrecy and private wealth management," the authors said. "Our estimates suggest a leakage rate of around 7.5 percent for the average highly aid-dependent country," the study concluded. The report, which looked at 22 of the most aid-dependent countries -- mostly in Africa -- compared data on aid disbursements from the World Bank with foreign deposits from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The study created a bit of an uproar after The Economist last week alleged the bank was suppressing the report, and implied that may have been behind the early departure of chief economist Penny Goldberg, who announced this month she would return to academia. The World Bank defended its support of independent research, including studies of corruption, and indicated the delay in publishing was simply due to the review process. "The draft paper, 'Elite Capture of Foreign Aid' underwent several reviews, and it was improved as a result," the Bank said in a statement. "The revised paper, now published as a World Bank Working Paper addresses a number of comments raised during the review process." The statement did not specify what changes were made, but an earlier draft of the study concluded that aid payments "cause" increased deposits in offshore accounts, but that was changed in the final version to say "coincide with." While the study said other explanations for the aid leakage were possible, it ruled out most options. "Aid capture by ruling politicians, bureaucrats and their cronies is consistent with the totality of observed patterns," it said, adding that the effects "are larger for more corrupt countries." The study was written by Jorgen Juel Andersen of BI Norwegian Business School, Niels Johannesen of the University of Copenhagen, and Bob Rijkers of The World Bank. The World Bank published a study showing 7.5 percent of aid payments may leak out of needy countries into offshore accounts Democratic presidential candidates fanned out on a quest for votes Thursday following a bruising debate that saw billionaire Michael Bloomberg take a pummeling from his rivals. As the race to see who faces President Donald Trump goes national with 16 states set to vote over the next two weeks, the party battle has taken on fresh urgency, with leftist firebrand Bernie Sanders seeking to cement his status as frontrunner. Efforts by rivals to knock Sanders off his perch and blunt a suddenly prominent Bloomberg were reflected in the crossfire in the ninth and most combative debate of the 2020 cycle. "Worst debate performance in history!" crowed Trump of the former New York mayor's debut presidential debate, which came shortly before Nevada votes on Saturday. Bloomberg, who has surged in the polls behind hundreds of millions of dollars of spending on television, radio and online ads, was the target of unrelenting attacks all night from the other five candidates on the Las Vegas stage. Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who is battling Sanders for the party's left flank, delivered some of the most piercing barbs at the 78-year-old media magnate as she seeks to revive her sagging campaign. "I'd like to talk about who we're running against: a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians," Warren said just minutes into the debate. "And no, I'm not talking about Donald Trump, I'm talking about mayor Bloomberg," she said, knocking him for delaying release of his tax returns, "harassing women" and supporting "racist policies" like stop-and-frisk crime prevention efforts. If Bloomberg was hoping few Americans would notice the attacks, he was disappointed. The showdown on NBC was the most watched Democratic debate ever, drawing nearly 20 million viewers, the network said, citing ratings analyst Nielsen. Warren redoubled her fusillade Thursday in North Las Vegas, where she made repeated references to Bloomberg attempting to "buy" the election. "I have really had it with billionaires, regardless of party, who think that the rules don't apply to them," she told an energized crowd. Sanders, the senator from Vermont who has been topping national polls, lashed out at Bloomberg's vast fortune at a time of "grotesque" income inequality in America. "Mike Bloomberg owns more wealth than the bottom 125 million Americans," the 78-year-old self-described democratic socialist said. "That's immoral." Bloomberg appeared to be rocked by the ferocity of the attacks and often found himself on the defensive. The three-term New York mayor recovered somewhat as he highlighted his roles as problem solver, successful businessman, city manager and philanthropist who, unlike Trump, grew up in a working-class family and became a self-made tycoon. But overall it was a shaky performance for a candidate who chose to unconventionally skip the first four nominating contests and make a splash on "Super Tuesday" on March 3, when 14 states including California and Texas hold primaries. Bloomberg headed to one of those states, Utah, on Thursday for a campaign event where he warned that the debate's "real winner" was Trump because Democrats like Sanders were pushing leftward policies rather than building a broad coalition. "If we choose a candidate who appeals to a small base, like Senator Sanders, it will be a fatal error," Bloomberg said. Centrist Senator Amy Klobuchar, who is polling in sixth nationally and faces a make-or-break week, stumped in Colorado, while Sanders was headed to delegate-rich California, where he holds a significant lead. - 'Debate implosion' - David Axelrod, who served as chief strategist for Barack Obama's two presidential campaigns, said Bloomberg's "debate implosion" was good news for Sanders although Warren's strong performance keeps her challenge alive. Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will be hoping to build in Nevada and South Carolina on their strong performances in Iowa and New Hampshire. Former vice president Joe Biden will be looking to rebound from his dismal showing in the first two voting states. He and Buttigieg both took shots Wednesday at Sanders and Bloomberg. But while Biden, who has seen Bloomberg cut into his support among moderate Democrats, criticized Sanders over immigration policy and gun reform, it was 38-year-old Buttigieg, with his skillful oratory, who landed the sharper blows. "We shouldn't have to choose between one candidate who wants to burn this party down and another candidate who wants to buy this party out," Buttigieg said of Sanders and Bloomberg. A Washington Post-ABC News poll out Wednesday showed Sanders with a commanding double-digit lead nationally, at 32 percent. Former frontrunner Biden was second at 16 percent, followed by Bloomberg at 14 percent, Warren at 12 and Buttigieg at eight. Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg came under fire from his rivals during his first debate since joining the race US presidential hopeful Mike Bloomberg (L), the former mayor of New York, joined his fellow Democrats on stage for the first time for their ninth debate of the party's nomination process on February 19 US President Donald Trump delivers remarks at a Keep America Great rally in Phoenix, Arizona, on February 19, the same day Democratic White House hopefuls held a contentious debate in Las Vegas Presidential hopeful Senator Elizabeth Warren redoubled her sharp criticism of billionaire former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the latest entrant in the 2020 Democratic nomination race, after the party's debate in Las Vegas By West Kentucky Star Staff Feb. 20, 2020 | 09:38 AM | PADUCAH The City of Paducah has released its plan for the second floor of a proposed Indoor Recreation and Aquatic Center.The floor plan features a large track that circles the entire floor, with views of the gymnasium and aquatics areas below. Two classrooms will also be available, as well as a large open area in the center for fitness equipment.Space is also planned to be dedicated for tenants to rent, as well as administrative offices.Paducah Public Information Officer Pam Spencer says the second floor of the center could have folks walking/jogging on the track, working out on the equipment, taking a fitness class, and learning arts and crafts.Click the link below to visit the City of Paducah website and find out more about the proposed aquatic center. On the Net: When the Shiv Sena snapped ties with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to form the government in Maharashtra with the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), it was evident that this would be an uneasy alliance. The Senas political worldview revolved around Hindutva, placing it at odds with the secular political agenda of the Congress and the NCP. Three months later, this tension is now out in the open, with its clearest manifestation in the differing positions of the coalition partners on the Bhima-Koregaon and Elgar Parishad cases. It has its roots in chief minister and Sena chief, Uddhav Thackeray, giving his consent to the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to probe the Elgar Parishad case. The NCP, which holds the home department, is upset at the decision, and the Congress has also struck a note of dissent. But what is driving this difference in approach? The answer lies in the alleged involvement of fringe Hindutva groups in the Bhima-Koregaon violence. On December 31, 2017, allegedly inflammatory speeches were given at the Elgar Parishad at Shaniwarwada in Pune. The conclave commemorated the battle of Bhima-Koregaon on January 1, 1818, where a small detachment of the British army, comprised largely of Dalits, held off a larger force of the Brahmin Peshwas. A day after the Parishad, there was violence against Dalits, who had thronged the Bhima-Koregaon war memorial in lakhs to pay their respects. The Pune police booked and arrested Left-wing and civil society activists, who were accused of waging war against the State, and being involved in a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This sparked counter-accusations. Prakash Ambedkar, the chief of the Vanchit Bahujan Aghadi (VBA), and NCP leaders, blamed leaders of Hindutva outfits, Milind Ekbote and Sambhajirao Bhide Guruji for the Bhima-Koregaon violence. Ekbote, who heads the Samasta Hindu Aghadi, comes from a family affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). He also contested the 2014 assembly elections from Pune as a Sena candidate. Ekbote was arrested for the violence and later released on bail. However, it is Bhide and his group, Shivprathisthan Hindustan, which present a bigger predicament for the Sena. As party leaders acknowledge in private, it is not possible for them to take a position against Bhide or any Hindutva activists, for it will be seen as a dilution of the Senas commitment to Hindutva. This is despite the pressure from the NCP, which is keen to expand its base among Buddhist Dalits. Shivaprathisthan, which has a strong base in parts of Western Maharashtra, is among the most influential fringe Hindutva groups in the state. The groups popularity and outreach has been built around the personality of former RSS activist, Bhide Guruji, whose austere lifestyle has stuck an emotional chord with a section of young Hindus. Bhide is also known to be close to senior BJP leaders. Shivaprathisthan employs the iconography of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, who remains a powerful political symbol in the state. Aided by the use of social media, this has increased the ranks of Dharkaris (as Shivaprathisthan members are called). The Congress and NCP leaders allege that while Left and Dalit activists were arrested for their alleged role in the Elgar Parishad case, Bhide has been treated leniently. They also complain that the Sena is toeing the line of the BJP on issues such as the Elgar Parishad and Bhima-Koregaon cases. Though the Sena was born in 1966 as a nativist, sons of soil party, which claimed to espouse the cause of the Maharashtrians in Mumbai, it took a formal turn towards Hindutva in the 1980s. Like most of its political positions, this was born more out of political expediency than any ideological conviction. Hindutva enabled the Sena to forge an alliance with the BJP in 1989. The late Bal Thackeray, the founder and supreme leader of the Sena till his death in 2012, even became the face of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement in Maharashtra, edging out the BJP and the Sangh Parivar. The Sena, with its wide social base and militant cadre, also espoused the cause of Hindutva more virulently than the BJP. Sena leaders admit a stung BJP may mobilise fringe groups to rake up causes linked to Hindutva to trap the Sena. This may include opposition to the veneration of the tomb of Adilshahi general, Afzal Khan, who was killed by Shivaji Maharaj in the Battle of Pratapgad, cow protection and beef vigilantism. If the Sena is seen as opposing these, it risks alienating the Hindutva vote; if it consistently supports these, the patience of its allies may run out. There also remains an ideological bond with the BJP, which the Sena does not want to cut off entirely because of the fragility of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government. The Sena also has to contend with the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) led by Uddhavs estranged cousin, Raj Thackeray, which has turned to Hindutva politics. This explains why despite its alliance with the secular Congress and NCP, the Sena is having a tough time reconciling the compulsions of the present with its Hindutva past. Issues such as action against Bhide, or the controversial Sanatan Sanstha, will be part of the minefield that the Sena will have to negotiate. The future of the government, the party, and indeed, Maharashtras politics, will depend on the dexterity with which it pulls off this balancing act. Dhaval Kulkarni is a journalist and author of The Cousins Thackeray: Uddhav, Raj and the Shadow of their Senas The views expressed are personal Source: Xinhua| 2020-02-20 22:28:11|Editor: xuxin Video Player Close ADDIS ABABA, Feb. 20 (Xinhua) -- A delegation of the African Union (AU) has expressed the union's unwavering solidarity and support to South Sudan as the world's youngest nation is implementing a peace agreement and strives to form transitional government. The AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) on Thursday wrapped up a three-day field mission to South Sudan, which was held in line with the Council's mandate of promoting and enhancing peace and security on the African continent. The South Sudan agreement known as the Revitalized Agreement on the Resolution of Conflict in South Sudan (R-ARCSS) was signed on Sept. 12, 2018, and the Revitalized Transitional Government of National Unity (R-TGONU) is scheduled to be formed on 22 Feb. 2020. The mission of the AU delegation aimed at evaluating the status of implementation of peace agreement and formation of transitional government, and it had underscored that an inclusive R-TGONU is a pre-requisite for lasting unity, peace, stability and development in South Sudan. Noting that the formation of the R-TGoNU is only the start of a long nation-building process, the delegation has also called on the parties to remain resolute, guided by the principles of compromise and restraint. Led by Mohamed Idriss Farah, Permanent Representative of Djibouti to AU, in his capacity as the Chairperson of the PSC for the month of February, the Mission took place, from Feb. 18 to 20, within the framework of the implementation of various decisions of the council on the situation in the country. As the fourth field mission of the council to South Sudan since October 2016, the mission also aimed at expressing AU's solidarity with the people and government of South Sudan during this critical period in the history of the country. The PSC delegation comprised representatives of the 15 member states, including, Algeria, Angola, Burundi, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, and Rwanda. The PSC delegation commended President Salva Kiir and the government for the courageous and progressive decision to revert the country back to the original ten States, and further noted that such a political compromise had restored the confidence of all stakeholders to the peace process. The PSC also welcomed the reassurance by Riek Machar to work with the government, noting that the issue of states had been resolved, and that he agreed to address other outstanding issues during the Transitional Period, including the security arrangements. Hundreds of Kashmiris have been thrown into jail under PSA law that can prolong detention without bail. Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir Ateeqa Begum has made several rounds of the courts since her son, Faisal Aslam Mir, was detained on August 6 last year, a day after India revoked Kashmirs autonomy. Thursday marks 200 days since the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed a crippling security and communications lockdown in the Muslim-majority region, with thousands of Kashmiris locked up as part of the crackdown. Mir, 22, is among hundreds of people in Indian-administered Kashmir detained under the Public Safety Act (PSA), which has been dubbed draconian by Amnesty International. Many of the detainees have been moved to jails across India. Ateeqa says her son was arrested when he left his home in the Maisuma locality of Srinagar, the regions main city, to buy medicine. She longs to meet Mir, who has been moved to a jail in Agra city, about 1,100km from Srinagar. But she can not afford to travel. Her husband, Muhammad Aslam Mir, died more than a decade ago leaving behind two children, including a daughter who is now married. From the past seven months, Ateeqa says she visits government offices, attends court hearings and visits shrines with a hope her son will be freed. Ghulam Muhammad Bhat sits in his tailors shop in Srinagar. He has been fighting to get his son released from jail [Masrat Zahra/Al Jazeera] He was my whole world and his absence is driving me mad, she says. Everyone neighbours, relatives tell me that I should have patience but how much? asks Ateeqa at her home, where she lives alone. I just want to see him once so that I can have some peace. I do not know about his condition. Sleeplessness Ateeqa is fighting multiple battles for her son as her health deteriorates; she suffers from sleeplessness, high blood pressure and mood swings. 200211132913517 I feel very helpless, she told Al Jazeera as she waits for another court hearing scheduled for March 2. It seems my whole world has collapsed without him. He is the purpose of my life and I will not stop fighting to free him. A police dossier says that her son was involved in secessionist activities and creating large-scale violence in the area. In most of the PSA cases, the detainees have been booked under the charges of creating violence and law and order problems. Three former chief ministers of the region, which has witnessed an armed rebellion since the late 1980s, have also been detained under the PSA. The separatists have been fighting for independence or a merger with neighbouring Pakistan. The Muslim-majority region is disputed by both India and Pakistan. Preventive detention A senior police official defended the detention of young Kashmiri men, many of them accused of stone-pelting. An exercise was conducted to identify chronic stone-pelters having multiple FIRs (first information reports or police complaints) registered against them to keep them out of circulation, the official told Al Jazeera on the condition of anonymity. Preventive detention law was invoked to deter other such elements and to send a strong message down the line. Ateeqa says her son used to take part in protests some years ago, but recently he was living a normal life and worked at a shop as a salesman. The government is humiliating our children and not letting them live. The removal of Article 370, which granted Kashmir a measure of autonomy, was revoked by the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which had campaigned to strip the regions special status. Kashmiri activists fear that the abrogation of Article 370 changed the geographical realities in Kashmir by removing a seven-decades-old law that had protected the demography of the region. While some restrictions have been eased, a partial ban on the internet continues with a complete ban on the use of social media. 191024074602559 A report by the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society says that 412 people have been booked under PSA from August 5 to December 31 last year. For seven months, the delayed court hearings and the hopeless justice system have been taking a toll on their families. No mercy Another case involves Bano, 45, whose youngest son has been detained under the same law and imprisoned in northern Uttar Pradeshs Agra jail. Bano, who gave only one name, says at midnight on August 2 last year, her son, Ahmad, 25, was sleeping in his room when the policemen arrived and took him away. The police told us that he will be released after an hour of questioning but it has been seven months now, says Bano, adding that her mother-in-law died of a heart attack a day after Ahmad was shifted to Agra jail. She was very attached to him. She got insane when she heard he was taken far away. She went to the whole locality telling people about him and the next day she was sleeping and complained of chest pain, she says, fighting tears. The imprisonment of young men in distant jails has been difficult for the families, particularly single mothers like Ateeqa. Both Mir and Ahmad have been detained for stone-pelting. Police documents say that they have been involved in causing previous violence as well. 200218114417864 Ghulam Muhammad Bhats son Aqib Bhat, 27, who sold crockery from a cart outside the regions biggest mosque in Srinagar, also remains in detention under the PSA for stone-pelting. He used to take part in the protests in 2016 but now he was just doing his normal work, says Bhat, who continues to work at his tailors shop despite bad health. The 55-year-old says his son was called by police before August 5 and later without any reason booked and sent to a jail in Agra. My son is disabled. He was hit with pellets in his left eye and cannot see properly, still no mercy was shown on him. He has undergone multiple surgeries but the police are not letting our children live even if they stay away from the protest, Bhat says. 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 contributing and/or subscribing to our free daily Newsletter . Support our mission and join our community now. Top contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination torched one another's proposals to reform the health care system Wednesday, as the contest to unify behind a single candidate to defeat President Donald Trump took a bitterly divisive turn. Minutes after Tom Perez, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warmed up the debate audience in Las Vegas by describing the party as a spirited but unified family, most of the candidates abruptly shifted into attack mode and not just against Mike Bloomberg, the billionaire businessman and former New York City mayor making his first, belated appearance in the ninth debate. Fighting to regain momentum after weak performances in the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts dispatched with her opponents' plans in brutally rapid succession. Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Ind., mayor, has offered "not a plan" but "a PowerPoint" that she claimed would leave millions uninsured, she said. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota has a proposal that is "like a Post-It note: Insert plan here," she quipped. And Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose "Medicare for All" plan she initially adopted as her own, "has a good start," but his campaign cannot stop attacking those who question how it would work, she said. "Health care is a crisis in this country," Warren concluded. "My approach to this is, we need as much help for as many people as quickly as possible." It wasn't the only tense moment. Sanders Angers The Culinary Workers Union How Sanders' Medicare for All proposal would affect unions in particular isn't a new question. But despite strong support for the proposal from some national unions, it emerged as a flashpoint in the run-up to Nevada's caucus on Saturday, turning the state's prominent Culinary Workers Union against Sanders, the current frontrunner, in the 11th hour. The union did not endorse a candidate but warned members that Sanders' proposal could eliminate the health care coverage they have gained through years of collective bargaining, replacing it with a system that is untested and unknown. The union then put out a statement last week saying its members had been "viciously attacked" by Sanders' supporters over the organization's opposition . Sanders responded by saying that, though there were some bad actors on social media, it was "not thinkable" that his supporters would attack union workers. "Let me be very clear for my good friends in the Culinary Workers union, a great union: I will never sign a bill that will reduce the health care benefits they have," Sanders said. "We will only expand it for them, for every union in America and for the working class." Klobuchar defended the "hard-working" culinary workers "who have health care plans that have been negotiated over time, sweat, and blood," she said. "And that is the truth for so many Americans right now." Last summer Sanders tweaked his proposal to try to alleviate concerns from unions. Under a Medicare for All system, he said, the National Labor Relations Board would supervise unions in renegotiating contracts with employers, so that they could acquire "wrap-around services and other coverage not duplicative of the benefits established under Medicare-for-all." The idea, Sanders' aides said then, was so that any savings a switch to single-payer achieved could still be passed on to workers, as increased benefits or wages. But members of the Culinary Workers Union and some other groups still worry about losing the coverage they have, in exchange for something unknown. Would that happen? Technically, yes, the health plan Nevada's culinary workers get through their union would no longer exist. Under Medicare for All, private health plans could not sell coverage that duplicates what the government program offers. But it's worth noting that, in this world, culinary workers would still have generous health insurance. Sanders' envisioned health plan is robust - he says it would cover virtually all practicing physicians and medically necessary services, with virtually no cost-sharing. Of course, that would also depend on whether a President Sanders could muster support for his plan among skeptical members of Congress. $100 Billion In Profits Sanders brought up one favorite talking point twice Wednesday his claim that the health care industry makes $100 billion a year in profits. We previously checked this claim and rated it True. The number comes from adding the net revenues in 2018 from 10 pharmaceutical companies and 10 health insurance companies. We recalculated the numbers, and they added up. Experts said it was even likely that the figure was an underestimate. Big Pharma Is Giving Money To Buttigieg And Others In another biting moment, Sanders charged that drug companies are donating to Buttigieg and other campaigns as the pharmaceutical industry profits off the current system. We previously checked Sanders' claim that Buttigieg was a "favorite of the health care industry" and rated it Half True. This is in part because it is actually Sanders who has received the most donations of any Democratic candidate from the entire health care sector, which includes pharmaceutical companies, health insurance industry, hospitals/nursing homes and health professionals. But, while checking this claim we also found that Buttigieg has received donations from employees and executives of pharmaceutical and health insurance companies such as AbbVie, Aetna, Anthem, Eli Lilly and Co., Merck & Co. and Pfizer. We did not check into donations for other candidates from pharmaceutical executives. Do People 'Love' Their Insurance? "You dont start out by saying, I have 160 million people, Im going to take away the insurance plan that they love," Bloomberg said just minutes into the debate, pointing out the shortcomings of Sanders' Medicare for All plan. It is true that Sanders' signature health proposal would eliminate private health insurance, replacing it with a single public plan that covers everybody. That would include the roughly 160 million Americans who get employer-sponsored insurance But Bloomberg's argument here that those people "love" their plans is complicated. When we previously checked a similar claim that 160 million people "like their health insurance" we rated it Half-True. Cursory polling suggests people with that coverage are mostly satisfied. But most isn't all. And, experts pointed out to us then, once Americans try to use that coverage, many find it lacking. In a Kaiser Family Foundation/ L.A. Times poll, for instance, 40% of people with employer-sponsored insurance still reported having trouble paying for medical bills, premiums or out-of-pocket costs. In that same poll, about half said they skipped or delayed health care because even with coverage they couldn't afford it. (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation.) And More About Warren's Attach On Klobuchar's Health Plan "Amy, I looked online at your (health care) plan. It's two paragraphs." Warren said. This is highly misleading. Warren's campaign told PolitiFact that she was referring specifically to Klobuchar's plan for "universal health care." It pointed to the two paragraphs at the end of this Klobuchar campaign web page, which come under the heading "Propose legislation to get us to universal health care." But that ignores most of Klobuchar's health care plan, which she outlines in quite a bit of detail on four different web pages a main health care policy page, a more detailed sub-page, a sub-page on prescription drugs and a sub-page on mental health. We did a word count on the text from those four web pages, and it exceeded 6,000 words and a lot more than two paragraphs. PolitiFacts Louis Jacobson contributed. For 27 years, the Rev. William J. Barber II has been the pastor at a church in the small city of Goldsboro, N.C. But on a recent afternoon, he could be found at a hotel in Raleigh, about an hour away from home. His work as an activist takes him to the state capital often enough that hes well known there. Not long after, hed move on to an event in Charleston, S.C., and then to Iowa, where hed lead a march demanding a presidential debate on poverty. Barber is ever in motion, and hes still picking up momentum. Hes hardly stopped since he attracted national attention as the leader of the Moral Mondays protests held at the North Carolina capitol in Raleigh beginning in 2013. His newsmaking actions were founded on the idea that being a person of faith means fighting for justicewhether by working beside a conservative mayor to protest the closing of rural hospitals or by calling for an NAACP boycott of the state in response to the legislatures actions, like its infamous bathroom bill. Barber at Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, N.C., on Jan. 27, before a backdrop showing the North Carolina house of representatives chamber where he was arrested in 2011 | Endia Beal for TIME In 2018, the 56-year-old ministera MacArthur genius grantee who founded the community-organizing group Repairers of the Breachput a new spin on that work. He and the Rev. Liz Theoharis of the Kairos Center at Union Theological Seminary launched the Poor Peoples Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. Under the principle Barber calls moral fusion, they take a holistic view of the relationship among injustices, from ecological devastation to systemic racism, and he believes solutions must come from listening to those most affected. We believe they have agency, Barber says of the 140 million poor or low-income Americans, and their stories need to be heard, their faces need to be seen. They have the answers. The campaign now has a presence in a majority of states and is planning an assembly in Washington, which it hopes will draw thousands, for June 20. Story continues Step Into History: Learn how to experience the 1963 March on Washington in virtual reality Any resemblance to the work of Martin Luther King Jr. is intentional: King launched his own Poor Peoples Campaign less than a year before he was assassinated in April 1968. It was also in 1968 that Barberwho was born just days after the 1963 March on Washingtonmoved with his family from Indiana to North Carolina. His father, a teacher and preacher, had gotten a call from a black principal asking him to return to his home state to help with the cause of integration. The young boy found himself on the front lines of that fight. In the process Barber learned an early lesson: There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with whats going on in the world. And so, at his church in Goldsboro, politicians are welcome to worship and stay for a conversation, and many do. But theyre not allowed to preach. Neither Barber nor his organizations endorse candidates, though they do endorse issues. Republicans have racialized poverty, and Democrats have run from poverty, he says. And were forcing them to deal with the reality. We are very political, but were not partisan. Read More: These 16 People and Groups Are Fighting for a More Equal America Barber, who received a diagnosis in the 1990s of ankylosing spondylitis, a form of arthritis that fused his vertebrae in place, says he has seen enough pain in the world that hes not going to let his own pain stop him. Hes got work to do. All the victories we enjoy todayvoting rights, Social Security, minimum wage100 years ago were seen as virtually impossible, he says. Everything we won, people had to start winning in the midst of opposition that looked like it was overwhelming. I believe thats the moment were in right now. Curtis is a North Carolinabased journalist and speaker This article is part of a special project about equality in America today. Read more about The March, TIMEs virtual reality re-creation of the 1963 March on Washington and sign up for TIMEs history newsletter for updates. Correction, Feb. 21 The original version of this story misstated a quotation from Rev. William Barber. He said that Republicans have racialized poverty, not property. Generic photo of a hand holding a kitchen knife. (PHOTO: Dhany Osman / Yahoo News Singapore) UPDATE: This story has been updated to reflect that Koh was charged. SINGAPORE A 46-year-old man was charged on Thursday (20 February) for an alleged stabbing incident in Geylang. Singaporean Koh Chiang Hock is accused of stabbing Kwoh Tze Poh once on the left side of his head and on his torso with a pair of scissors on Tuesday at 51 Lorong 21 Geylang Road. Kwok is said to have suffered a cut measuring 4cm and 1cm on the left side of his head and his torso respectively from the incident at 10am. He faces one count of voluntarily causing hurt with a weapon, which carries a jail term of up to seven years, or a fine, or caning, or any combination of the punishments. The police said in a release on Wednesday that it was alerted to an assault incident at Lorong 21 Geylang some ten minutes after it happened. Kwoh was found at the scene with a cut on his head and multiple stab wounds on his torso. Hen was taken to a hospital. Investigations by officers from the Bedok Police Division led to Kohs arrest within 24 hours of the incident, police added. Koh will return to court on 19 March. More Singapore stories: Singapore water polo lays out plans to wrest SEA Games gold back Woman jailed for lying to police about being molested by landlord Town council financial reports: Are residents getting money's worth? Rapa Nui, otherwise known as Easter Island (or Isla de Pascua), is one of the most remote inhabited places on the planet. It's hard to find on a map the island is little more than a stray dot in the vast southeastern Pacific Ocean. Its closest neighbors are the tiny Pitcairn Islands (some 1,200 miles away), while the nearest continental point is Chile, which is 2,200 miles to the east or five hours by flight. Map of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui. Despite its extreme seclusion, most people know of Easter Island for one reason: the moai sculptures. And they are enough to attract nearly 100,000 travelers every year to this island of just 5,700 inhabitants. Touching down in the middle of nowhere Approaching by plane, three distinct volcano craters emerge on a triangle of green grass fringed by black coastline. Everything else in all directions is barren blue ocean. Aerial view of the Ranu Kao volcanic crater. Patricia Hamilton Flights arrive at Rapa Nui's small Mataveri Airport in the town of Hanga Roa. The feel here is instantly more Polynesian than Chilean, despite Chile's annexation of the island in 1888. Aside from the language, imported food and household goods, the connection between Rapa Nui and Chile is obscure. Most of the island's population are of Polynesian descent and many still speak a local dialect, in addition to Spanish. And the most famous inhabitants the stone-faced moai have no connection to Chile at all. The moai of Rapa Nui Enormous and iconic, the cartoon-like moai statues scatter the windswept island as sentient guardians of the local culture. Their porous, basalt surfaces look featureless and ancient, yet their stature gives them lifelike attributes and a sense there is more to them than meets the eye. After being in their presence long enough, the rock effigies seemingly come alive. Visitors can get close but not touch the moai sculptures. Kevin Cox What is surprising is the number of moai on the island, in popular places and lesser-known locations. Seeing the sculptures is simple visitors can walk right up to them but touching the moai is strictly forbidden, as they still have great religious significance to the locals. At Rano Raraku, believed to be the quarry where most of the moai were carved, roped-off pathways lead up the volcanic hillside where hundreds of heads protrude from the soil, complete bodies lean at awkward angles, and ruined or unfinished sculptures lay on their sides. Wandering among the statues reveals subtle differences between them each one unique in appearance and personality. Feral horses wander freely around Rano Raraku, where some moai sculptures lean or have toppled over. Kevin Cox Many still wonder how such prodigious statues which date as far back as the 11th century and range from 3 to 11 meters (10 to 36 feet) tall were moved to so many locations around the island. Archaeologists and engineers have tried, unsuccessfully, to find the answer. Some people believe it to be the work of aliens from another world. These mysteries add to the moai's enduring allure. A trio of volcanoes While the moai tends to dominate international attention, it's Rapa Nui's dramatic coastline that truly mesmerizes. Rapa Nui's coastline. abriendomundo Jagged volcanic rock forms a crusty perimeter around the island, with inlets that are rhythmically thrashed by the ocean waves. Royal blue water contrasts with brilliant white surf, as tides race in and roar violently against the black cliffs, spraying water high into the air. There are three principal volcanoes which form the highest points of Rapa Nui, but only one Rano Kau can be comfortably reached without a guide. It is home to a small museum and visitor center located in the restored ceremonial village of Orongo. Beyond the village, visitors can sit on the rim of the volcano for unobstructed views 400 meters (1,312 feet) into the crater. There is also the option to comfortably stroll along the volcano's summit to nearby cliffs that overlook two notable islets Motu Iti and Motu Nui that shoot up from the deep sea less than one mile from the shore. The crater of the extinct volcano, Rano Kau. Kevin Cox To reach the other two volcanoes, a guide can be easily arranged by most hotels for an even more remote island experience. It's here, in the moments away from other tourists, where you feel alone in a place the rest of the world forgot. More than just moai Contrary to common assumption, Rapa Nui is not a beachcomber's paradise. With more cliffs than beaches, the island offers only two choices. Anakena is the main beach; this small cove of beige coral sand is located next to a park with shacks serving fresh food and drinks. A grassy slope of swaying palms leads to the beach and Ahu Nau Nau, a platform of seven ancient Moai once buried in sand, but which now watch over the bustling bathers below. The less populated Ovahe Beach is just around the edge of the cove and is a good spot to escape the crowds. One of the seven moai of Ahu Nau Nau, with Anakena beach in the background. Atlantide Phototravel Hiking and biking opportunities on the island are plentiful, each leading to archaeological ruins, more Moai or eye-popping vistas. Guidebooks and maps are useful for self-guided circuits to see the sights by car or on foot. There are hundreds of underground caves formed by lava flows, a few of which can be safely explored by non-spelunkers. Ana Te Pahu the largest lava tube on the island allows more than one kilometer of subterranean exploration. Near the coastline, the 50-meter (164 feet) Ana Kakenga, known as the "cave of two windows," ends at two jagged holes that peer out to the sea. One of two openings of the Ana Kakenga cave. jimfeng Despite their popularity and well-marked access, the caves are not for everyone. As paths are slippery and lighting is poor, hiking shoes and a flashlight are recommended for those who want to explore them. Sunrises and sunsets on Easter Island A benefit to renting transportation is the ability to witness the remarkable sunrises of Rapa Nui from different points across the island. Each day, visitors and locals alike, make a pilgrimage to the edges of the island to enjoy the magnificence of dawn. Sunsets on Rapa Nui. Buena Vista Images To revel in all of nature's glory, it's best to avoid the crowds at the usual places, such as the remarkable 15 moai platform of Ahu Tongariki, where buses of tourists arrive each morning. Instead, head to a remote oceanside spot to witness the pastel pink sky rise above the sea. For a nightcap, sunset at the grassy Ahu Akivi one of the island's few inland moai platforms offers an inspiring view of seven Moai staring directly into the sinking sun. Sensational seafood A benefit to being so far out at sea is the plenitude of fresh seafood. Independent fishermen glide up to the two little wharfs on the edge of town with their daily catch of red kana kana and some of the best deep-water tuna one can find. Visitors can buy fish from the fishermen at modest prices. Nearly every restaurant serves seafood in some form, including mahi mahi, lobster and even snails from the rocky coastline. The tuna ceviche is not to be missed, with herbs, avocado and meaty cubes of tuna so fresh they're almost crunchy. Tuna ceviche so fresh it's "crunchy." Kevin Cox For cheaper eats, go for a tuna empanada with its golden crust and perfectly cooked chunks of fish within; they're best bought from food carts on Policarpo Toro Street on the island's waterfront. Tips Getting there Presently, to get to Rapa Nui by air, travelers must either start in Chile or French Polynesia. There are daily flights from Santiago, and one flight weekly from Tahiti, both on Latam Airlines. Getting around Rapa Nui can easily be explored independently to fully appreciate both the moai and the island's natural beauty. Navigating is easy, as there is one main road that leads to the most popular archaeological sites. The remaining roads, located along the shorelines and deeper into the island, are primarily made of dirt or gravel. The best automobile option is an SUV, which are plentiful at the rental agencies in town. Mountain bike rentals and horseback tours are a popular way to explore remote locations such as Maunga Terevaka the island's tallest volcano and to visit other places where cars are not allowed. There are over 1,200 documented petroglyphs or rock carvings on Rapa Nui. Kevin Cox The runway of the Hindon airbase will now be fenced to protect aircrafts from Nilgai or blue bulls (Boselaphus tragocamelus). The district magistrate said that funds have been received for taking up chain-link fencing to protect the airstrip. As per the estimates of the forest department officials, there are around 300-350 blue bulls inside the airbase, which also has a blue bull habitat inside it. An adult Nilgai weighs around 100-130kg and the animal can move at a speed of 30-40kmph, officials said. During a meeting with the officials of the civil terminal at Sikandarpur, the district magistrate had asked them to coordinate with the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) and expedite the project of fencing. The funds have been received from the Union civil aviation ministry and the officials have been asked to expedite the work. The chain fencing will be done around the airstrip to protect aircrafts from Nilgai invasion. Since the domestic flights are also operating from the Hindon airbase, the airstrip needs to be protected by a fence, district magistrate Ajay Shankar Pandey said. The proposal for the fencing project was sent to the state civil aviation department in June last year. The civil terminal at Sikandarpur, near the Hindon airbase, operates flights to Hubli and Pithoragarh with the help of private airlines and more air routes are expected to become operational soon. officials from UP forest department, WWF-India and Wildlife Trust of India had survey the Hindon airbase and in the state assemblys winter season of 2018-19 the results were shared, forest department officials said, adding that fencing the airstrip was one of the highlighted points from the survey. The survey was done to tackle the issue of invasion by Nilgai, which are in abundance inside the airbase and pose potential threat to aircraft. The survey had highlighted habitat management of Nilgai, chain fencing, population control and even translocation. The recommendations could not be carried out but chain fencing was one of the vital points which got highlighted in the survey, divisional forest officer Diksha Bhandari said. In wildlife conservation, translocation requires capturing, transporting and release/introduction of species, habitats or other ecological material from one location to another. The survey recommended that Nilgai be translocated to Tilpata in Gautam Budh Nagar, but could not materialise, she added. In order to provide other facilities from the new civil terminal, the district magistrate has also directed the UP Roadways to initiate bus service for air passengers. The officials have told us that a bus service will be introduced from second week of March. The bus will take passengers from civil terminal to nearest metro stations in Ghaziabad to travel further to their destinations. The route will be connected to metro stations at Mohan Nagar, Vaishali and Kaushambi, he added. SHARE THIS ARTICLE ON The controversy over Rage Baking, once again, raises the question of, who gets to tell their stories via traditional publishing channels? And who gets to profit from it? (The cookbook is already a bestseller in Amazons baking category.) In a sense, it echoes the recent dust-up over American Dirt, in which American novelist Jeanine Cummins was accused of exploiting the suffering of Mexican migrants for fame and profit. But the Rage Baking dispute also recalls a similar situation last year, when Mark Bittman launched an online food publication on Medium, originally called Salty until someone pointed out that the name already belonged to a sex, dating and relationships newsletter for women, trans and non binary people. The site now goes by the name Heated. YEREVAN, FEBRUARY 20, ARMENPRESS. The ministry of emergency situations informs that on February 20, as of 08:35 some roads are closed and difficult to pass in Armenia. The ministry told Armenpress that the roads leading to the Amberd Fortress and Lake Kari will remain closed for uncertain time. Sotk-Karvachar highway is closed. Vardenyats Pass is closed for trailer trucks, but is difficult to pass for the other vehicles. As for the Stepantsminda-Lars road, the Georgian side informed that the highway is open for all types of vehicles. The ministry urges drivers to use snow tires. Edited and translated by Aneta Harutyunyan CALGARY AB, and SAN ANTONIO, TX / ACCESSWIRE / February 19, 2020 / Emerald Bay Energy Inc. (TSXV:EBY)(OTC:EMBYF) (the "Company" or "Emerald Bay") reported that the Company has completed drilling the fifth well, #4HC, on the Duval County Ranch Company ("DCRC") "E" lease, and the well is now on production. The five wells drilled to date at DCRC are now producing 73 bbls/day of oil. Additionally, repairs to the flow line on the Rouse lease have been competed, and 6 bbls/day of oil production has been added as anticipated. About Emerald Bay Emerald Bay Energy Inc. (TSX Venture: EBY, OTC: EMBYF) is an energy company with oil producing properties in Southwest Texas as well as non-operated oil and natural gas interests in Central Alberta, Canada. EBY is the operator of the Wooden Horse and Nash Creek Projects in Guadalupe, Texas, where the Company currently owns a 50.00% working interest those projects. Additionally, the Company owns and operates various working interests in the HugoCellR, Cotulla, and MarPat partnerships. The Company also owns 75% of Production Resources Inc., a South Texas oil company. For all upcoming news releases, articles, comments and questions, to stay updated and speak with management about Emerald Bay Energy. Please JOIN our Investor Information Group at: http://bit.ly/8020EBY For further information, please contact: Emerald Bay President, Shelby D. Beattie, or CFO, Mike Rice, by telephone at (403) 262-6000 Email: info@ebyinc.com www.ebyinc.com. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release. SOURCE: Emerald Bay Energy Inc. View source version on accesswire.com:https://www.accesswire.com/577047/Emerald-Bay-Energy-Updates-DCRC-and-Rouse-Lease-Operations Pastor among 2 dozen killed after gunmen storm church service in Burkina Faso Deacon, pastor and pastor's family murdered in separate incidents Email Print Img No-img Menu Whatsapp Google Reddit Digg Stumbleupon Linkedin Comment A pastor and at least 23 others were killed and 18 others injured after gunmen attacked a church in northeast Burkina Faso on Sunday. In a neighboring community, a deacon, a pastor, and the pastors family were killed by abductors over the weekend. Col. Salfo Kabore, the regional governor, told AFP that a group of armed terrorists attacked a Protestant church in the border village of Pansi in the Yagha province during worship services on Sunday. Kabore said that gunmen attacked the peaceful local population, after having identified them and separated them from non-residents. The mayor of Boundore commune, Sihanri Osangola Brigadie, told ABC News that about 20 gunmen had attacked the church. Brigadie visited some of the victims at a hospital located about 110 miles from the attack. "It hurt me when I saw the people," Brigadie was quoted as saying. A government official who spoke with ABC News on the condition of anonymity said that both Muslims and Christians were killed in the attack and the church was set on fire. Additionally, the gunmen were said to have kidnapped three minors and forced the youth to help transport oil and rice raided from the town shops. A resident of Sebba, a nearby town to Pansi, told AFP that fleeing villagers fled to Sebba for safety. The attack comes as over 4,000 were killed by Islamic extremist attacks in Burkina Faso, Niger and Mali in 2019, according to the United Nations envoy for West Africa and the Sahel Mohamed Ibn Chambas. Since 2016, Islamic extremist groups including the Islamic State West Africa Province and Ansaroul Islam have carried out attacks throughout the Sahel region of West Africa. But attacks increased fivefold in 2019. Burkina Faso has been at the center of the deadly trend. Chambas told the U.N. Security Council in January that deaths rose in Burkina Faso from 80 in 2016 to 1,800 in 2019. "Most significantly, the geographic focus of terrorist attacks has shifted eastwards from Mali to Burkina Faso and is increasingly threatening West African coastal states," Chambas warned at the time. According to the U.N., the number of people displaced in Burkina Faso rose 1,200 percent in 2019. There are about 600,000 internally displaced people in the country as it is becoming one of the worlds fastest-growing humanitarian crises. According to Open Doors, a leading Christian persecution watchdog operating in over 60 countries, the attack on the church in Pansi comes just days after an attack on a Christian community in the nearby town of Sebba. Gunmen reportedly murdered Lankoande Babilibile, a deacon of the Evangelical SIM Church in Sebba, last Tuesday. The gunmen also reportedly used Babilibiles car to abduct the churchs pastor, Omar Tindano, two of Tindanos daughters, Tindanos son and Tindanos two nephews, according to Open Doors. On Thursday, Open Doors was informed that that Tindano along with his son and nephews were reportedly executed while his daughters were released. The attack in Pansi on Sunday was the third attack on a Protestant church in Burkina Faso in addition to a number of attacks on Catholic communities. Of the attacks on the Protestant churches, Open Doors reports that the attack on the Pansi church was the deadliest. Open Doors hears from sources on the ground that the pastor was abducted now believed to be among those killed and the church building burned down, Open Doors reported Monday. There are several people who have yet to be accounted for. Last December, at least 14 people were killed when gunmen stormed a Protestant church service in the town of Hantoukoura near the border with Niger. Last April, gunmen killed a Protestant pastor and five other Christians who were leaving a worship service in Silgadji. Because of the troubling rise of violence in the once peaceful predominantly-Muslim country, Burkin Faso jumped over 30 spots to No. 28 on Open Doors USAs 2020 World Watch List of countries where Christians are most persecuted. Burkina Faso is losing the religious tolerance it has otherwise practiced throughout its earlier history, an Open Doors report on persecution in Burkina Faso reads. A radicalization of the Islamic population is now taking place. The recent expansion of Islamic militancy in the Sahel region threatens the developing democracy. Radical Islamic groups like AQIM [Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb]and Boko Haram are clearly gaining ground, the report adds. Although the government is taking various precautionary measures to prevent the expansion of such groups, it will also need to look for grassroots solutions to combat the growing Islamist influence. 20.02.2020 LISTEN There is only one road left to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set for Africa for 2030 and thats through sustainable businesses. For the sluggish progress to date has been primarily a consequence of putting all our eggs in one basket and expecting the state to deliver the SDGs, which it cannot. A prime obstacle in that is finance. The SDG Center for Africa estimates the financing gap to achieve the SDGs is running at between $500bn and $1.2tn a year. That is simply beyond the reach of the public sector, with the Center estimating that delivering basic state functions of health care, education, water, energy, and road infrastructure requires more than 50 percent of the GDP of most African countries. However, for the private sector, pursuing the 2030 goals of eradicating Africas hunger, poverty, and inequality and improving healthcare will deliver its own rewards, creating business opportunities worth more than a trillion dollars a year, according to United Nation estimates. In the absence of that private sector mobilisation, progress remains achingly slow. The 2019 Sustainable Development Goal Three-Year Reality Checker Report found only five countries in Africa - Seychelles, Mauritius, Morocco, Egypt, and Algeria - that had met the SDG target of three percent poverty by 2015. Yet the problem is substantially one of mindset. For, while achieving the right policies and public investment is necessary for delivering the SDGs, we need to abandon the idea that it is enough and focus more rigorously on developing SDG aligned businesses. It is not viable to expect nation-states to achieve a tax take, or a debt load, of 50 per cent of GDP to deliver basic services when the continent is home to a vast informal sector that contributes no government revenue at all. That basic needs bill is just unmeetable without a leap forward in business and GDP growth. And just as public sector SDG success depends on private sector take-off, so too does the private sectors success. Investing in SDG-focused businesses, calculates the UN, would create over 85 million jobs in Africa by 2030, which would in turn create new consumers and new markets. Indeed, even relatively small investments in SDG-focused businesses can produce huge returns. For instance, investing in agriculture technology to reduce food waste could generate $57bn a year in additional revenues, based on evidence from Rwanda, where small metal silos or plastic crates have reduced post-harvest losses by over 60 per cent and increased smallholder farmers incomes by more than 30 per cent. If private businesses collaborate with local governments to provide larger infrastructures, such as ports, oil and gas extractives, power plants and automotive, shared revenue of over $296bn could be generated and nearly 16 million jobs, according to the UNs estimates. There could be further benefits too from using local materials for such works. Likewise, providing affordable housing, clean water and sanitation, infrastructure and energy solutions, such as solar lanterns and improved cooking stoves to urban dwellers, has a potential revenue value of $214bn a year and could create over 32 million jobs. Such growth is typical for businesses focused on achieving SDGs. Indeed, research conducted by the Business and Sustainable Development Commission (BSDC) shows that business that is focused in SDG areas also achieves more value locally. For instance, reports the BSDC, 71 per cent of the value of food and agriculture businesses is retained in developing countries, 60 per cent of health and wellness businesses, 54 per cent of energy and materials, and 54 percent of the value of upgrading and developing new cities. Overall, business models that are directed towards achieving Africas SDGs have proven to work to the benefit of both consumers and businesses, which is why thy lie at the heart of all we are doing at Intellecap and at next weeks 7th Sankalp Summit for entrepreneurs in Nairobi. Our initiatives to support private sector SDG initiatives include research, partnerships, and projects spanning ideal adaptive technologies, such as rural solar mini-grids; private sector capacity building among communities displaced by projects such as the Olkaria geothermal plant; and assisting small producers into value addition and niche markets, in tea, in bamboo, and multiple other high potential areas. We have no doubt that without recalibration of our private sector SDG efforts, the 2030 goals for Africa will go unmet, whereas if we now see and seize this opportunity, no African will be left untouched by the benefits borne of SDG-focused entrepreneurs. Inaugural Edition of Industrial Data Book Identifies Trends in How Industry Uses Energy Feb. 19, 2020 U.S. industry used nearly 33 quadrillion British thermal units in 2018, or one-third of total energy consumption, according to the newly released 2018 Industrial Energy Data Book. Energy use for the sector has gradually increased since the 20072009 recession (2% from 2017 to 2018), and industry continues to be the largest energy end-use sector in the United States. A new resource published by the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on behalf of DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Industrial Energy Data Book summarizes the status of and presents key trends in energy use and its underlying economic drivers across the four industrial subsectors: agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and mining. Given the relationships between energy and water use, industry water withdrawals are also discussed in the data book. U.S. Industrial Energy Use by Fuel (19492018) U.S. Industrial Energy Use by Fuel (2018) Please contact the webmaster if you need help interpreting these charts. The Industrial Energy Data Book shows the increasing role of natural gas as an industrial fuel. In 2018, industry was the second-largest consumer of natural gas, behind electric power generation. Produced by NREL's Strategic Energy Analysis Center, this inaugural edition of the Industrial Energy Data Book provides an overview of the largest, yet least extensively quantified energy end-use sector for audiences unfamiliar with the sector, as well as for industrial energy experts. Due to the reporting schedules of underlying data sources, data are reported for years 20162018. "We're excited to debut this new data collection, which shows that in 2018 three energy carriersnatural gas, electricity, and petroleum productsmade up nearly 90% of industry's total energy use and almost 96% of its $78 billion total energy expenditures," said NREL Senior Analyst Colin McMillan, co-author of the report. "We also estimate that the largest energy-using facilities comprise about 0.3% of all industrial facilities but burn the equivalent of 28% of the sector's energy." Other key insights from the data include: In 2018, the industrial sector consumed less electricity than both the residential and commercial sectors. Industrial electricity consumption has gradually decreased since its peak in 2000. Renewable energy sourceswhich are nearly all biomassmade up about 8% of total industrial energy use in 2018, roughly the same portion as in 2017. Texas, Louisiana, and California are home to the greatest share of large energy-using facilities due in part to the prevalence of petroleum refining and petrochemicals industries. Together these states account for about 37% of total industry energy use. The report is accompanied by downloadable data of energy estimates for large facilities and for counties. The source code used to produce these estimates is also publicly available for download and use. Learn more about NREL's energy analysis research. The meetings took place on the occasion of Deputy PM Minhs participation in the fifth Mekong-Lancang Cooperation Foreign Ministers' Meeting and Special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers Meeting on Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) in Laos. Meeting with Wang Yi, Deputy PM Minh expressed his sympathies to China over the losses caused by COVID-19 and hoped China will overcome this difficult time soon. Regarding Vietnam-China relations, Deputy PM Minh suggested the two sides enhance political trust via high-level delegation exchanges, and carry out activities to mark the 70th anniversary of diplomatic relations. He recommended improving the efficiency of cooperation in all arenas, coordinating to effectively address border and territory issues, and strengthening locality-to-locality cooperation and people-to-people exchanges. The official asked China to continue applying measures to narrow Vietnams trade deficit, and facilitate the export of Vietnamese goods to the market, especially farm produce. He also called for more attention to solving problems in some cooperation projects, particularly the Cat Linh-Ha Dong urban railway. On the sea issues, Deputy PM Minh highlighted Vietnams stance of continuing to work with China and other countries in search of measures to maintain peace, security and stability in the East Sea, while facilitating the negotiations on a Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC). For his part, Wang Yi thanked Vietnam for supporting China in the fight against COVID-19. He said China is willing to increase the import of Vietnamese products and will actively coordinate with Vietnam to solve existing problems in the bilateral cooperation projects. He affirmed Chinas support for Vietnam in shouldering the role of the ASEAN Chair 2020 and a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council for 2020-2021. At the meeting between Vietnamese Deputy Prime Minister Pham Binh Minh and Lao Minister of Foreign Affairs Saleumxay Kommasith (Photo: VNA) At a meeting with the Lao foreign minister, host and guest agreed to boost cooperation in implementing agreements reached by the two countries leaders and at the 42nd session of the Vietnam-Laos intergovernmental meeting in January. The two sides agreed to intensify the implementation of the foreign ministries cooperation agreement for 2014-2020 and review the piloting of the one-stop-shop mechanism at the Lao Bao-Densavan border gate. Both countries pledged to strengthen coordination at regional and international forums. Sharing their mutual concerns over the complicated development of COVID-19, the two sides agreed that ASEAN countries should strengthen coordination and take prompt actions to cope with the disease. University of Nebraska President Walter Ted Carter is coming back to Columbus. Carter, who in December 2019 was hired by the NU Board of Regents to become the universitys eighth system president, will serve as the keynote speaker at the Columbus Area Chamber of Commerces annual celebration banquet on March 12 at Platte County Agricultural Park. But Carter is hardly a stranger to Columbus. He and his wife, Lynda, visited town during the vetting process for the president role. The community gave me and my wife, Lynda, such a warm welcome, and they were ready with great questions and feedback. Its clear to me the people of Columbus, like many Nebraskans, care about the success of their University and our 51,000 students, Carter told The Telegram. Im looking forward to coming back and giving folks an update on where we are now that Ive had an opportunity to settle into the role. "Im excited about the conversations were having around access and affordability, graduation rates, workforce development, and ongoing work to find new efficiencies in our budget. Columbus Chamber President Jeanne Schieffer said shes looking forward to hosting Carter and hearing his presentation alongside residents. Were very excited. I think it will be a really good program, she said. He has a story to tell its a wonderful story of his background I think this will be an opportunity for the whole community to hear what he has envisioned for the university. Carter previously had been superintendent of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, from 2014 until last year. There, he led 4,400 students and a large faculty. Since taking over at Nebraska, he has been quite busy. During an interview with the Telegram, he discussed what he and other university leaders have been up to in his first couple of months (he officially took over at NU on Jan. 1). Were at work now on putting together a five-year strategy document for the University thats going to spell out our goals and our process for achieving them. I think Nebraskans will be excited about what we come up with, he said. Bottom line, everything we do is going to be about the success of our 51,000 students. Of course, that includes the 300-plus students we enroll from the Columbus area! Columbus has been on his radar for another reason. Local resident and businessman Jim Pillen earlier this month was selected to be the Board of Regents chairman. Pillen, who represents District 3 on the Board, was elected in 2012 and re-elected in 2018. He served as vice-chairman in 2019. I couldnt be more pleased to have Jim leading our Board, and this is a great time to come and engage with the community, he said. Besides Carters presentation, the chamber will honor members who have reached significant anniversaries in their years of continuous membership and present the Rich Anderson Chamber Volunteer of the Year award. Central Community College-Columbus will be recognized as a 50-year member, while those who will be honored for 25 years of continuous membership include 3E, Copper Care Wood Preservatives Inc., Fehringer & Mielak L.L.P., Nebraska Vocational Rehabilitation, Jays Body Shop, Cargill Protein, Sleep Inn & Suites Hotel, Twin Rivers Veterinary Clinic, PC, and Browns Shoe Fit Company. The banquet is scheduled to run from 5:30 p.m.-9 p.m. It will start with a one-hour social, followed by dinner and then the presentation. Single tickets for members of the chamber are $25 each, while its $35 for non-members. A members-only reserved table of eight runs $250. We want to celebrate the year, Schieffer said, noting there are a lot of great businesses that have or are in the process of rebounding from last years devastating flood. Carter has made a point to visit many communities across the state and is enjoying life in Nebraska thus far. What I want people in Columbus to know is that Im officially a Nebraskan. Ive got license plates on my car, Ive paid taxes, Ive voted and Ive been to Runza, he said. Lynda and I could not be happier to call this great state our new home. Carter stressed banquet attendees can expect to hear more about the work he and other leaders are doing to ensure the universitys future is bright. Id like to talk with folks in Columbus about where we are as a university, where we can go, and how we can get there. Im going to be speaking about American values and how those inform our decisions in our daily lives, and how, in the same way, the core values of the University inform our decisions about where we invest our time and energy. I plan to share some personal stories that I hope will illuminate this point, he said. Our strategic plan wont be done for another few months, but I can tell you that our early conversations are focusing around a few key themes, like growth and value. We want our university to grow in terms of enrollment, retention and graduation rates, research activity and impact. I am especially interested in making certain that the University fulfills its promise to provide an outstanding, affordable education to every qualified Nebraska student ..." Matt Lindberg is the managing editor of The Columbus Telegram. Reach him via email at matt.lindberg@lee.net. Love 0 Funny 0 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. Ha Tinh Police in central Vietnam have arrested six people in the investigation into the death of 39 Vietnamese citizens in the U.K. last year. They said Thursday that Tran Dinh Truong, 35, Nguyen Thi Huy Hoa, 36, Vo Van Ky, 58, Vo Van Ho, 68, Le Van Hue, 53, Nguyen Quoc Thanh, 26, and Nguyen Thi Thuy Diem, 30, had created immigration profiles for over 60 people from many Vietnam localities for illegal work in the U.K. and Europe. Diem, who currently lives in China, is internationally wanted. The rest have been arrested by Ha Tinh police. Truong contacted Hoa and Diem last June to create immigration profiles for 26-year-old Pham Thi Tra My, one of the 39 killed, to go to the U.K. She was taken to China and then France for $22,000 for which Truong got $1,000 and the rest was received by Hoa and Diem, the police said. On her way from France to the U.K., My and 38 other Vietnamese succumbed to hypoxia and hyperthermia inside a refrigerated container truck they were taken in. My's last text messages to her mother broke hearts from around the globe. Part of it, quoted by many news agencies, read: "I'm sorry Mum. My journey abroad hasn't succeeded. Mum, I love you so much! I'm dying because I can't breathe ... I'm from Nghen, Can Loc, Ha Tinh, Vietnam ... I am sorry, Mum." Her and the other bodies were found in the U.K.s Essex County, northeast of London, on October 24 last year. The two youngest victims were 15 and the oldest 44. Of the victims, 10 were from Ha Tinh, 21 from neighboring Nghe An, and the rest from Quang Binh, Thua Thien-Hue, Hai Duong and Hai Phong. Their remains were returned to Vietnam last November. BAE Systems predicts 2020 growth despite Saudi ban FILE PHOTO: A sign adorns a hangar at the BAE Systems facility in Salmesbury By Sarah Young LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's BAE SystemsWhat: The Skally Line band
When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22. Doors open at 6:30.
Where: Olde Pine Theatre, 113 2nd St. SW, Pine Island
Cost: $8 in advance (oldepinetheatre.com or 507-491-2639), $10 at the door
" id="a5d526d7-2805-426e-b931-8ba3183fe201" style-type="fact" title="If You Go" type="relcontent"}} What: The Skally Line band When: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22. Doors open at 6:30. Where: Olde Pine Theatre, 113 2nd St. SW, Pine Island Cost: $8 in advance (oldepinetheatre.com or 507-491-2639), $10 at the door BOISE Each weekend, Nathan Putnam loads up the kids and hits the trails. The kids, a handful of young goats, follow behind Putnam in a single-file line made up of adult female goats, called does, and neutered male goats, called wethers, as they make their way into the Boise Foothills. In one winter weekend, they can cover upwards of two dozen miles. Theyre pack goats, meant to lighten Putnams load by carrying gear on hunting and backpacking trips. The 34-year-old Boise man got his first goat four years ago. He said his whole life has been changed by the animals. Pack goats have become increasingly popular in recent years thanks to their hardy, docile nature and how easy they are to keep in comparison with other pack animals. That boom in popularity is changing the way many Idahoans enjoy the outdoors, but Putnam and other goat packers are fighting to keep their herds in the Idaho backcountry amid claims the goats can spread disease to wildlife. Hunting trip sparked Boise mans love for pack goats Several years ago, Putnam was hunting near Robie Creek when he ran across another hunter, also hoping to harvest a bear in the area. The man said he lived nearby and would be happy to use his pack goats to help Putnam haul out his kill. Ive always been interested in homesteading and always wanted goats, Putnam said, so the idea immediately appealed to him. In 2016, he brought home his first goat, a brown Boer named Trooper. Since then, hes bought and bred more and now boasts a herd of 24. Putnams pack goats are a far cry from the dwarf or pygmy goat breeds popularized in recent years by activities like goat yoga. Some are Boers, an African breed raised for meat, while others are Alpines, a breed usually kept to produce milk. Many of them are a mix of the two breeds, which Putnam calls BoePine, that he breeds as a middle ground between the stocky, muscular Boers and the taller, thinner Alpines. The goats are around 32 to 35 inches at the shoulder and can weigh more than 200 pounds. When theyre fully grown around 4 years old, they can carry loads up to 60 pounds. The goats wear panniers, or packs that distribute weight equally on either side of their body, avoiding pressure on the spine. Putnam customizes some of the packs himself and buys others from fellow Boise goat packer Marc Warnke. Some of Putnams goats even have sponsorships from gear companies, which he promotes on his goat-centric Instagram page. Hiking, hunting with pack goats When Putnam heads to the Foothills, he usually brings between 15 and 20 goats. The weekend hiking treks help keep the goats in good shape ahead of the extensive backpacking or hunting trips that Putnam takes through the year when he usually brings along only 10 animals. On the busy Boise trails, he finds that the goats take people by surprise and usually make them smile. People love it, he said. They ask me all sorts of questions about it. Though they tend to shy away from dogs, the goats are friendly with people thanks to Putnams efforts to socialize them. Theyre happy to accept a pat or chin scratch from a stranger. Putnam said he tries to stick to higher-elevation trails with lower traffic. In the spring and summer, he often heads up to Bogus Basin with his herd. Hes also run into some envious hunters and hikers in the wilderness. When I run into hunters in the backcountry, theyre jealous, Putnam said. Theyre packing out this elk or something all by themselves. Pack goats booming in popularity The goats may take some people by surprise around Boise, but theyre steadily becoming more popular in Idaho and across the Mountain West. The interest in the last 5 years has tripled at least, said Kim Hellums, who breeds Alpine goats at DKH Destiny farm in Middleton. Hellums sold goats to Putnam and other Idahoans, as well as goat packers across the region. Ten years ago, I sold five (goats), she said in a phone interview. Starting about five years ago, I sold everything I had. Last year, I had 30 pack goat prospects. Hellums said she tends to see two types of goat packers: older outdoorsmen who need some help to keep up with their hobbies, and younger ones like Putnam who are looking for a lower-maintenance alternative to other pack animals. Horses are harder to keep, llamas are a little more difficult, more temperamental, she said. Putnam agreed, adding that he can easily load a few into the bed of his pickup truck or about a dozen into a small horse trailer. Additionally, goats dont require as much space (on her website, Hellums recommends a quarter-acre for two) and dont eat as much as larger animals. Theyre the poor mans pack animal, Putnam said. Hellums said goats are not the destructive garbage disposals theyve been made out to be. While they like to taste everything, she said, they dont eat everything. Theyre actually very picky eaters, Putnam said. Pack goats are also intelligent, affectionate and easy to get along with. I tell everybody, if you like dogs, youll like goats, Hellums said. Putnam said his 200-pound puppies are low impact and love to stick close by on the trails. If Im hand and foot crawling, theyre crawling up right behind me, he said. Concerns over pack goats, wildlife and pathogens As goat packing has become more popular, it also has become a point of concern for some agencies that say the animals could threaten the health of bighorn sheep populations in the West. Goat packers in recent years have battled with the Forest Service and state wildlife agencies to allow the animals in the backcountry. Currently, the North American Packgoat Association, or NAPgA, is pushing back against a revised forest plan for Idahos Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest that would require new authorizations and permit reauthorizations for domestic goat packing to prevent disease transmission between domestic goats and bighorn sheep. Similar restrictions were proposed in the Sawtooths in 2017, and the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming approved a plan in 2018 requiring goat packers to show a clean bill of health for their goats before they can get a permit for the area. The disease in question is caused by a bacteria Mycoplasma ovipneumoniae, or M. ovi. Several types exist in sheep and goats and can cause respiratory infections. Officials say infections in bighorn sheep herds spread by domestic sheep and goats could lead to pneumonia, potentially wiping out the wildlife. NAPgA disagrees. Curtis King, president of the association, said one of the main studies on disease transmission between domestic goats and wild bighorn didnt show a conclusive link. A NAPgA study of nearly 600 pack goats in 12 states found trace amounts of M. ovi in 20 animals and positive samples in 18 others. At the end of the day, this is all about keeping bighorn sheep safe from a pathogen that is not even carried by (pack goats), King said in a phone interview. King said hes encouraging goat packers to send in their comments on the Nez Perce-Clearwater plan, and hes urging forest officials to adopt NAPgAs best management practices to keep wildlife healthy. The practices include supervising the goats at all times, tethering them when in camp and keeping them separated from wildlife, as well as a rigorous step-by-step in the event that a pack goat does get lost. If people comply with these, contact with bighorns will never occur, King said. Hes hopeful NAPgA can come to an agreement with the Nez Perce-Clearwater because the area is a popular one for goat packers. I think the outcome of what happens on the Nez Perce is more important than what happened on the Shoshone, King said. Putnam said he and other Idaho goat packers are grateful that NAPgA is advocating for pack goats. Its good to have someone to look out for the little guys, Putnam said. Love 0 Funny 0 Wow 0 Sad 0 Angry 0 New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - February 20, 2020) - UGE International Ltd. (TSXV: UGE) (OTCQB: UGEIF) (the "Company" or "UGE"), a leader in commercial and community solar energy solutions, is pleased to announce five new contracts recently signed for projects in New York, the Philippines, and Ontario. In New York, UGE and Wildflower signed an agreement for a 100 kW system on the roof of a storage facility in Holbrook, NY as the latest addition to the existing relationship between the companies. The success of previous projects together has led to further development opportunities, in which UGE enables new and existing buildings to earn additional revenue while complying with the Climate Mobilization Act. In this Act, Local Law 94 requires all new construction in NYC to adopt prescribed sustainability measures, which the Company believes are best fulfilled through the installation of rooftop solar energy systems. In the Philippines, the Cebu Institute of Technology (CIT-U) signed a Memorandum of Understanding with UGE Philippines to officially commence contracting for a 97 kW solar energy system for their high school building in Cebu City. Aside from the financial savings, this milestone solidifies CIT-U's leadership in implementing clean energy technologies for academic institutions. UGE's CEO, Nick Blitterswyk, and CIT-U's President, Engr. Bernard Nicolas Villamor led the ribbon cutting ceremony at the CIT-U Library Activity Center on February 13th. UGE Philippines also signed a contract with Lite Properties Inc. for a 200 kW project. The solar system is sized to offset the electrical load of Lite Port Center, eliminating their exposure to the high electricity rates on Bohol Island. The UGE team, together with Lite Shipping Group President and CEO Lucio Lim, Jr., signed the agreement at the group's headquarters. With all three above clients, UGE is actively evaluating additional buildings to add to its 2020 project schedule. Finally, UGE Consulting Services has signed an agreement to complete the engineering scope of work for a rooftop system in Ontario, which will increase the existing system's capacity from 218kW to 350kW. This will be UGE's first project with Wattsavers and its first "repower" project in Ontario, a market it expects to see grow in the upcoming quarters. UGE Consulting Services also signed an agreement the prior week to complete the engineering of a commercial solar project for a large commercial-scale developer in the southwest USA. The above projects are all expected to be completed in 2020 with margins in line with the Company's stated goals for each business unit, as outlined in UGE's most recent investor presentation available on its website. UGE will finance the CIT-U and Lite Properties projects, while the building owner will self-finance the Holbrook system. Cebu Institute of Technology Signing Ceremony To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3890/52601_signingceremony800.jpg Lite Properties Signing Ceremony To view an enhanced version of this graphic, please visit: https://orders.newsfilecorp.com/files/3890/52601_contractisnging.jpg About UGE International Ltd. UGE delivers immediate savings to businesses through the low cost of solar energy. We help commercial and industrial clients become more competitive by providing low cost distributed renewable energy solutions at no upfront cost and maximum long-term benefit. With over 380 MW of global experience, we work daily to power a more sustainable world. Visit us at www.ugei.com. For more information, contact: 917-720-5685 investors@ugei.com To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/52601 Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on Thursday said that in all 138 Indians including 132 crew members and six passengers are on-board the cruise ship -- Diamond Princess, quarantined off the coast of Japan, and eight of them are infected with the coronavirus. "There are 132 crew members and six passengers, all Indians, who were on-board the cruise ship -- Diamond Princess. This was quarantined off the coast of Japan. As per the latest info, there are 8 Indian nationals are infected with the coronavirus. They are being treated at a local hospital," MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said while addressing a weekly briefing here. He further said that India has decided an aircraft consignment of medical supplied on a relief flight to the coronavirus-hit Chinese city of Wuhan. "The Government of India has decided to send an aircraft consignment of medical supplies on a relief flight to Wuhan. This a small way to express our support to China as it continues to fight against Covid-19 epidemic," he said. "On its return journey, the aircraft will bring in Indian nationals who couldn't board the first two flights. Those interested to come back have been asked to contact our Embassy. Subject to capacity limitations and other logistics we will accommodate nationals of other countries as well," he added. Earlier, Al Jazeera reported that brought the total number of infections diagnosed on board the Diamond Princess so far has risen to 634, citing Japan's Health Ministry. According to the Yonhap report, South Korea reported its first death from coronavirus on Thursday, with 53 new cases confirmed in a single day to bring the total to 104. (This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.) Amid hundreds being tested positive for coronavirus in the Diamond Princess cruise ship, the captain of the ship has kept spirits alive by cracking jokes and delivering critical health information in his Italian accent. Gerrano Arma started his career with Princess Cruises in 1998 as a lower rank cadet and rose through the ranks, according to the reports. Captain Arma was reportedly born in the beautiful peninsula of Sorrento, Italy, and has always been passionate about the sea. READ: Coronavirus Outbreak: 79 New Confirmed Cases On Quarantined Cruise Ship In Japan Captain Courageous He faced a great leadership challenge as captain of the Diamond Princess where more than 600 people have tested positive for coronavirus and the cruise ship was quarantined for a period of 14 days. His frequent messages to 2,600 passengers round-the-clock have kept them informed and raise their spirits even after fresh positive tests kept on emerging daily, as per the reports. He also sent chocolates and hearts to passengers with notes of encouragement and recited a passage about love from the Bible on Valentine's Day. READ: Novel Coronavirus: Six Chinese Nationals Put Under Surveillance In Shimla 621 infected on the ship The total number of infected onboard the quarantined cruise ship Diamond Princess has risen to 621 after Japan recently announced 79 more confirmed cases on the ship. According to reports, Japan's health ministry was carrying out tests on passengers and crews that are quarantined on board the ship. The Diamond Princess is currently docked in Yokohoma, a port city close to Tokyo and the passengers on the cruise ship began leaving after being tested negative for the coronavirus. According to reports, around 500 passengers were allowed to leave the ship after the 14-day quarantine period came to an end. The passengers leaving the ship also received an official certificate stating that the concerned individuals did not pose any threat and had tested negative for the infection of the virus. As per reports, a few countries were also not happy with the quarantine process onboard the Diamond Princess and started bringing back their citizens on board chartered planes. (With agency inputs) READ: India's Third Coronavirus Patient Tests Negative; Decision On Discharge On Thursday READ: Coronavirus Outbreak: New Semester In Chinese Universities Postponed [February 20, 2020] ENCQOR 5G Reaches a New Milestone in Signing Memorandums of Understanding With 6 Telecom Service Providers These agreements will foster the emergence of a world-class 5G innovation ecosystem in Canada ENCQOR 5G (Evolution of Networked Services through a Corridor in Quebec and Ontario for Research and Innovation) is a transformational Canada - Quebec - Ontario partnership focused on innovation in the field of 5G technologies (Evolution of Networked Services through a Corridor in and for Research and Innovation) is a transformational - - partnership focused on innovation in the field of 5G technologies The project brings together industry, small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the public sector, centres for innovation, and universities in order to unlock the technological promise of 5G in the near term and drive long-term economic growth ENCQOR 5G has five Digital Innovation Hubs, located in both Ontario and Quebec , providing a 5G platform where SMEs can develop and test new solutions MONTREAL, Feb. 20, 2020 /CNW Telbec/ - ENCQOR 5G is very pleased to announce that it has signed Memorandums of Understanding (MOU) with 6 telecom service providers in Canada. These enterprises are (in alphabetical order): Bell, Cogeco, Ecotel (Ambra Solutions), Rogers, Telus and Videotron. Thanks to these agreements, ENCQOR 5G and the collaboration agreement signatories will work closely with small and medium entreprises (SMEs) in Quebec and Ontario in the development of innovative solutions and services using the 5G pre-commercial test platform offered by ENCQOR 5G. "This announcement will enable the respective SME ecosystems to better prepare for 5G and take full advantage of the power and opportunities offered by this new technology. For ENCQOR 5G, collaborating with 6 players in the telecommunications sector constitutes a major milestone in the development of Canada's digital economy, which is competitive on a global scale," stated Pierre Boucher, general manager of ENCQOR 5G. A Strategic and Collaborative Approach "Bell was first in Canada to test 5G mobile technology, we've rapidly built out our 5G network capability and we're working with our partners to help Canadian businesses capitalize on the transformative potential of the next generation of wireless," said Bruce Rodin, Bell's Vice President of Wireless Network Strategy. "We look forward to partnering with ENCQOR to further empower small and medium enterprises across the country to make Canada a global innovation leader in this next wave of the digital economy." "Cogeco s very proud to work with ENCQOR and contribute to advancing 5G technology with our state-of-the-art infrastructure," announced Marie Ginette Lepage, Cogeco's Vice President, Wireless Solutions and Innovation. "Given that we are preparing our potential entry into the wireless market, we are taking this opportunity to actively contribute to the development of innovative products and services driven by 5G. In so doing, we will be able to offer our customers in Quebec and Ontario, at the appropriate time, tools to support their growth." Ms. Lepage continued, "Cogeco also recognizes the positive contribution ENCQOR will make when it comes time to ensure the efficient coexistence of 5G and existing technologies in our municipalities." Becoming a Leader in Digital Economy "The ENCQOR project allows ECOTEL to validate the 5G technology that will be used to connect remote Canadian villages. Moreover, the ENCQOR project will accelerate the deployment of 5G networks for industries looking to implement automation and real time data exchange," Eric L'Heureux, the President and CEO of Ambra Solutions was keen to say. "We are proud to partner with ENCQOR to help local businesses bring their 5G innovations to Canadians, 5G is the biggest technological evolution since the introduction of wireless and partnerships like this, with government, industry and start-ups, are critical to developing the ideas and solutions that will fuel industries and drive Canada's digital economy." said Alexander Brock, Senior Vice-President, Technology Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships at Rogers Communications. Working Together Towards a Brighter Future "TELUS is a global leader in wireless technology and we intend to retain that distinction. In 2019, TELUS earned the top spot in all five major wireless network reporting, including accolades from Opensignal, J.D. Power, PCMag, Ookla and Tutela," declared Bernard Bureau, Vice President - Network & Architecture Strategy. "We are recognized year after year as having one of the best networks in the world and we are excited to leverage this network excellence with ENCQOR to facilitate strong collaboration between industry leaders, government entities, research institutes and academia to foster the creation of a powerful 5G ecosystem to help build a brighter future for all Canadians." "For Videotron, 5G is a unique opportunity to bring our customers closer to friends and family and make their lives better. As the partner for Quebecers' connected lifestyles, we are proud to work with ENCQOR to stimulate innovation by building a supportive environment for the development of technologies that improve our fellow citizens' quality of life," stated Serge Legris, Vice President & Chief Technology Planning Officer of Videotron. ENCQOR's project is based on a distinctive model aimed at offering small and medium sized enterprises in Quebec and Ontario an open and accessible 5G pre-commercial platform that will allow them to develop innovative new products and services in many emerging sectors, such as Smart Cities, e-health, the Internet of Things, Smart Energy, multimedia and Industry 4.0 (manufacturing) as well as the transportation sector, including autonomous vehicles. About ENCQOR 5G The ENCQOR 5G initiative is funded by the governments of Canada, Quebec and Ontario as well as leading industry players Ericsson, Ciena, Thales, CGI and IBM. ENCQOR 5G is coordinated by Innovation ENCQOR, and delivered in Ontario by OCE and in Quebec by Innovation ENCQOR and Prompt. The program has a mandate to bring together SMEs and academia to contribute to the advancement of research, innovation and demonstration of applications through a pre-commercial 5G test bed. SOURCE ENCQOR 5G [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ] US rapper Pop Smoke, known for his breakout single 'Welcome to the Party', has been shot dead in an alleged armed robbery. Los Angeles police confirmed to Radio 1's Newsbeat a man was shot in his home. The identity of Pop Smoke, real name Bashar Barakah Jackson, was not revealed at the time. The 20-year-old, who achieved his first Billboard top 10 album this week with Meet The Woo V.2, was reportedly hospitalised and later pronounced dead. Jackson's label Republic Records has since released a statement on Instagram, saying it's "devastated by the unexpected and tragic loss of Pop Smoke". "Our prayers and thoughts go out to his family, friends and fans, as we mourn this loss together." New Delhi, Feb 20 : E-commerce player Flipkart has realigned its senior management team for the upcoming new business opportunities and Adarsh Menon, Senior Vice President and Head, Private Brands, Electronics and Furniture, is set to head a new business initiative. According to reliable sources, Flipkart CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy in a recent email addressed to employees detailed new roles for the senior executives. "Adarsh Menon will move on to a new business initiative at Flipkart after a successful stint in CDO (category design operations)," Krishnamurthy said in the email. Menon may head Flipkart's upcoming business to business (B2B) initiative. Manish Kumar, vice-president of business development who has built the grocery business, will look after the private label business. Ajay Yadav, Flipkart's Head of large appliances and mobile businesses, will take charge of the electronics business unit which was under Menon. Flipkart's furniture business will now be called the books, general merchandise and home (BGMH) category, said Krishnamurthy. The e-commerce player is in a restructuring mode from the beginning of this yeat to cut losses as competition gets tough. Flipkart is downing shutters on Jabong and the portal is now redirecting the users to the Myntra website. Walmart-owned FLipkart had acquired Jabong for $70 million in 2016, but saw a close to 13 per cent drop in app downloads for the brand in December 2019. Flipkart had acquired fashion e-commerce platform Myntra in May 2014. Soon after the Walmart acquisition in November 2018, Flipkart merged both Myntra and Jabong. Recent media reports also claimed that Flipkart may acquire Walmart's cash-and-carry business in India which is not making much headway. Mr Daniel Okyem Aboagye, the Member of Parliament for Bantama, has said he will defeat deputy chief of staff Asenso-Boakye in the upcoming parliamentary primaries of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP). The incumbent MP said he asked Mr Asenso-Boakye to rescind his decision to contest him so he could go for a second term but the deputy chief of staff would not budge. To that end, the lawmaker said he has intensified his campaign to ensure that he defeats the deputy chief of staff in the April internal polls. Mr Okyem Aboagye told Accra 100.5FMs parliamentary correspondent on Wednesday, 19 February 2020 that: I taught him and his wife, at Tweneboah Kodua Secondary School, economics and government at the A Level (1995-96) and, so, he is my younger brother. I won a historic 89 per cent for Akufo-Addo in 2016 and, so, if Nana Akufo-Addo says four for him, then me too, four more for me. I am older than him but in politics, he is older than me but I will defeat him. I pleaded with him that because of the interest of Bantama, he should let me go unopposed but he didnt accept that. I approached him for us to collaborate in competition not because I am afraid of him but I did it out of respect for him and in the interest of Bantama stability for progress. So, now, let us face it off at the polls, we will see what will happen in the polls. 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 AMRITSAR: Nepals former king Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev and his family members on Thursday paid obeisance at Golden Temple and partook of langar from the community kitchen. He ruled as the last king of Nepal from 2001-08. He is also known as the worlds last Hindu king. This is a sacred place not only for the Sikh community but also for people across the world. We all know Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of Sikhism, visited Nepal and preached there. Today, we have best relations with Sikhs in Nepal, said Gyanendra, who was accompanied by wife Komal Rajya Lakshmi Devi Shah and other relatives. Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) chief secretary Roop Singh greeted him with a siropa (robe of honour) and presented a replica of the Golden Temple. It was Gyanendras first visit to the Golden Temple. His visit will strengthen relations between the people of Nepal with Sikhs living there, Roop Singh added. African Americans are twice as likely to develop Alzheimers disease than white Americans. The reasons why are unknown because the group is underrepresented in research. An Indiana University researcher is looking to change that by studying Alzheimers disease in underrepresented groups with LEAD Longitudinal Early-Onset Disease Study. Dr. Liana Apostolova of the IU School of Medicine has been studying early onset Alzheimers meaning symptoms of cognitive decline appear before the age of 65 for two years as part of a five-year research grant. While research into this rare form of the disease is already limited, African American, Latino and Asian American representation in research does not reflect the general population of the United States. We need to increase minority populations in research and begin looking into ways to raise awareness in the community so they can come and find us, Apostolova said. This is not a form of the disease where we can set up a health clinic, because its a rare variant. We need to raise awareness. Because of the lack of representation in research samples and a general lack of understanding of early onset Alzheimers, which Apostolova said progresses rapidly and more aggressively than late onset Alzheimers, its unclear why African Americans are more likely to develop the disease. However, doctors do know health issues such as diabetes and vascular disease can increase ones risk of developing Alzheimers. According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, African Americans are 60% more likely than white Americans to have diabetes, and 40% more likely to have high blood pressure, a key risk factor for vascular diseases. Apostolova hopes to increase the number of minority patients that she studies to determine the risk factors for early onset Alzheimers, as well as why certain demographics are more likely to develop the disease. Laura Forbes, communications director for the Indiana chapter of the Alzheimers Association, said the chapter has volunteers focusing on education and awareness in the Black community. Were working to spread awareness of the [medical] trials that are going on, Forbes said, and dealing with some of the mistrust toward doctors that exists within the African American community. Through her study, which is funded through the National Institute of Health, Apostolova and her team work with 600 cognitively impaired patients and 100 cognitively normal patients between the ages of 40 to 64 to study genetic imaging, fluid biomarkers and collecting data on decline of cognitive abilities. Patients are studied for three years to monitor the progression and speed of decline. While it is normal in middle-age to sometimes forget names of people or forget the reason for walking into a room, cognitive decline hinders ones ability to live independently, Apostolova said. With Alzheimers either early or late onset patients can struggle with driving, paying bills, taking medication or keeping up with basic hygiene. Repeating the same information or asking the same questions multiple times are also red flags that someones memory loss is related to a health issue, not just a normal part of aging. Were trying to raise awareness of early onset cases, Apostolova said, because we hope if people listen or read about this research, they might recognize symptoms in someone in their family and bring them in. After a diagnosis of Alzheimers, which is determined by memory loss, cognitive decline, and brain scans, patients have an average life expectancy of eight to 12 years, starting from the first signs of cognitive decline. While Apostolova said its difficult to determine how close researchers are to a cure for the disease, she hopes this research will help determine the root causes of Alzheimers and pave the way for therapies to increase the quality of life for those currently living with the disease. Trials are the next stage of this project, she said. Early detection can help create a trial-ready population to test out promising new therapies. Many times with early onset patients, they are otherwise healthy, theyre less likely to have diabetes and heart disease than older patients, so we can study the disease in a purer form, without the noise from other disorders. Contact staff writer Breanna Cooper at 317-762-7848. Follow her on Twitter @BreannaNCooper. The evacuation procedure sparked a number of local rallies across Ukraine's regions amid conflicting reports in mass media and social networks regarding the possible quarantine site and spins alleging lack of precaution anti-hazard measures on the part of authorities. Ukrainian citizens and foreigners evacuated from China will be brought for a 14-day quarantine to the National Guard's Novi Sanzhary medical center in Poltava region. People will be kept there "under observation", with a strict regime of sanitary-epidemiological control and safety ensured, the Interior Ministry's press service said. The ministry underlined that police forces and the National Guard will respond to any unlawful attempts to prevent the placement of evacuees at the said facility or violation of the observation regime. The ministry said there were no threats to public health, while active preventive measures were being taken jointly with the Health Ministry. Read alsoEvacuation plane from Wuhan arrives in Kyiv for refueling before flying to Kharkiv (Photo) The statement comes amid local rallies outside the villages of Novi Sanzhary and Leliukhivka, where roads were being blocked by local residents who feared that the novel coronavirus might affect the region due to the placement of evacuees from China in a local facility. The evacuation routine sparked a number of local rallies in other regions as well over the past days amid conflicting reports in mass media and social networks, including provocative ones, regarding the possible quarantine site and spins alleging lack of precaution anti-hazard measures on the part of authorities. ALEXANDRIA, Va. A former counterterrorism analyst pleaded guilty Thursday to leaking classified information to two journalists, including one he was dating. Henry Kyle Frese, 31, of Philadelphia, held a top-secret clearance when he worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency. He pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria to illegally transmitting national defense information. Prosecutors say Frese leaked classified details about foreign nations' weapon systems in 2018 and 2019. The court papers do not explicitly identify the journalists who received the information, but details in the papers make it clear that the recipients were Amanda Macias of CNBC and Courtney Kube of NBC News. Macias wrote multiple articles in 2018 about Chinas missile systems. The Justice Department said Freses prosecution is one of six that have been filed in the last three years as part of a crackdown on leaks of classified information. Frese declined comment after Thursday's hearing. He faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced in June. Court documents indicate that between March 2018 and October 2019, when Frese was arrested at his office, he participated in at least 630 phone calls with Macias and 34 calls with Kube. Frese admitted as part of the plea agreement that he agreed to help Kube and provide her with classified information because he believed it would help Macias progress professionally. A statement of facts filed Thursday with Freses plea agreement indicates he also transmitted classified information to an employee of an overseas counterterrorism consulting group. Court documents indicate that several factors allowed investigators to develop Frese as a suspect in their leak investigation. To begin with, Frese and Macias lived together at the same address for much of 2018. In addition, only 26 people had accessed all five of the intelligence reports that were referenced in the articles, according to audit logs. Frese was one of them. Frese also admitted that he searched multiple times for classified information that was outside his areas of responsibility based on requests from Macias and Kube. Under the Espionage Act, which was used to prosecute Frese, prosecutors also can potentially charge the recipients of the leak as well as the person who transmits it. But U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia G. Zachary Terwilliger, whose office prosecuted the case, said in October when Frese was arrested that authorities are focused on the leaker, not the journalist. Heatwaves, melting ice, bleached coral reefs, rising sea levels, wildfires and droughts... the world has been witnessing some of the worst consequences of climate change and things are only going downhill. Apart from the above-mentioned havoc wreaked by climate change, there's another more worrying modern-day issue: the use of 'fake' snow to continue to make humans live in utter denial. AFP That's what this French resort had to do in order to remain open during the holiday season, despite a complete lack of snow owing to rising temperatures. Officials at Luchon-Superbagneres in the Pyrenees authorised the emergency operation of cover mountains with snow in an overnight drill. According to reports, the French ski resort has angered ecologists by using a helicopter to move snow from higher up in the mountains to its lower slopes. The authorities at the ski resort, Luchon-Superbagneres in the Pyrenees, told an international media outlet that the helicopter spent two hours transporting 50 tonnes of snow to drop on the lower slopes used by beginners and ski schools. And while the snow in itself wasn't fake, what was artificial was the effect the resort tried to create by transporting snow. The cost of transporting the snow was reportedly between Rs 3 to 4 lakhs. Herve Pouanu, the director of the local council in France's southwest said that the resort is expected to recoup at least ten times the cost of the operation from the business that would have been lost from the lack of snow. "We're not going to cover the whole resort in snow, Herve Pounau told French media, adding that if the snow was not transported a "large part" of the resort would have to be shuttered. Pouanu reportedly acknowledged that the operation was not eco-friendly and he also explained that it was the only remaining option. "Our beginner slopes and ski schools are at their busiest during the holidays," Pounau told French media outlets. AFP The snow airlifting has drawn criticism from environmental activists who said that using the helicopter created carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. Bastien Ho, the secretary of Europe Ecologie Les Verts party, said that the operation was evidence of an "upside-down world". According to Guardian reports, the February-March half-term holidays in France-known as the winter-sport holidays-have shot up over six weeks across different regions. It's the busiest time of the year for the countrys mountain resorts and Luchon-Superbagneres depends on this period for 60 per cent of its income. Un helicoptere pour enneiger une piste de la station Luchon Superbagneres. Sur fond de montagne denudee. En plein hiver. Je trouve cette video tres triste. Source : https://t.co/9j6TOHw8TQ pic.twitter.com/HqbQtteI9v Hugo Clement (@hugoclement) February 15, 2020 While snow, in the above case, was moved around to keep a business running, in Moscow, something similar. Only, Moscow used fake snow to keep up the holiday spirits! Last year, Moscow authorities dumped artificial snow in the city centre for New Year festivities as it was the Russian capital's warmest December since 1886. Videos of the delivery of fake snow on roads went viral and people couldn't help but note the irony of bringing snow to a city that otherwise spent millions each year on its removal. ORLANDO, Fla. - A fourth member of a family visiting Florida from Massachusetts has died after a four-vehicle crash earlier this week, the Florida Highway Patrol said. Jackson Smith, 11, died Wednesday at a central Florida hospital, highway patrol Lt. Kim Montes said. The crash happened Tuesday in Kissimmee, which is near Orlando. Troopers said the family had been travelling in a van when it was struck from behind and overturned. Scarlett Smith, 5, Julie Smith, 41, and Josephine Fay, 76, died at the scene, Montes said in an accident report. The Smith family is from Whitman, Massachusetts, and the Fays are from South Weymouth, Massachusetts. Two other children Shalie Smith, 10, and Skyler Smith, 5 were not injured in the crash. But the report said they were taken to the hospital for monitoring. Driver Shane Smith, 43, and passenger William Fay, 76, were taken to an Orlando hospital in stable condition. The familys van was travelling in traffic on State Road 429 when it was rear-ended by a pickup truck. The impact caused the van to turn over. Two other cars were involved, but no one else was injured. The report said charges are pending against the pickup trucks driver Lucas Dos Reis Laurindo, 26, of Kissimmee. An investigation continues. Leaving the organisers of an event to protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, National Register of Citizens and National Population Register in Bengaluru red-faced, a young woman on Thursday raised 'Pakistan Zindabad' slogan in the presence of All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi, who denounced her action and asserted 'we are for India'. The woman, identified as Amulya Leona, asked people to shout with her 'Pakistan Zindabad' thrice after the organisers of the event under the banner of 'Save Constitution' invited her to address the gathering soon after Owaisi came on the stage. A baffled Owaisi rushed to snatch the mike from her and was joined by others who tried to remove her from the state. But the woman was adamant and raised the slogan again repeatedly. Later, the police stepped in and removed her from the dais. The woman had been taken into custody, police said adding that sedition charges were slapped on her. Police said that a case has been registered under Section 124A (Offence of sedition) of the Indian Penal Code against Amulya. The police will first interrogate her and then she will be produced before a court, officials said. The Bharatiya Janata Party targeted the Congress over the incident, alleging the protests against the CAA were a 'joint venture between Pakistan & Anti-National Forces led by the Congress'. The Congress too condemned the woman's conduct and demanded stern action. Owaisi, who addressed the gathering later, said he did not agree with the woman, whom he described as 'so called liberal' and asked all liberals to refrain from any events involving Muslims. "Neither I nor my party have any link with her. We denounce her. The organisers should not have invited her here. If I knew this, I would not have come here. We are for India and we no way support our enemy nation Pakistan. Our entire drive is to save India," the AIMIM MP said. He asked people to refrain from liberals. If they (liberals) were so concerned about the Muslims and CAA, they should have their own Shaheen Bagh kind of protests. Speaking about CAA, Owaisi alleged it 'smacked of governments hatred' towards Muslims and was against poor. "The law is aimed at making Muslims stateless," he charged. Owaisi flayed the BJP government in Karnataka for booking a parent and the headmistress of a school for alleged derogatory remarks against Prime Minister Narendra Modi made by a class six student in a drama at a school in Bidar. The AIMIM chief asserted that his love for India is unquestionable because his family had chosen to stay in the country after the partition. Janata Dal-Secular corporator Imran Pasha claimed Amulya was planted by some rival group to disrupt the event. The woman, he said, was not in the list of speakers and demanded that the police investigate the matter seriously. The state BJP took to the twitter to condemn the development. 'Anti-CAA Activist Amulya Leona shouts PAKISTAN ZINDABAD in the presence of AIMIM Chief @asadowaisi at Bengaluru. Truth is that protests against #CAA are a joint venture between Pakistan & Anti-National Forces led by @INCIndia. Those who support Pakistan should go there forever,' it tweeted. Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad members and Karnataka Rakshana Vedike (Praveen Shetty faction) staged separate demonstrations in Bengaluru, demanding externment of Amulya Leona. The best solution to health insurance problems in this county is to ensure that people have jobs. If people have jobs, they can obtain health insurance through their employment or at least pay for private insurance. I believe that individuals should be able to write off insurance expenses from their incomes just as employers can. I oppose Medicare For All and would repeal most of Obamacare. 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